DEW Day: a Dortmunder Daze / Parker Progress Report review of Jimmy the Kid, feat. Child Heist

(NB: This post also appears on Existential Ennui.)

As you’ll no doubt already be aware if you’ve read Violent World of Parker supremo Trent’s earlier post, today is Donald E. Westlake Day. Instigated by Patti Abbott to mark the imminent publication by Hard Case Crime/Titan Books of the “lost” Westlake novel The […]

The Violent World of Parker’s third anniversary!

Strap yourselves in and get ready to skim. This is going to be a long one.

About the Site

I think of the relaunched Violent World of Parker as having been born on New Year’s Day, 2009, the day after Donald Westlake died. But the half-formed results of the relaunch weren’t made public until […]

Trailer and title sequence for Jimmy the Kid, plus “Keep Your Paws Off My Dog”

Jimmy the Kid, as I’m sure you know, was the Dortmunder novel that used a nonexistent Parker book (Child Heist) to launch its plot.

It’s been filmed three times. The other two versions are foreign, and, so far as I know, unseeable in the US. They may be unseeable anywhere at this point. The […]

A third film version of Jimmy the Kid?

In the early days of this site (2000), I had a couple of brief exchanges with Donald Westlake. One of them went like this (excerpted from longer e-mails):

DEW: What do you mean, two movies of JIMMY THE KID? If I knew how to ubderline [sic] on this despicable machine, I would […]

Rest in peace, Gary Coleman

Awful News: Donald Westlake Has Died

I have just received word that Donald Westlake died on December 31st, 2008, of a heart attack. He was 75.

This is a bit overwhelming. When someone has been around for your entire life, it is natural (for me, anyway) to just assume he will always be there. This was a […]