CASES CLOSED

“When Donald E. Westlake died unexpectedly last New Year’s Eve, thousands of people who’d never met him, myself included, felt as if they’d lost a friend. We knew him only through his novels, of which there are more than a hundred, none of them, so far as I know, obviously autobiographical. He almost always wrote about crime, and more often than not he wrote about it with the express intention of making his readers laugh. Small wonder that we loved him so…”