Bad guys misbehave regularly in crime novels. That's what bad guys do. But for the most part their villainies--tying nice girls to railroad tracks, playing poker with an extra ace--are elaborate setups, abominations staged by the author to make the good guys look good in the last chapter. This, of course, is what good guys do; they look good. And the bad guys go to jail or perdition.
To one energetic writer, however, this has always seemed a woeful waste of criminal talent. For some three decades Donald E. Westlake has operated a kind of literary halfway house for the morally...
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