MODERATOR: And yet, now you are known primarily as the author of comic caper novels, comedy thrillers, what Anthony Boucher termed the comedy of peril, call it what you will—
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Taradiddle.
MODERATOR: I beg your pardon?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: You want me to call these books what I will, and that’s what I call them. Taradiddles. Tortile taradiddles.
MODERATOR: Tortile . . .
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Taradiddles.
MODERATOR: Yes. Well, these, um, things . . . You are primarily known for them, so what led you from ordinary detective stories to these, hm?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: I couldn’t take them seriously any more. I did five books, and started a sixth, and it kept wanting to be funny. As Dick Stark pointed out, there isn’t much money in writing mystery novels, so I wasn’t risking a lot if I went ahead and wrote it funny. At that time, there weren’t any comic mysteries around, so I couldn’t prejudge the reception. Craig Rice had been the last comic detective novelist. But ideas and feelings float in the air, and later on it turned out that simultaneously a guy named John Godey, who later became famous for The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, was writing a comic mystery novel called A Thrill a Minute with Jack Albany. It constantly happens: writers who don’t know one another come up with the same shift in emphasis or the same new subject matter at the same time. We all swim in the same culture, of course.
MODERATOR: Would you say you were influenced by Craig Rice?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: No, I wouldn’t. She was influenced by Thorne Smith, who was magnificent, but every time I try to borrow from Thorne Smith the material dies in my hands. It’s difficult to be truly whimsical without being arch. I can’t do it.
MODERATOR: And P. G. Wodehouse?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: He couldn’t do it, either. That’s a minority opinion, of course.
MODERATOR: Would you care to talk about who has influenced your work?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Not until they’re in the public domain.
MODERATOR: I suppose you’ve been asked where you get your ideas?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Never. Who would ask a schmuck question like that?
MODERATOR: I see. Yes. To return to this first, um, tortile—?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: The Dead Nephew.
MODERATOR: Really? My fact sheet says The Fugitive Pigeon.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Your fact sheet is on the money. I haven’t always been lucky with titles. At the time, I was persuaded to change from the original, but now, sixteen years later, I’d rather be the author of The Dead Nephew than The Fugitive Pigeon.
MODERATOR: Why?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: It’s funnier and it’s meaner, and therefore more to the point.
MODERATOR: To return to the point, you wrote this first tortile taradiddle because you—
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Nicely done.
MODERATOR:—couldn’t—thank you—take the mystery novel seriously anymore. Does that mean you agree with Richard Stark about the gloomy future of the crime story, the thriller, the detective novel, call it what you will?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Depends on what you call it.
MODERATOR: I beg your pardon?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: I have a friend, Robert Ludlum, who writes—
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: Name-dropper.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE:—books, and very good books, too, which are full of suspense, mysteries to be solved, murders, detection, crime, chases, all the elements of the mystery story. If they were called mysteries or detective stories, if they were placed on the publisher’s “Mystery List,” they would sell a fraction of what they do. The best-seller list is crammed with sheep in wolves’ clothing. Sidney Sheldon, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins under all his many names.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: You should talk.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Tim, you are a pest.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: But indispensable.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Like the Sanitation Department. You take the garbage.
MODERATOR: Gentlemen, gentlemen. If mystery novels appear on the best-seller list under another category name, would you be willing to reveal that name?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: “Blockbuster.” You see an ad for a book, it says the book is a blockbuster, that means it’s a category crime novel—usually forty thousand words too fat—breaking for the big money.
MODERATOR: Then why aren’t all mystery novels simply called blockbusters? donald e.
WESTLAKE: Because they have to be Fifties mystery novels, full of Kirk Douglas–type characters. If you write Thirties mystery novels, whodunits with puzzles and clever murderers (never killers) and cleverer detectives, or if you write Forties private eye novels—“A mean man walks down these lone streets”—you can’t possibly get out of the ghetto.
MODERATOR: What about Ross Macdonald?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: The former editor of the New York Times Book Review has admitted in print that that was the result of a conspiracy to see if he really could boost an author he liked onto the bestseller list. Since he claimed that was the only time such a conspiracy occurred, to his knowledge, Macdonald is a fluke.
MODERATOR: Do you have an opinion about his work?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: He must have terrific carbon paper.
MODERATOR: You mentioned Thirties, Forties and Fifties crime novels. What about the Sixties?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: The Sixties crime novel was joky (as opposed to funny), smart-alecky, full of drugs, and self-consciously parading its cast of blacks and homosexuals. The only Sixties mysteries with any merit at all were written in the Fifties by Chester Himes. On the other hand, the Sixties Western was even worse: Remember Dirty Dingus Magee?
RICHARD STARK: Okay, this has gone on long enough. Everybody on your feet.
MODERATOR: Good God, he’s got a gun!
RICHARD STARK: Empty your pockets onto the table. Come on, snap it up.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: You can’t mean this, Dick. We’re your friends.
RICHARD STARK: No book published since ’74. How do you think I live? Give me everything you’ve got.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Will you take a check?
RICHARD STARK: Beat the Devil, 1954, Robert Morley to Humphrey Bogart. They ought to ask me where you get your ideas. You, Tucker Coe, on your feet.
MODERATOR: He’s not moving, he—
RICHARD STARK: Get him up. You, Moderator.
MODERATOR: He’s dead!
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: This water glass—yes, just as I thought. A rare undetectable South American poison. Tucker Coe has been murdered.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: I didn’t do it!
MODERATOR: Wait a minute. If the poison is undetectable, how do you know that’s how he was killed?
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: There isn’t a mark on the body, the glass contains a colorless, odorless liquid, and none of us has left the room. Isn’t the conclusion obvious?
RICHARD STARK: Let’s not forget me over here with my gun. Cough up your money and valuables.
MODERATOR: I can’t believe this is happening.
RICHARD STARK: Hey, Culver, this is all you got?
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: Realists don’t travel with a lot of cash.
RICHARD STARK: You, Moderator, get me the stuff out of Coe’s pockets.
MODERATOR: You want me to rob a corpse?
RICHARD STARK: Rob one or be one, the choice is yours. That’s better.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: We’ll see about—
MODERATOR: They’re struggling! Look out!
RICHARD STARK: You asked for—
MODERATOR: You shot him! Timothy J. Culver is dead!
RICHARD STARK: No mystery about that body.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: I didn’t kill Tucker Coe!
RICHARD STARK: Anybody else feel like a hero? No? All right; don’t move from this room for thirty minutes.
MODERATOR: Good God! He’s getting away!
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: I want to make one thing clear. I didn’t kill Tucker Coe.
MODERATOR: We don’t dare leave. We have to stay in the room with these two bodies. What can we do for the next half-hour?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: We could play Twenty Questions. I’m thinking of something that’s part vegetable and part mineral.
MODERATOR: Oh, shut up.
LIVING WITH A MYSTERY WRITER, BY ABBY ADAMS
Abby Adams Westlake wrote this in 1977 to accompany “Hearing Voices in My Head” in Murder Ink.—Ed.
Living with one man is difficult enough; living with a group can be nerve-wracking. I have lived with the consortium which calls itself Donald Westlake for five years now, and I still can’t always be sure, when I get up in the morning, which of the mob I’ll have my coffee with.
Donald E. Westlake is the most fun, and happily we see more of him than any of the others. He is a very funny person, not jolly exactly, but witty; he loves to laugh and to make other people laugh. His taste in humor is catholic, embracing brows low, middle and high, from Volpone to Laurel and Hardy. (His cuff links, the only ones I’ve ever seen him wear, depict Stan and Ollie, one on each wrist.) He’s a clown at times; coming home from the theater recently with a number of children (more about them later), he engaged in a skipping contest (which he won—he’s very competitive, a Stark characteristic spilling over) with several of the younger kids, causing the eldest girl acute embarrassment.
Westlake has in common with many of his characters a simplicity and naivete about life that is disarming, especially if you don’t know about the Stark and Coe personae lurking in the background. Looking for an American Express office, he walked through the red-light district of Amsterdam without once noticing the “Walletjes”—plate-glass windows set at eye level in the seventeenth-century canal houses, behind each of which sits a lightly clad hooker, under a red light just in case the message has not been put across. I had to take him back and point them out: “There’s one, Don, isn’t she pretty? And here’s another one.”
Like his character Dortmunder, Westlake is unpretentious, unmoved by style or fashion. He dresses simply, wearing the same clothes year after year, wearing hush puppies until they literally fall off his feet. I cut his hair, but he does his own mending and sews on his own buttons. (Mine, too.) Also like Dortmunder he takes a great deal of pride in his work (with, thank God, more success), but is not otherwise vain.
Behind the wheel of a car he is Murch. One of the four publications he subscribes to is Car and Driver. (The others are Horizon, the New Yorker and the Manchester Guardian; what is one to make of all that?) He drives passionately, never failing to take an advantage. We once drove across the United States and were passed only three times: twice by policemen and once by a battered old pickup truck full of cowboys that whizzed past us at ninety on a road in Wyoming that I still shudder at the memory of. (We were doing seventy-five.)
Like Harry Künt, the hero of Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner, Westlake will do almost anything for a laugh. Fortunately, he does not share Künt’s proclivity for practical joking or I would no longer share his bed. Like Brother Benedict of Brothers Keepers, he really is happiest leading a quiet life and being able to get on with his own work in peace. However, his life, like a Westlake plot, seldom quiets down for more than five minutes. (“I’m sick of working one day in a row,” he sometimes says.) Like many of his heroes, he brings this on himself, partly out of restlessness and partly out of a desire to make things happen around him. For instance, all these children.
Westlake has four, by various spouses, and I have three. Not satisfied with the status quo—his four scattered with their mothers from Binghamton, New York, to Los Angeles, California (“I have branches in all principal cities,” he is wont to say) and mine living with me in New York City—he ups and gathers everybody, with all their typewriters, baseball cards, Legos, musical instruments, movie books, and stuffed animals, and brings us all to London for a year. Then, not content with London, he rents buses and takes this traveling circus all over Great Britain, including Scotland in January (snow) and Cornwall and Wales in February (rain). Still not content, he drives us through the Continent in April for a sort of Grand Tour: Holland, Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg and France in three weeks. Because, like Brother Benedict again, he is obsessed with Travel.
Also, like every Westlake hero, Donald E. Westlake is sex-crazed, but I’m not going to talk about that.
Tucker Coe is the gloomy one, almost worse to have around the house than Richard Stark. We see Tucker Coe when things go wrong. The bills can’t be paid because the inefficient worlds of publishing and show business have failed to come up with the money to pay them. Children are rude, noisy, dishonest, lazy, loutish and, above all, ungrateful; suddenly you wonder what you ever saw in them. Ex-wives are mean and grasping. Cars break down, houses betray you, plants refuse to live, and it rains on the picnic. Coe’s character Mitch Tobin builds a brick wall in his backyard when he’s feeling sorry for himself; Coe has never actually built a wall, but he has built enough bookcases to fill the 42nd Street library, for himself and his friends. Also, when the Tucker Coe mood is upon him, he will do crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles (even ones he has done before), fix broken electrical things—in fact, do almost anything except work at his typewriter or talk with other human beings.
Timothy Culver is the professional—hack, if you prefer. He will write anything for anybody and doesn’t care how much he’s paid, just as long as the typewriter keys keep flying. If he doesn’t have any actual work to do, he will write letters; and if you’ve ever received one, you’ll know they’re just as well-written as his books. Well-typed, too. Part of his professionalism is that he produces copy so clean you could simply photostat the pages and put them between boards and have a book with fewer misprintings than most actual volumes.
His desk is as organized as a professional carpenter’s workshop. No matter where it is (currently, it’s a long white dressing table at one end of the living room here in London), it must be set up according to the same unbending pattern. Two typewriters (Smith Corona Silent-Super manual) sit on the desk with a lamp and a telephone and a radio, and a number of black ball-point pens for corrections (seldom needed!). On a shelf just above the desk, five manuscript boxes hold three kinds of paper (white bond first sheets, white second sheets and yellow work sheets) plus originals and carbon of whatever he’s currently working on. (Frequently one of these boxes also holds a sleeping cat.) Also on this shelf are reference books (Thesaurus, Bartlett’s, 1000 Names for Baby, etc.) and cups containing small necessities such as tape, rubber bands (I don’t know what he uses them for) and paper clips. Above this shelf is a bulletin board displaying various things that Timothy Culver likes to look at when he’s trying to think of the next sentence. Currently, among others, there are: a newspaper photo showing Nelson Rockefeller giving someone the finger; two postcards from the Louvre, one obscene; a photo of me in our garden in Hope, New Jersey; a Christmas card from his Los Angeles divorce attorney showing himself and his wife in their Bicentennial costumes; and a small hand-lettered sign that says “weird villain.” This last is an invariable part of his desk bulletin board: “weird” and “villain” are the two words he most frequently misspells. There used to be a third—“liaison”—but since I taught him how to pronounce it (not lay-ee-son but lee-ay-son) he no longer has trouble with it.
The arrangement of the various objects on and around The Desk is sacred, and should it be disturbed, nice easygoing professional Timothy Culver turns forthwith into Richard Stark. Children tremble, women weep and the cat hides under the bed. Whereas Tucker Coe is morose and self-pitying, Stark has no pity for anyone. Stark is capable of not talking to anyone for days, or, worse yet, of not talking to one particular person for days while still seeming cheerful and friendly with everyone else. Stark could turn Old Faithful into ice cubes. Do you know how Parker, when things aren’t going well, can sit alone in a dark room for hours or days without moving? Stark doesn’t do this—that would be too unnerving—but he c
an play solitaire for hours on end. He plays very fast, turns over the cards one at a time, and goes through the deck just once. He never cheats and doesn’t seem to care if the game never comes out. It is not possible to be in the same room with him while he’s doing this without being driven completely up the wall.
Stark is very competitive and does whatever he does with the full expectation of winning. He is loyal and honest in his dealings with people and completely unforgiving when they are not the same. Stark is a loner, a cat who walks by himself. He’s not influenced by other people, doesn’t join clubs or groups, and judges himself according to his own standards. Not the easiest man to live with, but fortunately I seldom have to. About the best you can say for Stark is that he can be trusted to take messages for Westlake and the others which he will deliver the next time they come in.
The question that now comes to mind is: What next? Or should I say, Who next? A half-completed novel now resides on The Desk, title known (but secret), author still unchristened. I feel a certain suspense as I await the birth of this creature; yet whoever he turns out to be I know he will probably be difficult to get along with, but not boring.
WRITERS ON WRITING: A PSEUDONYM RETURNS FROM AN ALTER-EGO TRIP, WITH NEW TALES TO TELL*
This was originally published in the New York Times Book Review on January 29, 2001, following the publication of Flashfire, the nineteenth Parker novel.—Ed.
I’ve just completed another few months being Richard Stark, and a very pleasant time it was. Richard Stark is the name I write under when I’m not writing under the name Donald Westlake, which is the name I was born with, and these days it is doubly pleasant for me to visit with Stark, because for twenty-three years he wouldn’t answer my calls.
The relationship between a writer and his pseudonym is a complex one, and never more so than when the alter ego refuses to appear. I became Richard Stark in the first place, forty years ago, for both of the usual reasons. As a young writer, effervescent with ideas, I was turning out far too much work to ship to the publishers under just one name. Also, being a writer who worked in a variety of styles, I thought it a good idea to offer brand-name definition. Westlake does this, Stark does that.
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