The hardboiled universe of Richard Stark:
Donald Westlake, who died in 2008, was born in 1933 and struggled for many years as a short-story writer before becoming a prolific writer of short novels in many genres, mostly crime, though he did pen a few dozen soft-porn titles. During the course of his career, he wrote more than 100 books, using at least 15 different pen names.
Westlake had a knack for writing tight plots, believable characters and fresh dialog—qualities valuable in any genre but particularly useful in crime novels that rely on plot-driven story mechanics and characters who are tight with their words and seldom make their true intentions known.
