Donald Edwin Westlake (July 12, 1933 – December 31, 2008) was an American writer with more than one hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit.

In 1993, the Mystery Writers of America named Westlake a Grand Master, the highest honor bestowed by the society.

Westlake died of a heart attack on December 31, 2008, while on the way to a New Year's Eve dinner in Mexico, where he and his wife were on vacation.

in 2001 with Martin Lawrence as Dortmunder (changed to Kevin Caffery); Constantin Costa-Gavras adapted The Ax for the European screen in 2005, to great critical and public acclaim – entitled Le Couperet, the film takes place in France and Belgium rather than the novel's setting of New England; Parker in 2013, based on Flashfire, with Jason Statham as Parker.

[citation needed] His novel Memory, published posthumously in 2010, was adapted into the upcoming film The Actor, directed by Duke Johnson and starring André Holland and Gemma Chan.

[citation needed] In 1987 Westlake wrote the teleplay Fatal Confession, a pilot for the TV series Father Dowling Mysteries based on the novels by Ralph McInerny.

Westlake adapted the script into the novel Forever and a Death, which was published posthumously in 2017 by Hard Case Crime.

[18] Westlake wrote an unproduced screenplay adapting the Dashiell Hammett crime novel Red Harvest, which changed the story considerably to refocus the ending on solving the original murder for which the detective had been hired, which is solved relatively early in the original book and which Westlake felt made the detective's continuing involvement in the story hard to justify.

[citation needed] In 2022, Variety (magazine) reported that Robert Downey, Jr. and Shane Black were working together on multiple movie and television projects for Amazon Studios based on the Parker series.

[19] An adaptation of Westlake's novel The Ax is currently in production by the South Korean director Park Chan-Wook under the title No Other Choice.

[27][28] In addition to Darwyn Cooke's graphic-novel adaptations of Parker, Cooke also homaged Westlake in his earlier work Catwoman: Selena's Big Score by giving one of the characters, an old flame and mentor of Selina Kyle, the name "Stark" as well as the face of Lee Marvin, who played the Parker character in Point Blank.