Donald Westlake: The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

NBM:To what extent do you read other mystery writers?

Westlake:I have read all of the early hard-boiled writers. Chandler is just a little too baroque for me. Every sentence has three syllables too many.

NBM:Too self-conscious?

Westlake:Yeah. Hammett, I think, is terrific. His use of language and his use of emotion — he’s sparing with both, and it’s very well done. Cain, too. Cain switched back and forth. You get something like Serenade and that’s pure Chandler. But then The Postman Always Rings Twice is so clean. Then there’s a guy who was doing Gold Medal originals in the 1950s and into the 1960s named Peter Rabe. He was absolutely wonderful. An awful lot of Richard Stark comes out of Peter Rabe. He had an oblique style that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Then he sort of disappeared for a while and came back with a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing that didn’t work. But for a while he was terrific. I know very little about him. On a dust jacket it said that he had a degree in psychology from Queens College and that his master’s thesis had been on frustration. His books were crooks dealing with frustration: they were very good.

I read fewer and fewer crime or mystery novels over the years; I don’t think that they are getting worse or that I’m getting better. It’s a certain amount of overload. I had been hearing about Elmore Leonard for a while and I kind of resisted. I met the man, and he’s a nice man, and I still resisted. Then the Washington Post asked me to review LaBrava. I said, “This guy’s wonderful,” and I ran out and read all of the others. They were all wonderful, except, sometimes it’s a mistake to read right through all of them. Now I’ve been resisting Glitz, I’m not sure why.

I think Leonard has treated his general career the way I treated Richard Stark: Let me take my shoes off and relax. You know, play and experiment and fool around and not worry in the same way that I would if it was under my own name.

NBM:What happened to short stories? Is it simply a matter of markets drying up and financial pressures on the writer to produce longer works?

Westlake:I’ve used this line a couple of times with would-be writers and so on — there’s only one thing in the United States that cost a nickel in 1947 that costs a nickel today: that’s a word in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In fact, the dollars in the short story market have not changed. In the 1930s, the slicks paid twenty-five hundred dollars; the slicks were Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Today, the slicks are Playboy and Cosmopolitan , and they’re paying twenty-five hundred dollars. Book prices have changed; movies have changed; everything else has changed but the short story. If you write a novel, there are thirty publishers, and so far as I can tell, there’s a movie producer in every phone booth in Los Angeles. They at least have enough money to buy you lunch. But the magazines and the short story field are very restricted.

NBM:How many movies have been made from your novels?

Westlake:I think there are twelve. From books under my name, there’s The Busy Body, The Hot Rock, Bank Shot, Jimmy the Kid, Two Much, and that’s five. Now Richard Stark — there’s Point Blank, The Split, The Outfit , and Slayground. There were two made in France: one called Mise en Sac from a book called The Score , and one called Made in U.S.A. from a terrible book called The Jugger. And then for one movie. Cops and Robbers, I wrote the screenplay first.

NBM:What do you think of the finished products?

Westlake:It’s such a crap shoot. The auteur theory assumes that the director is in charge — and all the people know that this person’s in charge. Nobody’s in charge. It’s three blind men describing the elephant every time. There have been everything from terrific movies to movies that I refuse to see. Just hearing of them has been enough.

NBM:What makes the difference? Is there an element in there? Is it a director or producer who’s concerned?

Westlake:I don’t know. I don’t know.

NBM:Is it your involvement?

Westlake:No. For instance, The Hot Rock and Bank Shot had the same producer. They were made within a year or two years of each other. The Hot Rock came first and was mostly successful. There were a few little problems with it, beginning with the fact that Robert Redford was terribly miscast. He did an honorable job, a very good job, but there was just no way to look at him and think “loser.” There were a couple of other little problems, but mostly I thought it was a fine movie. It had a wonderful screenplay by William Goldman, so that helped. The director, Peter Yates, was very uneven, put out terrible turkeys. But at the same time he made good movies, like Bullitt. But then a year or two years later, the same producers got at least as good a cast together for Bank Shot. The screenplay was quite bad and that was maybe part of the problem, but then they hired Gower Champion to direct it, and it turned out he couldn’t direct movies, at least not comedy. Somebody who saw the movie said it was a farce shot in close-up, so that every time anybody slipped on a banana peel, they fell out of frame. You never knew what was going on. George C. Scott, why not? He could have been terrific. But that’s one I won’t see.

NBM:How much direct input do you have in the movies that are made from your books?

Westlake:None.

NBM:You sell it and stand back?

Westlake:Yeah. Twice the screenwriter consulted me. When William Goldman was doing The Hot Rock, he called me and said, “I want to have lunch with you and I want you to tell me everything you know about those characters that you didn’t put in the book.” I thought that was very smart. At every step of the way, he would send me drafts and call. I would argue with him and he’d argue with me. Usually, he would explain why he was doing what he was doing, and I would say okay. Every once in a while I would convince him. That was fine. But it was strictly between him and me. It wasn’t anything the producers asked me to do. As soon as his job was done, my relationship with the movie ended. Goldman’s smart about this, too. The day the principal photography starts, he leaves the country, goes to France or wherever, and he comes back when the movie’s over. He doesn’t want at the end of the third week to be called up and told, “Listen, the actress we hired can’t do this. Will you rewrite?” His job is done.

A guy named Richard Blackburn, who wrote the first screenplay for Slayground, did the same thing to a lesser extent. He wanted to talk about the book; he showed me the rough draft. But he stayed too close to the book.

NBM:He stayed too close to the book?

Westlake:Yeah, he did. It’s a different form. The producer thought so, too, I guess, because he fired Blackburn. That’s another movie I won’t go to. Blackburn was shown the other guy’s script, so he talked to me about it. He said, “I don’t know what they’re doing, but the director loves it; it’s very pretentious.” There is one line in it: “My gun spits truth.” I won’t go to see that either.

NBM:Joe Gores, Robert Parker, and Elmore Leonard, to name at least three, are writing detective series for TV. Do you have any inclination to answer them with a nice robbers series?