Many fans of crime fiction and capers consider Donald E. Westlake among the best writers in the field. He published more than 100 books and received a Grand Master citation from the Mystery Writers of America. Those who love his work and such memorable characters as Parker, John Dortmunder and Sam Holt can now rejoice; collected here are essays, letters (one to Stephen King), interviews, an autobiographical fragment (in which he explains why being born in Brooklyn saved his infant life) and a recipe for John Dortmunder's companion May's tuna casserole. Some pieces have never been published before. All this is thanks to editor Levi Stahl, promotions manager at the University of Chicago Press.
As Lawrence Block writes in his foreword, Westlake never wrote a "bad sentence, a clumsy paragraph, or a dull page." He was also a "wonderfully witty man." Westlake considered Peter Rabe's Kill the Boss Good-Bye one of the "most purely interesting crime novels ever written," but claimed that Rabe "wrote the best books with the worst titles of anybody I can think of."
In a piece on Rex Stout, he proclaimed Stout a "far better writing craftsman than Conan Doyle." In an essay on "Hardboiled Dicks," Westlake suggested that Raymond Chandler's "homosexual content" gave his stories their "texture and fascination." Also included is a lengthy list of book titles Westlake never used, including Read Me (an apt directive for any of his books). As Stahl writes in his introduction, this is a "book for fans... lots of us." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher