Donald Westlake: The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

Donald E. Westlake is too complex a writer to characterize simply. In his twenty-five-year career, he has published upwards of sixty books. As Richard Stark, he wrote hard-boiled adventure novels about a tough professional thief named Parker; as Tucker Coe, he wrote about a neurotic ex-cop struggling to overcome his disgraceful dismissal from the force; under his own name, he has written a series of stories about a soft-boiled homicide detective named Abe Levine, who can never get used to death. Westlake is perhaps best known for his novels about John Dortmunder, a bewildered burglar who approaches his work with resignation while Westlake exposes him to the humiliations of comic circumstance.

Regardless of the pseudonym or the series character he employs, Donald E. Westlake is among the most admired writers in the field. We can only endorse the observation of Francis M. Nevins that “when the history of contemporary suspense fiction is compiled, he is likely to be recognized as one of its new masters .”

NBM:Christopher Porterfield in Time described you as “a softspoken, owlish ectomorph who resembles most of his protagonists.” Is that accurate?

Westlake:No, I don’t think so. When I started writing, my heroes tended to be older than I was, and now they’re younger, so I guess they just sort of stayed at that age of adventure. To some extent, every character is out of what’s in your own brain. I won’t do this a lot, but I’m going to paraphrase a famous writer. Aldous Huxley said that every character in every book is some part of the writer. He said the reason that he had never been able to create a character in any of his books who was driven by a need for money is that he’d never had a need for money. That doesn’t mean that if you write about a mass murderer, you are a mass murderer, but that some of the emotions or attitudes of that character are in you. In terms of behavior, in the Dortmunder books there is a feeling that things more often than not are not going to work out, but you should do the work anyway and enjoy it as much as you can, even if disaster is at the end. That’s something that I’ve shared with Dortmunder. And a kind of inane hopefulness, I share with Kelp.

NBM:You’ve used at least three pseudonyms: Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and Curt Clark — those in addition to your own name. Why the pseudonyms, especially when it’s no secret that Richard Stark, for example, is really Donald E. Westlake and, in fact, the books are even marketed as Donald E. Westlake novels written under the name Richard Stark?

Westlake:That’s now. During the twelve years that the Parker series was being written, I resisted very much being linked with those books. Now it’s like a previous room that I don’t go into anymore. That was me then. Essentially, the reason to use different names is the same reason that General Motors does: product identification. If it’s a Cadillac you’re looking for, and when you get it home you find it’s a Chevy, you get annoyed. And if it’s a comedy that you’re looking for, and you get it home and there’s nothing but blood on every page… There’s a science-fiction writer named Poul Anderson whom I think of as the strongest example of the other way to do it. He writes everything under his name. There are one or two kinds of things that he does that I like a lot, would read. The High Crusade , for instance; terrific book. There are other things also — sword and sorcery, stuff like that — I have no interest in. So I don’t tend to go out and look for Poul Anderson, because I don’t know what I’m going to get.

NBM:You said you resisted being identified with the Richard Stark books. Why is that?

Westlake:Because I wanted the freedom of not being Westlake pretending to be this other guy. Under a pen name, it’s just this other thing, and it’s completely separate from me. So I can unlimber all of that equipment in some way.

NBM:You’ve written some sixty books in twenty-five years as a professional writer. That makes you one of the most prolific respectable contemporary mystery writers. What is it about gènre fiction that makes writers so prolific?

Westlake:I think it may be because so much of what you’re doing involves conventions, whether you are working with them or against them. In the comedy, you’re working against them, but the conventions still exist. Raymond Chandler said, if you get stuck in a book, just bring into the room a man with a gun. By the time you explain who he is and why he’s there, the story’s going again. It’s like a legal contract — so much of it is boilerplate. A genre novel is not that extreme, but you know what the conventions are that you’ll be working with or against. If you are writing, say, a novel about a married college professor having an affair with a student, there are some conventions to help along the way, but not very many. So what is the thing that keeps the rubber band wound tight? It’s hard, I think; that’s slower work. There was one book I did called Brothers Keepers. It was one of the very rare times that I started with the title. The title was “The Felonious Monks.” It was going to be a book about some monks who have a problem, and they have to commit a crime to get out of it. I got into the book a little bit and liked the characters too much to distort them into criminals, so I wound up writing the book without the crime. That meant that, first of all, I couldn’t use the title. But, secondly, now what the hell is the book about? The monks are in a building with a ninety-nine-year lease and the lease is up and the owner of the land wants to put an office building there. The monks know that the lease should be renewable, but it has been stolen from them. So what I was going to do was have them steal it back; but instead it turned out to be a love story between one of the monks and the landlord’s daughter. The whole middle section of that book has nothing to do with crime. It’s a comedy, but it’s about a sworn celibate who has run off to Puerto Rico with the landlord’s daughter. And now what? That was the slowest writing I’ve ever done in my life. A page a day at best, because where am I and what s going on and how do I believe — much less the reader — that there is a tension in here, that the story is going somewhere.

NBM:Do you ever feel you write too much, spread yourself too thin?

Westlake:Yes, occasionally, but not very often. If I’m working a deadline, I might feel I have to work too fast, but more often I have more books ready than I can get published. The books begin walking on each other’s heels. You see the word “another” begin to come into every review. Sometimes I think, Oh my God, I’m one step from “Yet another.”

NBM:So pseudonyms are a concession to the marketplace and the publication process?

Westlake:Yes, more or less. In the early days, I would fill in between books with things under pen names. In the last ten to fifteen years, I’ve filled in with movie or television work. I call it an unintended WPA writers’ project. They pay you the money, and you do the job, and they say thank you very much and put it on a shelf.

NBM:Anthony Boucher observed that you have an acute insight into criminal thinking. How do you achieve it? Do you research criminal activity?

Westlake:I’m not a heavy researcher. It’s boring. I grew up plotting all sorts of heists. It may be that the writer is a failed crook. He has a more cowardly way to do it, you know: “Well, let’s just put it on paper.” Then, because of what I’ve written over the years, I’ve gotten letters from people in jail. They tell me funny stories. Essentially, I’m somebody they can talk shop to, in a funny way, so some stuff comes from them.