Pulpster Westlake Cashes In His Chips...

Prolific author Donald Westlake is dead. He took Tucker Coe and Richard Stark with him.
It was a massacre.

From The Huffington Post:

Westlake wrote more than 90 books _ mostly on a typewriter. Aside from his own name, he also used several pseudonyms _ including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West _ in part because people didn't believe he could write so much so quickly.

"In the beginning, people didn't want to publish more than one book a year by the same author," Susan Richman, his publicist at Grand Central Publishing, told the Times.

But one of Westlake's greatest creations, the sociopathic criminal Parker (the inspiration for this character) lives on courtesy of Darwyn Cooke and IDW publishing.