An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter for his work on Stephen Frears’s 1990 Jim Thompson adaptation The Grifters, author of some 100 novels—the man himself could only offer a ballpark figure—written under a host of pseudonyms between 1960 and his death in 2008, Brooklyn-born Donald E. Westlake was an industry unto himself, revered by readers and colleagues in genre fiction alike for the ingenious, keep-you-guessing plotting of his work and the hard precision of his prose. It was not long, unsurprisingly, for Hollywood—and others—to take notice of the cinematic possibilities of the author’s prodigious output, and here you can sample some of the big screen’s finest forays into Westlake’s world: John Flynn’s taut, taciturn take on another Stark novel in The Outfit; Peter Yates’s The Hot Rock, starring Robert Redford as Westlake’s most popular creation, master thief John Dortmunder, and most recently, Park Chan-wook’s latest, a take on The Ax, No Other Choice. A tip of the hat to the maestro of the crime caper.
