Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008
We’ve just received word that Donald E. Westlake passed away yesterday.
Donald is probably best known to comics fans as the author (under the psuedonym Richard Stark) of the Parker novels that Darwyn Cooke is adapting and bringing to IDW Publishing later this year. But that’s the barest fraction of his output. Over a career that lasted decades, he was a four-time Edgar Award winner in four different categories. In 1993, the Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master, their highest honor.
His novels were turned into twenty-one different movies, including Payback and The Hot Rock (featuring his famous character John Dortmunder) and wrote screenplays on his own, most notably for The Grifters, where he was nominated for an Academy Award, The Stepfather, and a treatment for the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.
He will be missed.
Here’s a promo image from the upcoming Cooke series:
This is sad news indeed. As a longtime Mystery Writers of America member, and the TV/Movie columnist for The Armchair Detective magazine, I was able to socialize with Westlake every year. He was a remarkably supportive, friendly, and funny fellow, who had made it his life's work to do, as he put it, "at least one of everything." I mourn his passing, along with those of Tony Hillerman and Greg Mcdonald — scholars, gentlemen, friends all. Thankfukky, their work will live forever. Read them.
"Thankfukky"?Is that a reference to The God Who Cannot Be Named?Harlan Ellison, in writing about his (in my opinion, wrong-headed) script for Nackles, a nice little creepy Christmas story that Westlake wrote under a pseudonym, for The Twilight Zone, said that Westlake wished him luck – said he couldn't see any way to adapt it as a screenplay.If i recall correctly, Harlan's version was never published – instead they did a Very Stupid Version of Arthur C. Clarke's The Star for Christmas – but i saw the screenplay, and Westlake was right.