Kind, cynical funny mystery writer Donald Westlake died on New Year’s Eve. If you don’t know the prolific Westlake or his funny goofball career criminal Dortmunder, you should fix that. Westlake was a ninja at making a huge mess of funny and surprising stuff that gets sorted out to your stunned but smiling satisfaction in his last few pages.
One of my Dortmunder favorites, Don’t Ask, starts with Dortmunder in a traffic-stuck frozen fish truck but lurches him forward into the theft (more than once) of an 800 year-old femur disputed by two angry countries.
More Westlake wonders, all of them suitable to keep you happy on airplanes, even when jostled by turbulent weather or children…
- Trust Me On This
- Newswoman Sara Joslyn goes to work at notorious tabloid and runs afoul of murder mystery while working on stories of century-old twins, a star’s honeymoon, and a “body in a box”; romance as a bonus with great police intervention which I’m restraining myself from describing.
- Baby, Would I Lie?
- Sara Joslyn again, now working for cute boss Jack at a trendy New York magazine called Trend, re-meets some of her tabloid pals in Branson country-western land and gets tangled up in an even more tricky mystery.
- Humans
- Begun in 1986 and/or 1990, according to its preface, this book recounts a struggle carried out by one angel and one demon against God’s plan for the end of the universe. Remarkably similar in its premise to Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990), which I also love, this book takes a different pathway, both darker and funnier, to — but of course I don’t want to spoil the ending.
I am now regretting I never wrote Westlake any fan mail — this blog post must now suffice. He was a true craftsman whose work made the world better, not least by making us laugh.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Kay Dennison // Jan 3, 2009 at 7:55 am
I miss him already!!!
2 fp // Jan 4, 2009 at 1:33 am
I’ve recently been reading the “Parker” novels he wrote as Richard Stark. Makes me sad to hear he died.
3 TechPRGuy // Jan 5, 2009 at 3:25 pm
When I first discovered his books, I devoured them, then moved on to all the Richard Stark titles. I regret never making it to his (infrequent) book signing visits to Boston.