I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.
It is a very nice restaurant on the border of New York and Massachusetts, in that area where the Berkshire Hills meet near a river valley that introduces the west-bound traveler to the Catskills. It is so nice that my wife and I could afford to eat there maybe once, sometimes twice, a year. I was waiting for her, in those days we would spend a lot of time waiting for one another, in a comfortable seating area by the doors. Another man was there, too, and we began to talk. His wife was at a garden show, mine was finishing a pre-marital conversation with a young couple. Since his wife was a gardening writer, and both of our wives were at their work, we acknowledged both would lose track of the time and we should probably go to the bar and get something to drink. That was a terrific idea.
After we were situated, he asked if we had met somewhere. To be honest, I was about to ask him the same thing. I said I didn't think so, but he then remembered that I had officiated at a funeral a week or so before and he had been in attendance. I was concerned that this would end the conversation, the Berkshires are notoriously Christo-phobic, but instead he started to ask about how sermons were composed. That's when it got really interesting.
I had long since abandoned the practice of writing sermons word for word and tediously reading them to the congregation. I had learned, after my first year of ordained ministry, to trust in what I had to say, rely on the experience of being a lecturer and teacher, and depart from the text to actually look at the congregation as I spoke to them. It made a lot of difference. About the most I did, after sorting the sermon in my head, was scribble a stray note or two. Unfortunately, many times the scribble was so obscure that I couldn't remember what it referenced.
He laughed at that, told me that he was a writer and that he, too, would do the same thing. We then spoke of spontaneity and, after learning that his metier was fiction, I asked how strongly he outlined his stories.
"Oh, not at all. I know the characters and have a pretty good idea where they're going."
Yes, sermons, too, I thought.
My wife arrived, the three of us spoke for a time, his wife arrived, and I thanked him for the pleasant conversation and we went to our separate tables. He had told me his name and I spent a portion of our meal trying to place it. It came to me once we returned home and I noticed one of the paperbacks sitting in a room where I had discarded our beach vacation gear the month before. Of course I recognized him; his photo was on the back cover of one of the books I had read in a beach chair between wave sets that summer.
Don Westlake. Better known to readers of thrillers as Donald E. Westlake, although sometimes known as Richard Stark, Rolfe Passer, Alan Marsh, Alan Marshall, James Blue, Don Halliday, and many more. He was staggeringly prolific and, as he began writing paperbacks in the very early 1960's when publishers were reluctant to release more than one book per author per year, found multiple pseudonyms the best way to release his stories and earn a better living.
There are two characters for which he is best known, with the development of the latter an indication of what he meant when he spoke of spontaneity. The first, known simply as "Parker", is a career criminal who is amoral and highly professional. He was never intended to be more than a character in one novel. However, the reading public found the grittiness of post-Spillane noir fiction to be sufficiently popular that Westlake's publisher urged him to make Parker [he never had a first name] into a series character who robbed, murdered, conned, and outwitted the police and other criminals through 24 novels, from 1962's The Hunter to 2008's Dirty Money.
It was while he was writing a Parker novel entitled The Hot Rock, eventually published in 1970, that Westlake developed a new character. For whatever reason, Westlake kept finding that in writing a gritty Parker novel, about an elusive jewel that has to be stolen and re-stolen over and over again, he kept veering into comedy. The novel he was writing, despite his best intentions, was funny and light-hearted and anything other than a typical Parker novel. So, he changed Parker, the amoral career criminal, into George Dortmunder, the hapless, middle-class professional con man and thief.
Responding, however unconsciously, to the change in the paperback market, Westlake's lighter criminal world of Dortmunder would be featured in 14 novels and prove to be an equally popular character. To date, Parker has been played on screen by Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson; Dortmunder, a much more malleable character, has been played on screen by Robert Redford, George C. Scott, and Martin Lawrence. In addition to providing fodder for screen productions, Westlake wrote the screenplay for the movie The Grifters, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
There are other novels and screenplays and other characters, of course. Westlake may have been the last of the journeyman writers, living in a quiet former farmhouse in upstate New York and enjoying a good living entertaining people through affordable books; stories that, despite their humble binding and price, would be filled with crisp dialogue, surprising plot twists, and memorable circumstances. One may read any of Westlake's novels under any of his names and not have one's intelligence insulted.
Donald Westlake would die while on vacation in Mexico in 2008 at the age of 75, with a stack of unpublished manuscripts in his home office, even including a novel featuring...James Bond.
He came to mind when I contemplated this, the final Friday profile, as it, too, was a product of that conversation over overpriced drinks nearly twenty years ago. I must have spoken of progeny and our responsibility to them in the funeral homily I delivered for Westlake's acquaintance, as he brought up our charge to ensure the education of our children and grandchildren. An education that could not be trusted to professional educators, no matter how well-intentioned.
"We should always tell them stories. Heck, even ones that are mostly true."
Yes, that may be the sub-title of these 150 profiles offered over the last six years. Thanks, Don. It's been fun.