Prolific writers, people who thumped out the words, churned out the books . . . and short stories, and poems, essays, reviews and commentaries, here’s a short list: John Updike, James Patterson, Robert B. Parker, Joyce Carol Oates.

Donald Westlake is there, too.

He wore out two manual typewriters in his lifetime, and it isn’t any wonder because he wrote more than 100 novels, and most of them were mysteries.

Westlake was a fast writer.

Today, we have a couple mystery/thriller writers who publish four books a year under their own name, but back in the 1960’s – the decade in which Westlake wrote 35 of his 100 novels – readers didn’t think writers could crank ’em out that fast. So to get his books out there, Westlake published under his name and a double handful of pen names, the best known of which are Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and Edwin West.

Westlake loved a good laugh, so he wove fun and even farce into his crime novels. Editor/publisher Otto Penzler said Westlake was “the most consistently humorous writer of mystery and crime fiction the world has ever seen.”

A New York Times book critic was more direct. He declared Westlake to be the king of comic capers.

High praise, both of those statements.

Westlake raked in his share of honors for his writing – three Edgar Awards (1968, Best Novel, God Save the Mark; 1990, Best Short Story, “Too Many Crooks”; 1991, Best Motion Picture Screenplay, The Grifters), an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay adaptation of The Grifters, and in 1993 the Mystery Writers of America awarded Westlake the title of Grand Master for his body of work.

Crime novelist and critic H.R.F. Keating ranked Nobody’s Perfect, Westlake’s 1977 novel, as one of the world’s top 100 crime and mystery books.

Westlake started out writing mystery short stories that he sold to the pulp magazines. But in 1960, he broke into the book world with The Mercenaries.

He wrote that book and his other early novels in the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler.

Westlake found his own voice with his 1965 novel, The Fugitive Pigeon, the first of his crime novels in which he laced the story with jokes and humor.

He was a master of language and image. For most writers, an empty bourbon glass is just that – empty. But for Westlake, the glass has “nothing but an amber echo round the bottom.”

Westlake also had a gift for giving his villains the best lines. One complains about his inept getaway driver: “Before we got outa the car, when the cops surrounded us, I broke his neck. We all said it was whiplash from the sudden stop.”

Hollywood producers loved Westlake’s books. They turned 15 into movies

Westlake departed this world on New Year’s Eve 2008 at the age of 75.

Tomorrow: The Hot Rock

A movie about a writer?

Been done. “Capote” is one of the more recent.

But a movie about an unknown writer – a ghost writer – now there’s an interesting concept, particularly if we can trap that writer in some kind of disaster about to befall the person whose book he’s ghostwriting.

Director Roman Polanski does that in his new film, “The Ghost Writer”.

Says Los Angeles Times and NPR reviewer Kenneth Turan, “This film is a thriller, wrapped around a roman a clef about contemporary politics, wrapped around Polanksi’s eternal cynicism about the fate of individuals faced with the entrenched strength of the powerful. The director blends personal preoccupations with audience preferences as effortlessly as Alfred Hitchcock did.” [Here’s the link to the full review. ]

Did Turan like the film?

Oh yes.

Will you?

If you like a good story well told, yes.

And if you, too, are a writer?

Absolutely.

Two side notes:

– Robert Harris, the screenwriter for this film, first made his mark as a television news reporter, journalist, and columnist. He wrote Fatherland, his first suspense novel, in 1992, then followed it with Enigma (1995), Archangel (1998), and The Ghost (2006). This last is the basis for  “The Ghost Writer”.

– Roman Polanski edited the film while he sat in jail in Switzerland. He had been arrested on a  32-year-old warrant from the U.S. for having had sex with a minor. Said Pierce Brosnan, one of the stars in this movie, Polanski “would be in his nine-foot by four-foot cell, edit the movie and give it to the warden. The warden would give it to Polanski’s lawyer (who would) then give it to the editor.”

That’s a gem of a story in itself.

Tomorrow: The prolific Donald Westlake

It shouldn’t be a surprise that most writers discovered the wealth that is contained in books at their local library . . . when they were kids.

Yet I am always surprised when someone like Frank McCourt writers with such deep emotion about his first acquaintance with these public places where information, knowledge, and stories are valued, stored, and shared . . . freely and free.

Joyce Carol Oates is the latest to talk about libraries. Over the decades, she’s written a continuous stream of short stories and novels, three of her novels receiving the prestigious National Book Award.

In the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Oates writes about home. And home for her, as she defines it, is Lockport and the area around it in upper New York state . . . where Oates was born 71 years ago and where she grew up . . . and where she discovered books and libraries. Here’s that section of the Smithsonian story:

As in a vivid and hallucinatory dream, I am being taken by my grandmother Blanche Woodside – my hand in hers – to the Lockport Public Library on East Avenue, Lockport. I am an eager child of 7 or 8 and this is in the mid-1940s. The library is a beautiful building like no other I’ve seen close up, an anomaly in this city block beside the dull red brick of the YMCA to one side and a dentist’s office to the other; across the street is Lockport High School, another older, dull-brick building. The library – which, at my young age, I could not have known was a WPA-sponsored project that transformed the city of Lockport – has something of the look of a Greek temple; not only is its architecture distinctive, with elegantly ascending steps, a portico and four columns, a facade with six large, rounded, latticed windows and, on top, a kind of spire, but the building is set back from the street behind a wrought-iron fence with a gate, amid a very green jewel-like lawn.

The library for grown-ups is upstairs, beyond a dauntingly wide and high-ceilinged doorway; the library for children is more accessible, downstairs and to the right. Inside this cheery, brightly lit space there is an inexpressible smell of floor polish, library paste, books – that particular library smell that conflates, in my memory, with the classroom smell of floor polish, chalk dust, books so deeply imprinted in my memory. For even as a young child I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

What is most striking in the children’s library are the shelves and shelves of books – bookcases lining the walls – books with brightly colored spines – astonishing to a little girl whose family lives in a farmhouse in the country where books are almost wholly unknown. That these books are available for children – for a child like me – all these books! – leaves me dazed, dazzled.

The special surprise of this memorable day is that my grandmother has arranged for me to be given a library card, so that I can “withdraw” books from this library – though I’m not a resident of Lockport, nor even of Niagara County. Since my grandmother is a resident, some magical provision has been made to include me.

The Lockport Public Library has been an illumination in my life. In that dimension of the soul in which time is collapsed and the past is contemporaneous with the present, it still is. Growing up in a not-very-prosperous rural community lacking a common cultural or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked, worked and worked – and had little time for reading more than newspapers—I was mesmerized by books and by what might be called “the life of the mind”: the life that was not manual labor, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young I had my “farm chores” – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

There was no greater happiness for me than to read – children’s books at first, then “young adult” – and beyond. No greater happiness than to make my way along the seemingly infinite shelves of books in the Lockport Public Library, drawing my forefinger across the spines.

Thank you, Joyce Carol Oates, for this reminder of the wonder and joy that is to be had at the library.

You can read the rest of her “Going Home Again” story in the March issue of Smithsonian. Here’s the link to the online edition.

Tomorrow: The Ghost With No Name

It seems every writer has to write a Christmas novella, a short book that’s hot for the season and on the remaindered table by January 2.

Some of them actually are good. You have your favorites.

One of mine is thriller writer David Morrell’s The Spy Who Came for Christmas.

I didn’t know it until I found it at the AAUW’s book sale, but thriller writer David Baldacci also has written a Christmas novella, his The Christmas Train.

One buck and into my bag it went.

I’m going to wait until we get a good snowstorm in December, then, with a cup of hot chocolate in hand, I’ll clamber aboard Baldacci’s Christmas Train for my holiday read.

Joe Owens was there, in Korea, a Marine lieutenant leading Baker-One-Seven, a mortar and rifle platoon at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, a horrible fight in the deep freeze of a Korean winter.

He wrote a book about it, Colder than Hell.

And I found the book at the AAUW book sale.

I’ve read James Brady’s Korean war novel, The Marines of Autumn. It, too, dealt with the Battle of Chosin Reservoir and the retreat that followed, across the Korean mountains to Hungnam. If you like war novels, this one is a gem. So much of it rings true and for good reason – Brady was a Marine lieutenant in Korea, though his time there came after the Chosin battle and retreat.

Now’s my opportunity, with Colder than Hell, to read about the battle from someone who was there, in the thick of the blood and killing.

Real life, not fictional life.

Tomorrow: The fourth book in my bargain bag

I like oral histories, such as Studs Terkel’s Working and The Good War.

So when I picked up Rudy Tomedi’s No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War at the AAUW’s used book sale, well, I was hooked.

Tomedi, a journalist and Vietnam war vet, came along too late to know the Korean war first hand. But by good fortune, he met three vets of that war – aging men, Tomedi calls them in his notes – who told him of their experiences in Korea, in our country’s forgotten war, in a war they went to nonetheless because their believed it was their duty to do so.

Said Tomedi, that wasn’t his experience in Vietnam. No one in his unit wanted to be there. So he tracked down other Korean war vets, more than a hundred of them, and their stories became this book.

I have an idea for a James Early book. Early, a World War II vet and a Kansas sheriff, goes to Korea to rescue a friend and one-time deputy who was ordered to war and turns up MIA – missing in action.

Something in Tomedi’s book may be helpful.

Tomorrow: The third book in my bargain bag

I like those books that tell us about the prominent and perhaps little known writers in our state. Or county courthouses. Or taverns. Or former governors. Or . . . you name any kind of aggregation and some enterprising soul has probably written a book about it.

Pictures and paragraphs.

Short reads.

But hugely interesting if you care at least two sticks for the subject.

I found a book about Wisconsin women at our local AAUW used book sale. Wisconsin Women: A Gifted Heritage, published in 1982 by the Wisconsin Division of, yes, the American Association of University Women.

I paged into the coffee-table book. Women’s rights advocate Frances Willard, political mover and shaker Belle Case LaFollette, novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, and painter Georgia O’Keefe are here. Even the entertainer Hildegarde and one-time Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

That last one surprised my wife Marge as it may surprise you.

Golda grew up in Milwaukee, was a librarian there and taught in a neighborhood Yiddish school for a while. As a condition for marrying Morris Meyerson, she insisted he move with her to Palestine when the time was right. It was right in 1921. Golda rose in the political movement that established present-day Israel, served in a number of cabinet positions and, in 1969, was elected the fourth prime minister of Israel – the first woman to hold that office.

You guessed right. I bought the book.

Tomorrow: The second book in my bargain bag

Those of us who look for book bargains celebrate the opening day of the used book sales season. For those of us in Wisconsin – or at least here in Janesville – that was last Thursday.

Spring here came a couple days before. The truck sank that the Golden K Club had parked on the ice on the Traxler Park lagoon. It’s the K Club’s annual fundraiser – the K Club, the high school version of Kiwanis. Guess the date . . . you know how that game of chance goes.

Then Thursday our local chapter of the American Association of University Women opened the doors at the Olde Towne Mall for the AAUW’s annual used book sale. Buy one book or buy ’em by the bag, bargains were there – tables and tables and tables of them.

Next month, the Friends of the Milton Library will have their used book sale. And on and on it will go until the Saturday of the Fourth of July weekend when, for me, the BIG ONE comes – the Friends of Barrett Memorial Library takes over the waterfront park in Williams Bay.

I’ll tell you about that one when we get closer. For now, tell me about your favorite used book sale.

Tomorrow: The first book in my bargain bag

Hard to believe, but that wildly popular series of children’s books – the Little Golden Books – has been around for 67 years.

The aims of Georges Duplaix, head of the Artists and Writers Guild, Dr. Mary Reed of Columbia University’s Teachers College, and the executives at Simon & Schuster way back in 1942 were to create uplifting stories for kids – stories that would teach – and get them into parents’ hands cheap. They also said the covers and pages had better be darn durable because little kids are hard on books.

At the time, you could buy a children’s book for $2 to $3. The minimum wage then was 30 cents an hour, so there went most of a day and a half’s pay for a book for your kids. It isn’t any mystery why most parents didn’t buy books for their children.

The target of the planners was to bring out books that would sell for a quarter – less than an hour’s pay.

And they hit the target. And they used excellent writers and illustrators to make sure those books were the best they could be.

Here are the first 12 Little Golden Books issued, all on October 1 of 1942: Three Little Kittens, Bedtime Stories, Mother Goose, Prayers for Children, The Little Red Hen – I remember that one well – Nursery Songs, The Alphabet from A to Z, The Poky Little Puppy – a favorite that my wife read often to her children – The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, Baby’s Book of Objects, The Animals of Farmer Jones, and This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes.

Sales took off like the proverbial rocket, a million and a half copies out there in five months.

Eleven years into the project, 300 million books sold.

By 1986, a billion books.

By 2002, 2 billion books – enough to reach the moon.

Little Golden Books is now past the 3 billion mark . . . even though the average price of a book is a tad more than $3.

The imprint now has more than 1,200 titles out there. Twelve hundred stories.

And the most popular? The Little Red Hen, followed by Richard Scarry’s Good Night Little Bear, Animal Orchestra, The Lion’s Paw, The Fire Engine Book, and The Good Humor Man.

What’s your favorite?

Sandra Bullock may win an Oscar for her role in the movie “The Blind Side”.

Joel Mathis, a writer for the Philadelphia Weekly, hopes she doesn’t. Said he on his blog last November, “There’s no subtlety here [in the movie]. Just a hammer to the face. Let’s be clear: The Blind Side book [upon which the movie is based] isn’t just about Michael Oher [the young man now playing pro football for the Baltimore Ravens]. It’s also about the Tuohys, the white family that took him in. But it is not about Sandra Bullock. That is, however, what ‘The Blind Side’ movie is apparently about. And I cannot take the idea of this marvelous book being reduced to a Michelle Pfeiffer ‘Dangerous Minds’ white-woman-saves-the-black-kid story, because it’s real life. And the real story is more complicated than that.”

That’s the difficulty with trying to compress a 304-page book into a 2-hour movie, the screenwriter has to simplify the story.

Mathis likes Michael Lewis’ book, considers it one of the better nonfiction books of the last few years.

If you haven’t read The Blind Side, here’s Mathis’ summary: “It tells the story of Michael Oher, an all-but-orphaned young man from the wrong side of the tracks in Memphis who was accepted into a private Christian school, adopted by a wealthy white family and set on the path to success. And oh yeah, his redemption roughly coincided with his emergence as a likely future NFL prospect.

“It’s a fascinating tale that implicitly raises questions about race, class, privilege and whether Oher – barely literate – would’ve been able to graduate from high school, let alone attend college, if he hadn’t had an army of people who became invested (in multiple meanings of that term) in his success. You spend the book rooting for Oher, even as a growing sense of unease sets in that maybe he’s being used, that he’d still be languishing somewhere in West Memphis if not for the accident of his genetic gifts. It’s a complex and sometimes subtle story, inspirational but not cheaply so, thanks to the issues it raises.”

So if you have not yet seen the movie, maybe you should skip it and instead read the book. It came out in September 2006 from W.W. Norton.

A side note. Blind Side author Michael Lewis once worked for Salomon Brothers as a bond salesman. Out of that experience, he wrote the 1989 bestseller Liar’s Poker. Lewis has written six books since, including Moneyball, his investigation into the economics of professional sports.

Tomorrow: Little Golden Books, remember those?