#mitch tobin

[engarde-bitch]

In the red room with Mitch Tobin

[ufonaut]

Between 1960 and 1969, Donald Westlake wrote forty-seven novels; sometimes up to eight a year. It was also during this time that his best known alter-egos emerged. Richard Stark wrote cold, blunt, hard-boiled crime fiction; Tucker Coe wrote overtly emotional mystery novels about an open-wound of an ex-cop. At first glance, these two major highlights of Westlake's '60s output couldn't be more different – and yet, in many ways, they are mirror images of each other. Although widely debated in the case of Richard Stark’s infamous cold-blooded protagonist, the stories told by Coe and Stark are still those of men gradually opening up to the world around them, and being transformed through their relationships with other men.

New article comparing The Handle (1966) and Murder Among Children (1967) is now up on my substack and on Tough Business, our Richard Stark's Parker website!

[ufonaut]

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966) // The Sour Lemon Score (1969) // A Jade in Aries (1970)

Descriptions of gay living spaces in Donald Westlake's crime fiction work.

[ufonaut]

small collection of quotes from a jade in aries 1970 that make me feel the most insane feelings on planet earth. it's easily the best gay book i've ever read, and maybe that's a love of crime fiction talking but there's very little art out there in the world treating us with the kind of love, care and sympathy donald westlake had for the gay community. here's a few words from the man himself:

[ufonaut]

do you understand. (the handle 1966/murder among children 1967)

[ufonaut]

Paul Brock had not merely moved into the second-story floor-through apartment in this building, he'd moved an entirely different world into it. || "Ronnie and Jamie kept the top floor just for themselves. [...] They made a whole thing about it, you know? Their private world." "A beautiful world," I said.

The Sour Lemon Score (1969) || A Jade in Aries (1970)

Donald Westlake's two major gay-themed novels certainly have a lot of similarities.

[drone-reference]

Drone footage of Colorado Rockies and Continental Divide in the Rio Grande National Forest.

[theinsectworld]

The waiter for lunch today was a thin fiftyish man with a mournful face and large ears, who reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting. Fat people in Norman Rockwell paintings look as though they’ve always been fat and enjoy it, but thin people have extra rolls of flesh, as though they’ve just recently lost a great deal of weight. They also tend not to look happy about it. This waiter, in a gray business suit and conservative tie under a full-length white apron, with his lined mournful Norman Rockwell face, was a very comical figure until he came close enough to see his eyes. Deep-set and shadowed, they weren’t merely mournful, they were despairing. I met his look, and knew at once that he, like me, was impaled forever on one unchangeable instant in the past. -- Wax Apple (1970), by Donald Westlake