PLATO, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, once defined man as a "featherless biped." His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others.
So who’s right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two—and that’s Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written. Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization. Donald Westlake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers.
The bookstores nowadays stock an endless number of comic mysteries, the best known by Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, and Gregory McDonald. Amusing as these writers often are, it is an injustice to place Westlake in their company. He is an author of a wholly different rank. His true peers are such great American humorists as Mark Twain and Ring Lardner and such great American crime novelists as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler.
You might not realize this if you go to see What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, currently showing in theaters. Starring Martin Lawrence as Westlake’s ill-starred thief (renamed from John Dortmunder to Kevin Caffrey), the film is the latest of Hollywood’s generally failed attempts to present Westlake’s crime capers—a series that includes Robert
Redford in The Hot Rock (the best of a weak lot), George C. Scott in Bank Shot, Paul Le Mat in Jimmy the Kid, and Christopher Lambert in Why Me?
But you can’t miss Westlake’s skill in the recently published Bad News, the latest chapter in the comic saga of the inimitable John Archibald Dortmunder—master thief and American hero, a man whose bad luck is topped only (and barely) by his resourcefulness and determination. What’s more, The Hot Rock, the first Dortmunder adventure, has just been reissued in paperback with a new preface recounting the ambiguous genesis of this singular character. And finally, Westlake has just produced—under his pseudonym "Richard Stark"—the novel Flashfire, the nineteenth adventure of his master criminal Parker, the anti-Dortmunder and reigning champion in the amorality division of American mystery fiction.
Under his own name, Westlake has written forty-seven works over the past four decades. During that period, he’s also written twenty-three novels under the name "Richard Stark" (four starring Alan Grofield, a charming actor and occasional thief who is worthy of revival). And under a cloud of pseudonyms—at least five, but it’s a good bet there are more—he’s written dozens more.
With characteristic irony, Westlake says of his crime-noir character Parker and his crime-blanc character Dortmunder: "It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name." But precisely the opposite is true: Westlake expresses his serious thoughts in comedy because it is truer and healthier to see what is laughable about the typical, the everyday.
Val:Y
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