A Stark World

A Stark World by John McNaIIy The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit, by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). Chicago, September 2008. $14 paper each

When Donald E. Westlake died on New Year's Eve, he took a crowd of good men down with him. There were at least fourteen. Maybe more. James Blue. Ben Christopher. Sheldon Lord. Writers, all of them. Some better known than others. Edwin West. Curt Clark. Tucker Coe. Samuel Holt. They wrote science fiction novels and biographies. They wrote soft porn paperbacks and short stories. But none of them will ever write again. Down they went on New Year's Day. Westlake had even blurbed one of them. "I wish I had written this book!" he crowed of J. Morgan Cunningham's novel Comfort Station.

But here's the kicker. He had written the book. He'd written all their books. These men these writers - they were all Donald E. Westlake. They were his pseudonyms. Some, like P. N. Castor, were one -shot wonders. Others, like Alan Marshall, whose soft-porn titles include All My Lovers, Man Hungry, and Virgins Summer, published nearly as many novels as Norman Mailer. All told, Donald E. Westlake published over a hundred books under various names, including his own, but one pseudonym in particular stood above all the others: Richard Stark.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE first introduced Richard Stark to the world in 1959 via a short story in the magazine Mystery Digest. Stark's first novel, The Hunter, appeared two years later, and until 1974 's Butcher's Moon, the novels kept coming, one, two, three a year. And then they stopped. Stark was put into retirement. It wasn't until twenty-three years later that Comeback, a new Stark novel, appeared, reviving a series that must surely constitute one of the longest-running in American crime novels.

Last fall, the University of Chicago Press reissued the first three Richard Stark novels in handsome trade paperback editions: The Hunter (by far the most popular of these novels, having first been made into the movie Point Blank starring Lee Marvin and then remade into Pay- back starring Mel Gibson), The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit. This spring, Chicago released the next three books in the series: The Mourner,...