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 nonfiction anthology The Getaway Car, table of contents revealed

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

With Trent currently otherwise engaged—literally—it falls to me to provide an update on the Donald E. Westlake non-fiction anthology Trent and I blogged about back in April of last year. Edited by University of Chicago Press’ Levi Stahl, and due for […]

Let’s do this! Help requested for Donald Westlake nonfiction collection.

Go here.

From Levi Stahl, Our Man at the University of Chicago Press:

…I’ve just signed a contract with the University of Chicago Press (my employer when I’m wearing my publicist’s hat) to edit a volume of Donald Westlake’s nonfiction–a celebratory miscellany, sort of like the wonderful Charles Portis volume that was […]

University of Chicago Press releases Parker character guide

I haven’t had time to look at it yet, and don’t have time even to find a graphic to illustrate this post like I usually do, but I wanted to get this posted ASAP on more than just Twitter.

In order to celebrate fifty years of Parker, and on the eve of the release of […]

Grofield reprint covers revealed

Sort of fooled ya there. The above image is not one of the covers. It was rejected, and I can see why. I really like it, but it doesn’t fit the book at all.

You can see the actual covers for the upcoming University of Chicago Press reprints, as well as some other rejected alternates, […]

The e-Book Score: Free Richard Stark and Donald Westlake

There’s a novelty song by a local artist that got some airplay in Austin a decade or so ago. I don’t remember the artist and minor Googling based on likely-misremembered lyrics didn’t turn it up, but the closing lines were something like:

I think there’s one thing on which we can all […]

U of C Parker bookmark, and some movie thoughts

Promo bookmark from the University of Chicago press. The line is from Firebreak, the last reprint to date. There’s not much to say about a bookmark beyond “Hey! Pretty cool bookmark!” (which it is), so I’ll use it as an excuse to ramble on about other things.

I relearned a lesson in the past […]

The return of Alan Grofield

Ever since I started this site back in the olden days, I’ve gotten one question over and over again: Is anyone going to reprint the Grofield books? (If you’re not familiar with Parker’s occasional partner Alan Grofield, you can find out more by going here and clicking the links.)

And the answer was […]

Lawrence Block’s trilogy of Parker forewords

Today, Mulholland Books posted Lawrence Block’s foreword to the University of Chicago Press edition of Butcher’s Moon. This means that all three of Block’s forewords, which form a trilogy of sorts, are now available for reading online.

The foreword to Butcher’s Moon, titled to make it more article-like “Canarsie and Westlake, Parker […]

Lawrence Block’s introduction to U of C Press’ Backflash

I know some people skip introductions, forewords, afterwords, &c. Not me. I love ’em. There are several posted on this site, and every single one of them is interesting.

Of course, on this site I can only post forewords and so on from out-of-print editions, usually long-out-of-print editions, and even then I’m walking a […]