Crime becomes comedy, bad luck or hard-boiled suspense depending on which side of Donald Westlake’s work a reader enters. The Dortmunder novels, beginning with The Hot Rock, follow a professional thief whose carefully planned jobs repeatedly go wrong in elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways. Under the name Richard Stark, Westlake wrote the much colder Parker novels, starting with The Hunter, about a ruthless professional criminal carrying out robberies with minimal sentiment. Standalones such as The Ax turn unemployment and desperation into dark crime satire. Westlake’s prose is lean and efficient in both comic and serious modes, but his interest in criminal procedure, planning and unintended consequences remains consistent. His work spans comic capers, noir and heist fiction, with useful links to Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block and other writers who make professional criminals the protagonists. Read more Less
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