Donald E. Westlake: Prolific writer of mysteries and thrillers whose screenplay for 'The Grifters' was Oscar nominated

Donald E. Westlake was a prolific writer of mysteries and thrillers, with a handful of screenplays (and an Academy Award nomination) to his credit. But he was much more than that. He could be one of the funniest, most hilarious entertainers in the writing business, yet at the same time could hammer out some of the bleakest, most hardboiled prose of his or any other generation.

His second novel, Killing Time (1961) was favourably compared on publication with Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (a book a critic once described as "300-odd pages of non-stop violence and fiendishness"); his "Parker" series of novels, about a professional bank robber written under the pseudonym Richard Stark, has been acclaimed as the "best of 1940s-style prose in a modern setting".

No wonder he was given the task of adapting Jim Thompson's bleak noir masterpiece The Grifters for the screen; and no wonder the script ended up with an Oscar nomination. The wonder is he didn't win – although he did gain the third of his trio of Edgar awards, from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), for the script in 1991.

With around a hundred books to his name – or names: he used half a dozen pseudonyms – Westlake had a lively and varied writing career, in his early days especially turning his hand-cranked typewriter (a machine he never forsook) to most types of entertainment fiction to put, in the classic pulpwriters' phrase, food on the table. He turned out hardboiled suspensers, comic spy stories, paperback smut, a smidgeon of science fiction, short stories by the volumeful and criminal caper novels by the dozen. He tried his hand at a juvenile (Philip, 1967), a political drama (Ex-Officio, 1970, as by Timothy J. Culver), and a western – Gangway (1973), in collaboration with his friend and fellow-writer Brian Garfield; and he wrote a priceless book-length lampoon of the popular bestseller Arthur Hailey.

Donald Westlake was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933 and grew up in upstate Albany. After High School he attended State University of New York, Plattsburgh, served a tour of duty in the US air force (1954-56), then finished his education at Binghampton, New York state. For a while he worked at a literary agency (like his near-contemporary Ed McBain), then became embroiled with one of the most bizarre pulp-fiction editors in the business, signing on at the eccentric Rolf Passer's Mystery Digest during the late 1950s. Passer was a one-off who could never make his mind up whether his magazine should run sex stories, alien invasion "true confessions", or mystery fiction. Often an issue contained all three.

Westlake sold his first short story "Arrest", in 1958 to Manhunt, then market leader in the world of digest pulp fiction, wrote for Mystery Digest for a while, then branched out to hit other digest markets (the pulps, a natural home for his work at this stage in his career, having long since perished): Guilty, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Off-Beat Detective Stories, Tightrope, Shock, The Saint and others. He was still writing short stories in the 1980s, though now only roughly once a year for Playboy, the fees for which probably kept his car on the road.

He sold his first novel, The Mercenaries, a tough adventure yarn, in 1960. Perhaps while pondering which direction to take, fictionally, he rattled off a handful of soft porn epics for Monarch Books, of Stamford, Connecticut, such as Campus Doll and Young and Innocent (both 1961) under the pseudonym Edwin West. Financially this proved a dead end, and Westlake subsequently poured all of his creative talents into above-the-counter fare for publishers such as Random House, Evans, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Mysterious Press, mainly appearing under the Hodder & Stoughton imprint in the UK.

Westlake ran two main series in his writing, as well as one or two minor ones. The Parker novels were about a cold-blooded professional thief who usually worked for hire and had no compunction in killing to get himself out of a tight spot. There are light moments, though not many. One of Parker's associates, Alan Grofield, is a failed actor who robs banks so that he can work in summer stock, where the pay is uniformly lousy. Grofield appeared solo in a handful of Richard Stark novels, including the excellent Lemons Never Lie (1971).

The attraction of the Parker series as a whole to aficionados, apart from the needle-sharp writing and the sublime use of character-interplay, is seeing how Westlake/Stark can extract his characters out of terrible situations, when all seems not merely lost but terminal. The attraction of the series for the big screen was the high tension Westlake generated out of often the simplest of storylines: Parker and his associates plan a heist which, through cupidity as much as stupidity, goes wrong in the most spectacular fashion, and they have to pull themselves put of the wreck, sometimes with only their lives to show for it. And Westlake was brilliantly adept at ringing the locale changes with each successive novel: one story might be constructed around a diamonds heist, another an armoured car robbery, another the plunder of an isolated casino. The Score (1964) described the looting of an entire town.

Of the original 16 Parker thrillers, six were later turned into movies, including the first Parker book, The Hunter (1962), which John Boorman transformed into one of the hardest-boiled films of the past 40 years, Point Blank (1967), with a lethal Lee Marvin, re-named "Walker", pounding through the plot and exacting vengeance in the most vicious ways possible.

Boorman wasn't the only top movie name to appreciate Westlake's work. Costa-Gavras turned his novel The Ax (1997) into Le Couperet (2005), while Jean-Luc Godard was much taken with the plot of the Parker novel The Jugger (1965), which he turned into Made In USA (1967). Unfortunately Godard forgot to mention his homage to Westlake who sued, and won, stopping the film's distribution in the United States.

Under his own name, Westlake wrote a series about an inept bank-robber called John Dortmunder, whose heart is in the right place but whose choice of associates leaves much to be desired. He continually picks nitwits and bunglers and, as the caper slowly unravels, has usually to contend with stupidity on a grand, even industrial, scale. Luckily, from the cops as well as his criminous chums. The critic Francis Nevins has pointed out that the Dortmunder series "takes place in a fairy-tale world where no one gets killed, raped, tortured or even bruised badly, probably the closest thing to the world of P.G. Wodehouse that any American has conjured up".

In the late 1960s Westlake, as Tucker Coe, ran a five-book series about an ex-cop turned gumshoe (sort of), which some critics point to as Westlake's most serious contribution to the genre. Mitch Tobin has a troubled mind – when a cop, he let his partner down, leading to the man's death – and, between "cases" he picks up from assorted low-lives, he is building a wall around his backyard. There are few laughs (no critic at the time realised Coe and Westlake were one), but in Murder Among Children (1968) there's a doozy of an "impossible crime". Westlake, without initially telling anyone, ran yet another "character" series during the 1980s, for Tor Books, as by Samuel Holt.

A decade later another minor act of revenge against the system brought Parker out of cold storage. The last Parker book he'd written, Butcher's Moon, had been published in 1974. He'd then begun another book, but after three attempts stopped trying. When talking about the 23-year gap between Parker's sudden demise and his return, Westlake would become whimsical: "Richard Stark proved to me he had a life of his own by simply disappearing ... He was gone ... refused to answer the phone. I tried for years. I would write 50 pages and discover it was awful ... a ghastly parody, a cheap imitation. And then suddenly he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor."

The real reason Richard Stark, and thus Parker, came back from the dead – in Comeback (1997) – was because, having won an Oscar nomination for his Grifters screenplay Westlake was subsequently turned down flat for two scriptwriting jobs in succession on account of his age. He was then in his sixties. Understandably miffed, Westlake subsequently admitted, "Parker came back to say, 'I'm older than you but I'm still smarter than you. I'm better than you, faster than you and I'm still prettier than you".' After a shaky start, the subsequent series blossomed into one of the true "must-haves" for mystery enthusiasts.

Donald Westlake was a superb stylist and, when in humorous mode, a comic genius whose prose had real laugh-out-loud qualities. It was the comedy of bewilderment, bafflement, and exasperation – and the last never more so than when he mocked the Arthur Hailey bestseller phenomenon by writing a short paperback original for Signet Books about a New York public lavatory, Comfort Station (1970), as by J. Morgan Cunningham. The only hint to its true authorship was the strapline, "I wish I had written this book! – Donald Westlake". In the same year he also published one of the few books worth reading about writing pornography, Adios Scheherazade.

Westlake was one of only two writers to be awarded the prestigious Edgar award in three separate categories. For his novel God Save The Mark in 1968; the short story "Too Many Crooks" in 1990; and his screenplay for The Grifters in 1991. He was given the Grandmaster award, the MWA's highest honour, in 1993.

Jack Adrian

Donald Edwin Westlake, writer: born New York 12 July 1933; three times married (four sons); died 31 December 2008.