| Richard Stark |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT DONALD E. WESTLAKE | |
| 1933 births | |
| living people | |
| american crime fiction writers | |
| american novelists | |
| edgar award winners | |
| united states air force airmen | |
| people from brooklyn | |
| new york writers | |
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Westlake attended Harpur College in Binghamton, New York , and left early. He spent two years in the USAF . He is married to Abigail Westlake (also known as Abby Adams Westlake and Abby Adams), a writer of non-fiction. Her two published books are ''An Uncommon Scold'' and ''The Gardener's Gribe Book''. The couple live in Upstate New York. Abby Westlake is an especially capable gardener and Westlake garden is frequently opened for public viewing in summer. {Link without Title} In addition to publishing prolifically under his own name, Westlake has published under numerous Pseudonyms , including John B. Allen, '''Curt Clark''', '''Tucker Coe''', '''Timothy J. Culver''', '''Morgan J. Cunningham''', '''Samuel Holt''', '''Sheldon Lord''' (with Lawrence Block ), '''Allan Marshall''', ''' Richard Stark ''', and '''Edwin West'''. Westlake is known for the great ingenuity of his plots and the audacity of his gimmicks. His writing and dialogue are lively. His main characters are fully rounded, believable, and clever. Westlake's most famous characters are the hard-boiled criminal Parker (appearing under the Richard Stark pseudonym) and Parker's comic flip-side John Dortmunder , the hard-luck criminal genius who originally began as Parker getting caught (to Westlake's surprise) in a comic situation in the novel '' The Hot Rock ''. Most of Westlake's novels are set in New York City . In the Dortmunder novels, there is usually a detailed shortcut somewhere through the city. Several of Westlake's novels have been made into motion pictures, including '' The Hot Rock '' in 1972 with Robert Redford , '' Payback '' in 1999 with Mel Gibson , and '' What's The Worst That Could Happen? '' in 2001 with Martin Lawrence . Westlake himself has written a few screenplays, most notably '' The Grifters ,'' adapted from the novel of the same name by Jim Thompson , for which Westlake was nominated for an Academy Award . EXTERNAL LINKS
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