The Last of Westlake
It's the saddest of sad news: Donald Westlake is dead. The creator of Dortmunder, the hapless thief whose brilliant plans invariably escalate out of control until his team are stealing train engines and breaking into prisons, died in Mexico at 75, apparently of a heart attack.
Westlake was incredibly prolific, using many pen names over his career, but finally settling on his own name for the Dortmunder books and other assorted one-off crazy titles, and the name Richard Stark for an entirely separate series starring Parker (one of which was the inspiration for Boorman's movie Point Blank. I've been reading his books forever. He was the author I turned to most often for pure pleasure reading, one of the few who could have me laughing out loud. His short collection of Dortmunders served as a role model for a story I just turned in a couple months back, "The Bank Job," for Darrell Schweitzer's Urban Werewolves anthology.
Anyone who knows the pleasure of just getting lost in a book for the pure joy of the ride, will know the immensity of this loss.
His last novel, I believe, is due out in April.
This sure as hell wasn't the way I wanted the new year to begin. The wrong people keep dying.