DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

A friend of mine, now retired, was then a major exec at a major bank, and one of her jobs, the last four years, was the farewell interview.

I loved it, but social reality impeded. Now I wander in here at 9 in the morning or so, and come back for a while in the afternoon. I am a very lenient boss.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.

I start with the story, almost in the old campfire sense, and the story leads to both the characters, which actors should best be cast in this story, and the language. The choice of words, more than anything else, creates the feeling that the story gives off.

Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.

When Stark isn't off sulking somewhere, or whatever he's doing when he won't return my calls, I alternate between the two. That usually works well, though occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind.

I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way.

My work schedule has changed over the years. The one constant is, when at work on a novel, I try to work seven days a week, so as not to lose touch with that world. Within that, I'm flexible on hours and output.

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.

All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.

Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.

I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.

If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.

If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers.

The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo, Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.

The critics didn't like it at all. They felt it was crude and violent without meaning, and they dumped on it. 'Point Blank' marked a shift in movie-making, and they weren't ready for it. However, I think those were the last negative words ever said about it.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

I love Hammett, never liked Chandler - I'm one of the few.

I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'

With writing, I prefer the solo effort, but when a team is working right, as it did on 'The Grifters,' boy, it's exhilarating.

I did the first Parker novel, in which he got caught, and the editor at Pocket Books took me to lunch and said, 'Is there any way that this guy could get away at the end, and you could do three books a year for us?' And I said, 'I think so.'

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.