Novelist Donald E. Westlake, 75; Wove Farcical Mysteries

The Post's Michael Dirda noted in 1993 that the novelist had also written serious adventure fiction, lean paperback thrillers and scores of mysteries under names including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West.

"Yet whatever his incarnation, Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible," Dirda wrote. "I suspect that most of the man's novels . . . are read in a single sitting. . . . Yet Westlake, it should be remembered, is more than just a funny man: As Richard Stark he produced the leanest, bleakest and fastest-moving crime novels of the 1960s. Stripped of any laughs except for some gallows humor, emptied of all emotional affect, these grim slices from the life of a thief known only as Parker can make even Dashiell Hammett look gushy."

The noms de plume came about, Mr. Westlake once said, because "I loved writing, and I was just pushing out too much stuff for a rational marketplace to contend with. I first started putting pen names on short stories because magazines wouldn't publish the same byline twice in the same magazine."

"I write from 10 at night to 4 in the morning, about 7,000 words at a time. It's like being in the basket of a blimp, working at that hour. It's wonderful. There's just one little room with me in it, and I'm sailing through the night wherever the story will go. Just me, alone." He wrote not on computers but on Smith-Corona Silent-Super manual portable typewriters.

More than 15 of his books became movies, and he wrote a number of screenplays. His latest novel, "Get Real," is to be released in April.

His marriages to Nedra Henderson and Sandra Foley ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife, Abigail Adams of Gallatin, N.Y.; four sons; three stepchildren; and four grandchildren.