Tony’s Reviews > The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany > Status Update

Sex, sports and writing are the three fields where it is considered somehow a fall from grace to accept money for doing what you’re good at.

The Azores are never, ever going to be mistaken for Club Med. The weather, probably the leading edge of my friend the storm, was overcast and clammy. The landscape was vertical and dour, darkly jagged, unfit for human occupancy, rather like a Bronte novel without the characters. If there were a Michelin guide to the place, it would consist of one word: Don’t.

The courage and daring, the ingenuity and imagination, the skill and talent demonstrated in these escapes, if used in the interests of society rather than directed against society, would undoubtedly make such men as these among society’s most valuable citizens. But the challenge is given these men, and they accept that challenge. They are not challenged to use their talents to benefit society, but to outwit society.

Most escapees seem to use up all their ingenuity in the process of getting out, and none at all in the job of staying out. They have fantastic courage and daring in the planning and execution of one swiftly completed job, be it a murder or a bank robbery or a prison break, but seem totally incapable of giving the same thought and interest to the day-to-day job of living successfully within society.

Screenplays are very confined, limited to the surface of things, limited in a thousand ways. A screenplay is just an outline with dialogue.

Rex Stout has done something very rare in his novels. He has created an ongoing mini-world, a sealed-off chamber as distinct from our world as Middle Earth. When I pick up Ross Macdonald I expect his character in _our_ California, but when I pick up Rex Stout I know I will enter once more into that same alternate universe, in which Archie Goodwin will drive a Heron through the streets of some city called New York.

I’ve managed to avoid all the traps. Since I was never a bestseller, no one’s expectations about my work were very high, but since I was prolific, I could turn out enough wordage to make a living.

When Kahawa was published I got complaining letters and their general tenor was “I’ve always liked your books, and so has my teenage son, but how can I show him this book with all this graphic sex?” 500,000 dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood; and nobody complained about the violence. They complained about the sex. Ah, such wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties

Research is my own personal Sargasso Sea. It’s exactly like entering one of our civilization’s mental attics, a quotation book or thesaurus or large dictionary, looking for just one thing, and being found in there three days later by search parties, seated on the dusty floor, intently reading.

One thing I know about the caper is that it helps if the job is outrageous in one way or another. Once, for instance, before the government started paying by check, Parker stole the entire payroll from a United States Air Force Base. Dortmunder, not to be outdone, has made off with an entire bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home.