Donald Westlake

Otto Penzler has a great remembrance of Donale E. Westlake in today's weekend section (Leisure & Arts) of the Wall Street Journal. I came to the MWA Edgar Awards too late to see or meet Westlake, but he must have been a delightful raconteur as well as a great mystery writer. I didn't know he had written the screen play for The Grifters, an exellent movie that I may put onto my Netflix queue and view again.

Speaking of Netflix, we saw The Visitor this week, another great movie. I find these small indy films much more entertaining and even gratifying than the big blockbuster films. Give me a cinematic experience with no blood, no explosions and no cars driving through plate glass. Yes!

Except for novels by Joseph Finder, Stephen Frey and Brad Meltzer, so-called business or financial thrillers are a rare breed. This puzzles me, because so many of us work or worked in offices, for businesses, and caught glimpses of the power struggles, the weird corporate cultures, the sleaze, the grasping and greediness, shoot, all the stuff that makes books work. At least television has tuned into this with The Office and 30 Rock.

Maybe these books aren't escapist enough. We want romance and dust blowing across the Khyber Pass. Finances require attention to detail, due diligence, and all those things requiring mental effort. Guess that's why Madoff got away with his schemes for so long. Nobody (well, hardly anyone) bothered with due diligence.

I can't read enough about the Madoff thing, and expect that writers are churning out international and financial intrigue fiction by the ream these days. The Journal today wrote that only BLACK PENS were permitted at Madoff HQ. No blue, no green, and red ink must have really been anathema. All good stuff. The secrecy, the conflicts. Just screams to be written about.

And how about the woman in Vienna who had that bank and had sold Madoff's stuff to the Russian Mafiosi and is now in hiding? There's a plot for you. Yes!

Hie ye to your keyboards and write. Good story lines, great conflict, all on a world stage with the most revolting people and sleaze and Palm Beach and big houses and the Hamptons! Jeeminy Criminy maybe I should write it myself.

Naw. But my drug dealer will have been burned in a similar Ponzi scheme. Hoo boy is he mad. I love Lotto.

Grapeshot, besotted with her own sleazy characters