{"id":92,"date":"2009-01-02T16:49:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T21:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/02\/donald-westlake-obit\/"},"modified":"2009-01-08T00:05:50","modified_gmt":"2009-01-08T05:05:50","slug":"donald-westlake-obit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/02\/donald-westlake-obit\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image91\" src=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/donald-westlake-films.jpg\" alt=\"donald-westlake-films.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I was saddened yesterday to hear of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/02\/books\/02westlake.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss&amp;pagewanted=all\">the death of mystery writer Donald E. Westlake<\/a>. Under his own name as well as the pseudonym &#8220;Richard Stark,&#8221; Westlake wrote some of my favorite comic caper and tough-guy heist novels, and many of those books had been adapted into motion pictures. The Westlake comedies starred a professional thief named Dortmunder, who was played on screen (sometimes with a name change) by actors as diverse as Robert Redford (<i>The Hot Rock<\/i>, above left), George C. Scott, and Martin Lawrence. The most famous film version of a Richard Stark novel is probably <i>Point Blank<\/i>, with Lee Marvin, but Robert Duvall did a great job as the lead in <i>The Outfit<\/i> (above right, with Joe Don Baker).<font color=\"#483D8B\">*<\/font><\/p>\n<p>Westlake is also the author of <i>Somebody Owes Me Money<\/i>, which Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai (who brought the novel back into print last summer) and I agree is perhaps the greatest title a novel has ever had.<\/p>\n<p>And be sure to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omnivoracious.com\/2009\/01\/donald-e-westla.html\">this thoughtful appreciation from <i>Omnivoracious<\/i><\/a>, from which the picture below is taken.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.omnivoracious.com\/images\/2009\/01\/02\/westlake_donald_600.jpg\" width=\"425\"><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#483D8B\">*Correction: I got the casting reversed when I wrote this post; it&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;ve seen <i>The Outfit<\/i>. Probably too long.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of mystery writer Donald E. Westlake. Under his own name as well as the pseudonym &#8220;Richard Stark,&#8221; Westlake wrote some of my favorite comic caper and tough-guy heist novels, and many of those books had been adapted into motion pictures. The Westlake comedies starred a professional [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}