Wallace Stroby’s Westlake Obituary

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Crime novelist Wallace Stroby sends along his farewell to Donald Westlake:

While reading a draft of my first novel, THE BARBED-WIRE KISS, [agent Knox] Burger called me out of the blue to criticize my tendency to write overly terse, in a manner he found inappropriate for the story. “You’re trying to write like Richard Stark,” he told me. “Don’t!”

But who could, even if they wanted to? Westlake and Stark were one of a kind. We’ll never see their like again.