Showing posts with label donald westlake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label donald westlake. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 November 2020

Books to Look Forward to From Titan Books

 December 2020

The Further Adventures of sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse is by Stuart Douglas.. A cursed legagcy. The last Lord Thorpe, reclusive owner of Thorpe Manor, has died. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are invited to the auction at which the estate will be sold off, in hopes Holmes can uncover the whereabouts of the missing De Trop Diamond, a jewel-encrusted gemstone brought back from the Crusades by an earlier member of the Thorpe dynasty – and the source of a legendary curse. Making the acquaintance of the various potential bidders for the Manor, and visiting the nearby village, the two men uncover the details of the curse from the local publican, before exploring the grounds of the Manor itself. All seems well until one of the guests is found dead. Trapped in the Manor by a ferocious snow storm, and cut off from his network of London assistants, Holmes must convince the remaining guests that the curse is not real, and that there is a murderer in their midst…

January 2021

After 16 Years on the run, would Nolan bury the hatchet with the mob or would they bury him first?They don’t come tougher than Nolan – but even a hardened professional thief can’t fight off the entire Chicago mafia. So when an old friend offers to broker a truce, Nolan accepts the terms. All he has to do is pull off one last heist – and trust the Mob not to double cross him. Fortunately, Nolan has a couple of things going for him: an uncanny knack for survival and an unmatched hunger for revenge… Two For The Money is by Max Allan Collins..

February 2021

When four groups of international heist artists team up to pull off the theft of the century – stealing an entire castle, and the treasure secreted in its walls – what could possibly go wrong? Well, consider this: none of the master thieves speak each other’s languages…and no one knows precisely where the loot is stashed…and every one of them wants to steal it all for him or herself. It’s Westlake at his wildest, a breathless slapstick chase through the streets of France with the law in hot pursuit… Castle in The Air is by Donald Westlake.

March 2021 

Later is by Stephen King. The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine – as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave.






Saturday, 9 March 2013

Point Blank at the BFI




POINT BLANK
Directed by John Boorman
US 1967 | 92 mins | Cert 15

With: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn




A BFI release

Release date: 29 March 2013
At the BFI Southbank plus selected venues nationwide

John Boorman’s American debut remains a landmark crime movie, mixing fast-paced, hard-hitting Hollywood action with European stylistic experimentation and cool, existential enquiry to lastingly intoxicating effect.

Heading up a slew of actors who can only be described as ‘iconic’, Lee Marvin is cast to career-best perfection as Walker, an old-school gangster left to die in Alcatraz after an otherwise successful heist. Like some anachronistic avenging angel, he returns to seek out those who betrayed him and retrieve his share of the loot from the outwardly respectable, strangely faceless ‘Organisation’. But does Walker belong, can he still function in this world?

Bringing a sharp outsider’s eye – and Philip Lathrop’s superb Scope compositions – to the strikingly angular cityscapes of Los Angeles and San Francisco, Boorman also deployed a teasingly fragmented chronology, innovative sound design and careful colour schemes to create a consistently surprising, acerbically witty and gripping narrative that finally constitutes a vengeful dream of vain desires. Though there have been subsequent adaptations of Donald Westlake’s The Hunter, this terse masterpiece remains by far the best, and still feels extraordinarily, exhilaratingly modern. – Geoff Andrew






Wednesday, 6 July 2011

Bob's Minky Tale

More great news from Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime, which we're proud to reveal is an imprint published by British Titan Books.

Hard Case Crime has published books by a number Mystery Writers of America 'Grand Masters' over the years -- Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Stephen King as well as the highly anticipated 'Choke Hold' from Christa Faust, the follow-up to the disturbing 'Money Shot'-- but in 2012 we're going to add to this illustrious list a Grand Master from the other side of the aisle, the Science Fiction Writers of America: Robert Silverberg.

Five-time winner of the Nebula Award, five-time winner of the Hugo Award, author of acclaimed, mind-bending fantasy novels that have won praise from people like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, Bob began his career writing under fake names for the last surviving pulp magazines. For the very last issue ever of TRAPPED DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, the editor asked if he could supply a complete novel, and Bob did, an action-packed suspense thriller about a government agent going undercover in the Philadelphia Mob to root out a master currency forger from within. The issue of TRAPPED appeared on newsstands in 1962 -- and after it went off sale a few weeks later, this work by Silverberg vanished. It never appeared under the author's real name, never appeared in book form -- never appeared in any form for the past half-century.

And it's a great read.

So...in April 2012, Hard Case Crime will be giving BLOOD ON THE MINK its first-ever proper publication, including a new afterword by Silverberg discussing the novel's genesis and his work for the pulps, as well as two short stories he wrote for the pulps that have a connection to the novel, and that also haven't seen the light of day for more than 50 years.

Somewhere in Philadelphia, a master engraver is turning out brilliant forgeries of U.S. currency plates for organized crime. To bring the operation down from the inside, the government sends an agent undercover posing as a West Coast crime lord’s right-hand man. It’s a dangerous game of impersonation—one that could prove fatal when the agent’s secret begins to unravel...

Click Here to read a sample chapter

Thursday, 8 January 2009

A sad start for 2009

DONALD WESTLAKE RIP

2009 has started on a sour note with the passing of Donald Westlake. I know other blogs have put up notices before me but I thought that this tribute to the great writer by Mike Carlson is a good one. Note: This appears on Michael Carlson's Irresistible Targets: http://irresisitibletargets.blogspot.com

DONALD WESTLAKE: IN MEMORY OF A CON-MAN by Michael Carlson

Most obituaries of Donald Westlake concentrated, and rightly, on his prolific output, more than 100 novels and an equal number of short stories, as well as some exceptional screenplays. Westlake was one of the last of a dying breed, the generation which followed the great pulp magazine writers, and made their livings pounding out paperback originals on manual typewriters. For Westlake, the habit was so ingrained he never gave up his typewriters; he once explained to me that, although he stockpiled old machines to cannibalize for parts, the real difficulty was finding ribbons, which he went through at a prodigious rate.

I met Westlake a couple of times; the last was a wonderful lunch thrown by Quercus at Chez Elena in Charlotte Street, where Don and Abby were literally the life of the party. I started thinking how that Donald Westlake was the antithesis of his Richard Stark alter ego, in much the same way that the Dortmunder books are a reflection in a fun house mirror of the Parker novels, and then it occurred to me that a central theme of Westlake's work has always been human frailty. His characters are done in, or nearly so, by their weaknesses, their foibles, and in his plots, which he basically made up as he went along, letting the characters find their own ways through situations which usually arise out of those flaws. Then they generally run up against people with more serious flaws, most commonly greed, and things accelerate from there. 'You never really know whay you're doing,' he said to me, and I think that applies to most of his characters too.

Even Parker, who wants to know, and control, everything. In fact, Parker is a successful professional thief precisely because he has none of those human failings, the reason for that being he has very little in the way of human feeling, especially in the first series (the redux is a somewhat kinder, gentler sociopath), and he takes advantage of, or takes revenge on, those who do have them.

Like many great comic writers, Westlake's humour had dark roots. The best comedians see the world as a noirish place, and find it funny. Westlake described the Parker books as growing out of an image he had of a man walking across the George Washington Bridge, the feeling of being an outsider he'd experienced himself coming to New York during a peripatetic youth. When he said that, it reminded me of the somewhat lost hero of 'Up Your Banners', a straightforward comic novel he wrote around the student protest movement in the late 1960s, and Westlake loved being reminded of that. He made the connection to Parker himself, saying he'd introduced Grofield, the actor and part-time thief, to the Parker novels in order to have a little comic relief. Grofield spun off into a few books of his own, and at about the same time Westlake, as Tucker Coe, wrote five novels about the ex-cop Mitch Tobin, whose existential angst in expressed by his working on a wall in his backyard. It was as if Tobin were the antithesis of Grofield. Remember too that the opening of the Grofield novel Blackbird, with its failed armored car robbery, was used as the opening of the Parker novel Slayground which was also made into a British movie starring Peter Coyote, Robbie Coltrane, and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's favorite actress.

It's tempting to concentrate on the playfulness of Westlake's writing: how he and Joe Gores inserted their characters into each other's books, how Grofeld pops up in The Hot Rock (still one of the great heist movies, and one of Robert Redford's best roles, with Ron Liebman and Zero Mostel stealing every scene they can from him) or how in Jimmy The Kid the Dortmunder gang use a fictional Parker novel, Child Heist, as the blueprint for their own kidnapping. It was while contemplating how one can write the words 'fictional Parker novel' with a straight face that it finally occurred to me that what Donald Westlake actually was, what made him such a treasure as a writer. Westlake was a con man, a first-class con man, and we readers were the marks.

This is no great revelation. Go to Westlake's website and you're greeted with a quote 'I believe my subject is bewilderment' and then another one 'but I could be wrong'. He even wrote a novel called 'God Save The Mark', which won the first of his three Edgars. When he wrote an Arthur Hailey-style paperback original, Confort Station, as J. Morgan Cunningham, the book appeared with a blurb saying 'I wish I had written this book'. Signed Donald E Westlake!

Think about it. Westlake started out working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, writing critiques of manuscripts sent in, with a fee, by hopeful would-be writers from across America.
Meredith found some great wordsmiths there. Evan Hunter, of course, like Westlake, would establish a second identity for a different sort of book. Lawrence Block would, like Westlake, move between hard-boiled and comic crime. This crowd included Brian Garfield and John Jakes, who would become best-sellers. All of them would write to order under multiple pseudonyms. Some, like Robert Silverberg, could turn out perfectly-typed manuscripts as quickly as they could type. These guys would play poker every week, and practice their con games. They even wrote one novel as a joint enterprise to help one of them out, one player sitting out and writing as chapter while the rest played on, then another sitting out, and so on.

Meredith, as their agent, would get them bulk contracts for paperback originals and contract the work out. This included a huge number of adult novels, of which Westlake claimed to have written 28, though others put the number at 39, or more. He used the name Alan Marshall (or Marsh) for most of them, wrote some with Block who was writing as Sheldon Lord, but also let other writers use the name to sell books published under imprints like Bedside, Nightstand, and the probably unintentionally punning Midwood. It was the same publisher who printed Jim Thompson's later novels, including The Grifters, for which Westlake won another Edgar, and an Oscar nomination. He described writing these books by doing exactly one chapter, fifteen pages a day, for ten days, and figured out that at $900 a pop, he was earning $22.50 an hour. In the Dortmunder novel Bank Shot (filmed with George C Scott lisping for reasons best-known to him) Kelp hits a car whose trunk is filled with adult novels, and all the titles Westlake lists as being visible are ones he wrote.

Westlake then wrote a very funny novel, Adios Scheherazade, about a man who writes porn, cashing in one more time on that genre which is probably the biggest con of all, when you think of con-men as giving the mark what he thinks he wants. I wonder if one of the reasons Westlake wasn't more successful in Hollywood was that those guys never really know what it is they want. But you look at his best work, like the screenplay of The Grifters, or the original screenplay for The Stepfather, or his adaptation of his own novel Cops & Robbers, or the Hammett adaptation Fly Paper (despite some odd casting) for Showtime's Fallen Angels series.
Or maybe it was because he simply liked sitting at the typewriter and being the master of his own destiny.

But I can't escape this sense of Westlake carrying on the con as the reader turns the pages, and I think that's why the Parker books are so special, and may remain the focus of critical attention on Westlake's career. Critics tend to value seriousness over humour, and Richard Stark's books were written with such a taut prose, especially considering the early Sixties milieu in which they first appeared, that they jumped out at you. He was performing that same con, keeping your attention focused, but with such economy that the story-telling was subsumed totally in the force of the story. I remember being transfixed by them when I discovered them, somewhat bizarrely, in the library at Dickinson College, where I found myself teaching. I've written at length for both Shots and Crime Time on the film adaptations of the Parker books, although Point Blank remains a classic film, and was Westlake's own favourite, I remain exceptionally fond of John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall the screen's best Parker (though, like all the adaptations, not called Parker). It is a small and perfectly formed crime film that deserves a higher reputation.

Westlake's reputation, on the other hand, has probably never been higher. The early Parker books are being reprinted by the University of Chicago, which says something about American academe as well as the quality of Westlake's writing. Those fabulously entertaining Sixties novels are re-appearing, and as for the early adult stuff, well, let's say university presses need not worry.

But anyone who knew Donald Westlake, even casually, was aware of how full of life he was.
You imagine someone who writes seven days a week as being an introvert, but he was anything but. He died on New Year's Eve, as he and Abby were about to go out, and although that is tragic, I see something touching in the thought that he lived his life at a full pace until he just suddenly stopped.

Writers never die, of course, as long as they are being read. And I believe Donald Westlake will go on being read for a very long time. Readers love being conned, after all, and who could do it better?

MURDER ONE

The famous London Crime Book store MURDER ONE is to close its doors just short of reaching it's 21st birthday. Sarah Weinman was one of the first to blog on this. Every one is the business will have fond memories of the store (where ever it was located). It was a great place to not only find books, but to bump into authors and attend some really good launches. The owner, Maxim Jakubowski, seemed to be keeping it on an even keel whilst all around him failed but alas, the current economic crisis forced him into "early retirement" from the book trade. Mind you, that leaves him more time to write.

ALEX KAVA ON THE MOVE

This isn't the news I was expecting to give you from Sphere/Little Brown this January but Alex Kava has been bought by Nikola Scott and David Shelley at Sphere. She has signed up to write two MAGGIE O'DELL thrillers. Scott and Shelley outbid three rivals for the author, who is moving from Mira. The first hardback, set in Florida during a devastating hurricane, will appear in autumn 2010. "Alex is such a talented writer and I’m a huge fan of her series heroine Maggie O’Dell," Scott said. Sphere has UK and Commonwealth rights; in the US, Kava is moving from Mira to Doubleday.