Blood and Blunder, Will the Real Mr. Westlake Please Stand Up?

Donald E. Westlake is not sure how many books he has written. "Somewhere a little over 100," the award-winning crime novelist said in a recent interview.

    Perhaps best known for the Dortmunder series about a comically pessimistic crook, Westlake will sign copies of the recent "What’s So Funny?" at the annual Hotchkiss Library book signing in Sharon on Aug. 1, along with "Dirty Money," written under the pen name of Richard Stark (he has also published as Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt, Curt Clark and Edwin West, among others).

   Westlake and his assorted pseudonyms live and work in a 150-year-old colonial near Ancram, NY, with his wife, Abigail, and a cat named Barnaby. It’s a rambling white house, the kind that has been expanded over the years so that you pass through room after room with fireplaces, wood floors and comfortable-looking stuff, trying to figure out which one is the living room.

   Finally, there is a sitting room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding the many volumes of his work, topped by little effigies of Edgar Allan Poe – his Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, including a Grand Master Award, the group’s highest honor. Dust jacket photos on his early hardcover novels show a man with dark, closely cropped hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a goatee, a bit of a beatnik.

   "That was my low-maintenance period," he said. "All I had to do in the morning was brush my teeth." Westlake, now 75, is tall, clean-shaven and distinguished by a shock of white hair. Outside, a grassy meadow rises off behind the house, to one side an impressive vegetable garden, carefully laid out by Westlake’s wife, Abby Adams, a gardening writer.

   Known for his intricate plotting, Westlake is not much of a planner when he sits down to write. He typically does not know exactly how his stories will turn out before he begins. He works without an outline, often just using a simple situation or idea as inspiration.

   "I just tell myself the story, day by day by day," he said, "which means I spend most of my life saying, ‘Now what?’ "

   Sometimes characters or story just come to him. While he was dreaming up a new kind of comic anti-hero for the first John Dortmunder book, "The Hot Rock" (1970), Westlake was in a New York bar when he noticed a neon beer sign that said Dortmunder Actien Bier. The rest was crime-fiction history.

  "I could just see the guy, the slope of his shoulders, the hangdog look," Westlake said. "The character leaped out of the word."

   Later, while casting about for a new Dortmunder caper, Westlake had a weekend house in New Jersey. Nearby a bank was being torn down, and for a time the bank was operating out of a mobile home next door. Westlake thought: "Man, you could drive a truck up to that bank and tow it away."

   Hence "Bank Shot" (1972), subsequently made into a movie with George C. Scott as Dortmunder, in which thieves tow the trailer-park bank away to get the money out. They end up putting a coat of paint on it to disguise it as a diner, but the paint is water-based, and it rains. And so on.

   He refers to this writing method as "narrative push," that is, the narrative itself, once commenced, pushes the story into being. He recalls a conversation with his friend Elmore Leonard, another distinctive voice in American fiction, in which Leonard told him: "By the way, I finally figured out who the hero is in the book I’m writing — on page 55. That’s early for me."

   Westlake’s genre of crime stories has been dubbed "blood and blunder," since the heroes often bumble their way to a solution. His novels, like those of his friend Lawrence Block, typically have sharply drawn New York settings peopled by eccentric but likable city types. It’s not just that Westlake knows that 66th street runs west. He renders New York, especially its conversational tics, real.  

  "It’s more of an attitude," he said. "It’s sort of a city-style laconic attitude. Years ago I was at One Police Plaza to interview a commissioner, riding up in an elevator, a lot of activity at every floor, lots of big cops on the elevator. The door opens onto a glaring, day-glo ugly orange room. People get off, door closes. A voice in the back of the elevator says, ‘I wouldn’t get off on that floor.’ That’s the New York style."

  Westlake originally set out to write hard-boiled crime stories in the tough-guy American mode, but got sidetracked by the comic possibilities, beginning with "The Fugitive Pigeon" (1965), the story of an ambition-free young man whiling away his time tending bar in Canarsie. Suddenly he finds himself the target of an erroneous mob hit contract.

    Conventional thinking at the time was that the worst thing you could do was make a tough guy comic, Westlake said. "I called my agent and said, ‘This one is coming out funny.’ And he said, ‘Don’t do that. No foreign sale. Funny doesn’t translate into another language. No paperback sale. You’ll cut your income in half.’ Well, it sold twice as much as any of the others and was translated into 10 languages."

   As success and reputation grew, Westlake began writing under other names. Why all the pseudonyms? Early on, he said, he discovered that magazines would only publish a single story a month, and book publishers  were only interested in one novel a year, by the same author. Needing money and able to bang stories out quickly (it took him three to four months to complete a novel then; now, alas, it requires seven), he adopted pen names to capitalize on his output.

   Westlake’s numerous quirky, offbeat thrillers have long attracted the attention of Hollywood, with varying results. "Point Blank" (1967) with Lee Marvin was one of his favorite adaptations, as was "The Hot Rock" (1972) starring Robert Redford. A recent Dortmunder film, "What’s the Worst That Could Happen?" starring Martin Lawrence (the first black Dortmunder), was not so good. "Payback" (1999) with Mel Gibson was a remake of an earlier film and, he said, for some reason having to do with lost paperwork, didn’t earn him a cent. Westlake’s screenplay for "The Grifters" was nominated for an Academy Award.

   Films based on his books have been made by Jean-Luc Godard ("Made in USA" 1966, based on "The Jugger," with a female playing the Dortmunder character) and Costa-Gavras, who adapted "The Ax" to critical acclaim in Europe. Another early novel, "Money for Nothing," is currently under option for a movie to star Tobey Maguire, who, if you know the book, would be perfect.

   "It’s still around," he said. "They finally have a screenplay."

    Meanwhile, the prolific Westlake is currently doing … nothing. He has just finished a Dortmunder novel, "Get Real," involving a reality-television series, but he wants to take a break from writing series characters.

   "The next one will be about somebody I don’t know," Westlake said. "I’m going to wait for that story to come along."