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Rest in peace, Donald Westlake
Jan. 2nd, 2009 06:55 pmDonald Westlake died this Wednesday. Damn. He was 75, but I don't think he was done living yet, or done writing. And I never did work up the nerve to write him a fan letter.
As the NYT obit mentions, he wrote several books a year
for many years; my favorite works of his are the Dortmunder books, a series of comic crime books about capers going wrong, with a regular cast of characters that feel like old friends.
If you've never read Westlake, here's a link to the first chapter of Westlake's Watch Your Back, which is a good introduction to Dortmunder and his friends at the O.J. Bar & Grill:
As the NYT obit mentions, he wrote several books a year
for many years; my favorite works of his are the Dortmunder books, a series of comic crime books about capers going wrong, with a regular cast of characters that feel like old friends. If you've never read Westlake, here's a link to the first chapter of Westlake's Watch Your Back, which is a good introduction to Dortmunder and his friends at the O.J. Bar & Grill:
WHEN JOHN DORTMUNDER, a free man, not even on parole, walked into the O.J. Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue that Friday night in July, just before ten o’clock, the regulars were discussing the afterlife. “What I don’t get,” said one of them, as Dortmunder angled toward where Rollo the bartender was busy with something far over to the right end of the bar, “is all these clouds.”