Crime novelist Donald Westlake is a man of many aliases—Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, pseudonyms picked up over the course of 100-odd published books—but two names stand out, his own and Richard Stark. As Westlake, he mostly writes comic caper novels, notably his half-dozen books about luckless criminal John Dortmunder. As Stark, he's created one of the noir genre's most definitive antiheroes in the cold-hearted master thief Parker. His books have been filmed many times, including the well-regarded Point Blank in 1967, and he was nominated for an Oscar for his 1990 adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters. His latest book is a new Stark novel, Ask The Parrot, which picks up Parker on the run from the law after the disastrous bank heist of the previous Nobody Runs Forever. Recently, Westlake talked with The A.V. Club about making it up as he goes, getting into his characters, and the crooks who read his books.
The A.V. Club: When you were starting out as a writer, you wrote science fiction as well as crime.
Donald Westlake: I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns. I wrote tiny little slices of life, sent them off to The Sewanee Review, and they always sent them back. For the first 10 years I was published, I'd say, "I'm a writer disguised as a mystery writer." But then I look back, and well, maybe I'm a mystery writer. You tend to go where you're liked, so when the mysteries were being published, I did more of them. Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."
AVC: What drew you to writing about crime?
DW: If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.
AVC: What do you think you might have ended up doing had you not made it in the fiction business?
DW: I shudder to think. I have no known marketable skills.
AVC: Is it true that your father wanted you to be an architect?
DW: Yeah. The only thing I learned from that is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place. [Laughs.] I don't think I would have been a good architect. Really, I have thought about this from time to time, and I might have wound up like my father, who never did find that which he could devote his life to. He sort of drifted from job to job. He was a traveling salesman, he was a bookkeeper, he was an office manager, he was here, there, there. And however enthusiastic he was at the beginning, his job would bore him. If I hadn't had the writing, I think I might have replicated what he was doing, which would not have been good.
AVC: The architect idea was interesting because of—this might be a stretch—your skill at structuring plots.
DW: I think that comes from it being invented on the fly. I'm one of the narrative-push people. I don't outline, I don't plan ahead. So I'm my first reader, telling myself the story as I'm going along. Since I haven't designed it ahead of time, each day I have to be sure that the footing is solid before I make the next step. I think you could be more intricate if you work it out ahead of time.
AVC: What is your typical work day like?
DW: I get up at a normal hour, and it's two or three hours at the desk in the morning, beginning with looking at what I did yesterday and making any changes in it, then using that springboard to go forward. And then usually an hour or two in the afternoon. The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way. Years ago, I heard an interview with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The interviewer said, "Do you still practice?" And he said, "I practice every day." He said, "If I skip a day, I can hear it. If I skip two days, the conductor can hear it. And if I skip three days, the audience can hear it." Oh, yes, you have to keep that muscle firm.
AVC: Do you ever have trouble with writer's block?
DW: I don't think so. It's different when you make it up as you go—that means you're going to get stuck. I wouldn't call it writer's block, I'd say, "I don't know where the hell this story is going." And that can go on for two, three weeks, during which I become increasingly difficult to live with. But then I either find where it's going to go, or I find what I did wrong 20 pages ago that made the trouble form. But I know people who have suffered writer's block, and I don't think I've ever had it. A friend of mine, for three years he couldn't write. And he said that he thought of stories and he knew the stories, could see the stories completely, but he could never find the door. Somehow that first sentence was never there. And without the door, he couldn't do the story. I've never experienced that. But it's a chilling thought.
AVC: Your books are often about the difference between a professional and an amateur, especially the Parker series—the ending of Ask The Parrot addresses that point directly.
DW: Yes. Around the time the first series ended, I finally figured out what the series was about. It's about a man doing his job. He's just a workman.
AVC: And the Dortmunder series is also about professionalism, in a different way.
DW: This sounds like a joke, but in a way, I mean it straight: Dortmunder's the most realistic stuff I do. Stark is much more of a romantic. The example that I've given in the past is, whenever anybody else's gang goes to rob a bank, there's always a place to park out front, but when Dortmunder goes to rob a bank, he has to park two blocks away and walk back. I submit that that's much more realistic.
AVC: One school of thought says that "American crime novel" is essentially a working-class genre.
DW: I think it is. The British were doing [crime stories] first, but the British thing is a very different thing. There, the stories are about restoring a break in the fabric of society. The American thing has never been worrying about breaks in the fabric of society, but about people doing their job, whether it's police procedurals or criminals or whatever. Yeah, that is working-class. Although there's another thing—years ago, there was a director who going to make a movie from a Richard Stark novel. It never happened, but in our discussions at one point he said, "You know, you write like a Frenchman." I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "In American mystery novels, the bank robber robs the bank to pay for the operation for the little girl in the wheelchair. In French novels, the bank robber robs banks because he robs banks. You write like a Frenchman." I said, "I'll take it."
AVC: There's also something in the American noir that comes out of the Western.
DW: One of our continuing myths was summed up in Huckleberry Finn: Our escape, what we think of as our escape, is that we can always light out for the territories. Well, we really can't, not anymore, but that's part of the American character—that belief that at any moment, I could just drop the coffee cup and disappear. And it makes for a different self-image and a different story, in a way.
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