Actually, Westlake uses two typewriters. The first, with elite type and narrow margins—"so I don't have to interrupt to change pages too often"—is for banging out first drafts. Westlake makes corrections by hand and then retypes the manuscript in a conventional format. Though he uses a computer for e-mail and electronic submissions of book reviews ("the New York Times won't accept print anymore"), he shudders at the thought of composing his prose on a screen.

Westlake's novels are intricately plotted and often hilarious; Kirkus Reviews called his latest, Watch Your Back!, "a top-flight caper from Westlake, who can out-connive anyone in the writing business." His phrases go straight to the target like darts: a fence's apartment is "wrapped like a dirty scarf around an unpleasant airshaft"; Dean Martin's voice is "morphine-laced molasses." Unlike many mystery writers who favor detectives, Westlake gravitates toward the criminal element. "For me, 'Can you get away with it, and how do you pull it off?' is more interesting than 'Who did it?'"

Though he ranges from heist capers to tough-guy noirs, occasionally dipping into nonmystery genres, Westlake describes his own body of work as "mostly, but not always, comic novels." (When he introduced a colleague at a Writers Guild award ceremony, host Bill Murray dubbed Westlake "the second funniest man in the room.")

Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Westlake grew up in Yonkers and Albany, leaving the latter "as soon as I found the bus depot." Since 1990, he and his third wife, author Abby Adams, have shared a classic white farmhouse in Columbia County, though Westlake takes MetroNorth to New York every Thursday for Writers Guild council meetings and a long-running poker game. Adams's oeuvre includes several gardening books, and even a dusting of snow can't obscure the tidy geometry of her raised beds. On the windswept hillside above, a few dozen stoic beef cattle stand still as gravestones.

Westlake's farmhouse is rambling and warm. The three-time Edgar winner pads through its rooms in a comfortable sweater and house slippers, finally settling onto an overstuffed sofa. His alter ego, the congenitally luckless burglar John Dortmunder, might case the joint for antiques: There are paintings on every wall, a grandfather clock-and-pedestaled globe that would look right at home in the Explorers' Club. Two cats bask on a kilim rug, licking their paws in the sunlight. The bookshelves are neatly alphabetized—Diane Arbus, Ambrose Bierce, Willa Cather, Charles Dickens—and the only mysteries in sight are a couple of Westlake's.

"I've been a slave to story my entire life," he says. "I was driven so mad by the need for story that I taught myself to read at age three."

As Westlake tells it, he crouched on top of a newspaper photo of a bunch of guys in uniform, and stared at the letters underneath, struggling to figure out what they meant. He had alphabet blocks, but t-h-e made no sense. Then he figured out the sound that started the next word, p-o, and the rest of the word came clear: police! The police department!

A linguist might question a three-year-old sounding out an unphonetical word like police, but it makes a great story. An affable man with a dense overgrowth of white eyebrow, Westlake is a natural raconteur. Stories fly to him and stick, like metal filings on a magnet. He spots a neon "DAB Dortmunder" sign in a bar and it conjures a character. "I could see his slumped shoulders, the way he walked. The name just told me the guy."

By age 11, Westlake was impatient with "stories that didn't go in the direction I wanted," and started to write his own. At 14, he started sending them to various magazines—everything from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine to the New Yorker—which invariably sent them back. He sold his first story at 20, to a science fiction magazine called Universe.

"I don't know where fiction went," he ruminates. "There was a time when there was a great appetite for short fiction. There were magazines appealing to women, men, outdoorsmen, mystery fans, science fiction fans; Westerns, true-crime magazines. They're all gone. When I was a kid, the Saturday Evening Post would print seven short stories and three chapters from serials. Where did that hunger go?"

He offers a cautionary tale from Playboy's fiction editor. When the Writers Guild went on a prolonged strike in 1976, Playboy received "hundreds and hundreds" of short stories from out-of-work screenwriters. When the Guild struck again in 1988, there was no such surge. "This is the first generation of TV and screenwriters who don't come from print," Westlake says. "If Sony didn't write it, they haven't read it."

The author's multiple pseudonyms came about because he was "writing too much." He sold one story to a mystery magazine as Donald E. Westlake and a second as Richard Stark. When they bought a third for the same issue, he credited it to "James Blue," his cat. "At first it was just a matter of getting the things off my desk, but after a while they became brand names. Chevrolet and Cadillac are both General Motors, but they're very different brands." When asked to describe a police line-up of his most frequent aliases, Westlake doesn't hesitate. "Tucker Coe is all raw emotions, so raw he could never mention them. Stark is emotion-free and blunt. People who love adverbs will starve to death on these books." And Donald E. Westlake? The author grins. "Westlake is ironic and rococo, even when he's trying not to be."

Westlake is best known for his Dortmunder series. "I had an idea for Parker [the hard-as-nails master thief favored by Richard Stark]: What if he had to steal the same thing more than once? It would really piss him off. I described it to my wife and my agent, and both times I started to laugh. I knew it was dangerous. The worst thing to do to a tough guy is make him inadvertently funny."

But the premise enticed him, so instead of Parker, Westlake rolled out that shlump with the beer-sign name, putting him through three capers in 100 pages before he dead-ended. The manuscript sat in the back of a closet for three years, until Westlake and Adams decided to renovate. As he emptied the doomed closet, Westlake rediscovered the Dortmunder pages. The rest of the story unspooled like a dream, and he finished the book, The Hot Rock, in a matter of weeks.

Westlake still had no inkling he'd launched a new series. Two years later, he spotted a New Jersey bank that had moved operations into a mobile home while the building was under construction. An irresistible caper plot struck: Why not steal the whole bank? "And I knew just the boys to do it," he says.

Dortmunder's trademark is the brilliant scheme that goes haywire. He and his gang have conspired to steal, among other things, a collection of vintage cars (The Road to Ruin), a Native American corpse (Bad News), and the femur of St. Ferghana (Don't Ask). Dortmunder is a consummate New Yorker, reluctant to venture into outer boroughs and appalled by the concept of Florida. But Westlake's research has taken him even farther afield. For his 1981 novel Kahawa, he investigated the unlikely true story of a gang of thieves who stole a trainload of coffee from Idi Amin ("something I wouldn't do"), dumping the offloaded boxcars into the Nile. Along with an eight-day trip to Kenya—"Uganda was eating people at the time, and I became aware that I was protein"—he attended an international coffee conference in London, and read a 1600-page tome about African railroads.

During the '80s, Westlake produced a series of high-powered Mystery Weekends at Mohonk Mountain House. Over 300 guests worked in teams, combing the Victorian hotel and interrogating suspects portrayed by the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Gahan Wilson. (This trio appeared as the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein in Transylvania Station, which Westlake and Adams adapted into a book.)

Many of Westlake's books have been filmed, including his first Parker novel The Hunted, the source for both the Lee Marvin classic Point Blank and the more recent Payback. He adapted his own Cops & Robbers, Why Me, and Hot Stuff, and Jim Thompson's The Grifters, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

Westlake sees a vast gulf between writing novels and screenplays. "When I write a novel, I'm God. When I write a screenplay, I'm a cupbearer to the gods." On a movie set, "No one's in charge. Moment by moment, day by day, it might be an actor, it might be the money, it might be the weather. If it rains in a novel, it's because I want it to."

There are more novels en route. Watch Your Back! comes out in paperback in May; this fall, Westlake will unveil Richard Stark's latest, Ask the Parrot, which uncharacteristically took him "a whole year!" to write (ten eye operations in two months might account for the slowdown). He's also unfurling a new caper.

"Did you hear that?" he asks, cutting himself off in mid-sentence at the sound of a thump in another room. "Birds, flying into the window. It happens whenever it's sunny and bright like this. They fly at their reflection and knock themselves out." He pauses a moment. There might be a story in that.