The Spy Who Wasn’t There

Sometime in 2012, Charles Ardai, writer, editor, entrepreneur and co-founder of Hard Case Crime, was chatting with Abby Westlake when an unpublished manuscript came up in their conversation. It was called Fall of the City and it was loosely based on a treatment Donald Westlake had written under contract with Eon Productions/United Artists for James Bond film #18, which would Read More …

Crime Scenes: Donald Westlake on Film

Seven-film series features screen adaptations of the hard-boiled crime writer’s work Special event on Friday, May 12: Abby Westlake and Luc Sante in conversation with program curator Levi Stahl Museum of the Moving Image, May 12–14, 2017 Astoria, Queens, NY, (April 10, 2017)—Donald E. Westlake published nearly a hundred novels under various pseudonyms during his half-century career, the most influential Read More …

Westlake-Leonard Panel at the FIRN

The comedic writing of Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard will be the focus of one of several roundtables at the 2016 Festival International du Roman Noir (FIRN) [International Festival of the Noir Novel]. The roundtable, Masters of laughter: Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, will be hosted by Michel Abescat, respected Editor-in-Chief of the French culture and TV magazine Télérama. The panel will include: Abby Westlake, author, Read More …

Happy 82nd Birthday

Unbeknownst to everyone at the time, the birth of Donald Westlake–82 years ago today–would eventually result in the immaculate conception of more than a dozen other personalities all living within the same man. The best known of these, of course, is Richard Stark, creator of the Parker series. Tucker Coe took up residence a couple decades later and told five Read More …

New and Updated Pages

The Getaway Car headlines the 54 new pages that have been added to the site. The other 53 cover short fiction and short non-fiction gathered from the original periodicals found in the Westlake library. Nine of the short non-fiction pages include the full piece, reproduced as large images from the original publications, most of which were not reprinted in The Read More …

Praise for The Getaway Car

It took a while for The Mysterious Bookshop to post the video and even longer for me to put it up here but below is, at last, the video of Levi Stahl, Lawrence Block, and Abby Westlake–introduced by longtime friend, publisher and bookstore owner, Otto Penzler–as they mark the release of The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany at Read More …

New Book: The Getaway Car

I didn’t fully appreciate Donald Westlake’s career until adulthood. For as long as I can remember, my father was the guy on the other side of a closed door making a manual Smith-Corona sound like a machine gun with the hiccups. So I knew he was a professional writer, as additionally evidenced by the signed copy of his latest book Read More …

New Year Message and Updates

New Year’s Eve marked five years of life on Earth sans the creative genius and ebullient personality of Donald Edwin Westlake, etc, etc. I have not and will not make a practice of recognizing that date in publishing and personal infamy on this site, which, in itself, stands as a daily tribute to his memory. Instead, I will tend to Read More …

Sortable Bibliography Sneak Peek

With 164 separate entries in the new master bibliography so far, we’re still only up to 1967. Ultimately, this table will become a comprehensive list of everything ever published under the name of Donald E. Westlake or one of his many pseudonyms. The current bibliography, listing novels, shorts, fiction, non-fiction and pseudonyms in separate tables, will not be replaced. It Read More …

Mini Update… Literally

I apologize for the delay in approving comments over the past month or so but I have a good excuse. My wife and I welcomed our first child, Madelyn Elizabeth Westlake, into the world on June 24th. She is Don’s seventh grandchild but hopefully not his last. My only sorrow is that she will never get to meet her amazing Read More …

Opening Weekend for “Parker”

Opening weekend has come and gone and the results are in. “Parker” came in 5th overall at the box office with a $7 million take over three days in more than 2,000 theaters nationwide. One of my pet peeves with the stenographic nature of American journalism is the fixation on opening weekend box office results. The only people who really Read More …

Big Update 9-19-12

The project of rebuilding the Westlake bibliography continues and there are still a few surprises to be found. Yet another pseudonym has been uncovered but it mostly belongs to another author, Laurence Janifer (aka Larry Mark Harris). The title in question was very likely finished by Don when Harris was unable to meet his deadline. You can read about it Read More …

New Additions 8-19-12

The epic project of building a database and uploading images from every copy of every book in Don’s personal library has begun. The full collection containing one copy of every edition of every book in print, and in every language, numbers in the hundreds. Several hundreds. So far, I’ve been able to catalog the first 41. The 41st book in Read More …

Audio is Back!

Along with the other back-end trouble I had with the old host, I lost the ability to embed audio files in a reliable way. Well, that’s all over now, thanks partly to the migration, improvements in the new WordPress update and the existence of SoundCloud. There are currently only three audio tracks on the entire site and all three are Read More …