Westlake Score: Nobody’s Perfect

NB: This post also appears at Existential Ennui.

This next Westlake Score is again a 1970s British Hodder & Stoughton first edition of a Donald E. Westlake crime caper, again bearing a Mark Wilkinson-designed dust jacket, which I’ve again added to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s […]

Review: Killy, by Donald E. Westlake (1963)

(NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.)

Slight change of plan here: I had intended to post a Westlake Score this week, but I’ve decided to hold off on that for the moment—partly because on a whim I actually started reading the Westlake Score in question, and so I might […]

Not Quite Parker review: The Hunted–The Dame (#2) by Dave Zeltserman

You get some things right, you get some things wrong.

In my review of The Hunted, the first volume of Dave Zeltserman’s new series of the same name, I wrote:

“I got the impression that Zeltserman just wanted to get the origin story out of the way so that he could get on to […]

Trailer and title sequence for Jimmy the Kid, plus “Keep Your Paws Off My Dog”

Jimmy the Kid, as I’m sure you know, was the Dortmunder novel that used a nonexistent Parker book (Child Heist) to launch its plot.

It’s been filmed three times. The other two versions are foreign, and, so far as I know, unseeable in the US. They may be unseeable anywhere at this point. The […]

1994 Westlake TV interview

Donald Westlake’s son Paul dropped this in the comments, but it’s worthy of a post of its own.

I’ll let Paul tell you about it (slightly edited–you can read the original thread here).

It’s from 1994 but I don’t have any more info. The only thing I remember that was written on […]

Review: The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake

The Hot Rock began life as an attempt at a Parker novel:

One day in 1967 I was wearing my Richard Stark hat, looking for a story to tell about my man Parker, and I thought, he reacts badly to frustration, what if he had to steal the same thing four or […]

A third film version of Jimmy the Kid?

In the early days of this site (2000), I had a couple of brief exchanges with Donald Westlake. One of them went like this (excerpted from longer e-mails):

DEW: What do you mean, two movies of JIMMY THE KID? If I knew how to ubderline [sic] on this despicable machine, I would […]

The Hot Rock comes to comics

Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, was responsible for one of the best books of 2009 in Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Parker: The Hunter. The Hot Rock, first published by Casterman in France in 2008, is the darkly comic flipside to Parker; a story of a bungling con and an increasingly ridiculous […]

A Look Back at Westlake’s Career

TrickCoin.net has a retrospective on Donald Westlake’s long career. It’s not always kind–the author doesn’t much care for the later Dortmunders, for example (which I have not yet read). But it is good and interesting reading, whether or not you entirely agree.

He does like the second series of Parker novels, […]