New Donald Westlake blog: The Westlake Review

I don’t suppose there’s any way to write this post and not mention that Chris Lyons and I have had our differences in the past. Some of them spilled out into public, and they were sometimes not pretty. However, his take on things Westlake is always interesting (even if I strenuously disagree with it […]

Trailer for A Walk Among the Tombstones

I’m a bit late to the party on this, so maybe you’ve seen it already, but below is the trailer to the upcoming film adaptation of Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder novel, A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson as Scudder. Lawrence Block has a cameo.

This is one I have not yet read, […]

New York Crimes

I look rather the dork in this photo–we don’t have the professional pictures back yet, so we are having to suffice with whatever guests took on their camera phones–but no matter how well I photographed, I was never going to shine in comparison, was I?

After the craziest year and half of my life, […]

Westlake on Highsmith, in The Getaway Car

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

Four years ago on Existential Ennui I posted a review of Ripley Under Ground, Roger Spottiswoode’s 2005 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s second Tom Ripley novel. Much as I love Highsmith’s source text—indeed the Ripliad as a whole—I wasn’t terribly keen […]