Edgar Award Finalist: A comical crime caper “filled with action and imagination” (The New York Times Book Review).
 John Dortmunder leaves jail with ten dollars, a train ticket, and nothing to make money on but his good name. Thankfully, his reputation goes far. No one plans a caper better than Dortmunder. His friend Kelp picks him up in a stolen Cadillac and drives him away from Sing-Sing, telling a story of a...

A kidnapping plan cribbed from a crime novel goes hilariously wrong for gang boss John Dortmunder—from the Edgar Award–winning author of Bank Shot.
 
When his “friend” Andy Kelp has a plan, career criminal John Dortmunder knows that means trouble. Kelp’s schemes, no matter how well intentioned, tend to spiral quickly out of control. But this one, Kelp swears, is airtight. He read it in a...

This rollicking tale of an aging robber who wants to blow up a reservoir “will keep readers laughing” (Publishers Weekly).
In his day, Tom was a hard man. He came up with Dillinger in the 1930s, and pulled a lot of high-profile jobs before the state put him away. They meant it to be for good, but after twenty-three years the prisons are too crowded for seventy-year-old bank robbers, and so they let the old man go. Finally...

On Long Island, a media tycoon catches a burglar in his house and relieves him of a nice-looking ring. The novel describes the comic adventures as the burglar, John Dortmunder, stalks the tycoon to recuperate his property. By the author of Don't Ask.

Having set up a con on Monroe Hall, a fabulously wealthy and corrupt CEO, John Dortmunder and his hapless gang of crooks suddenly find themselves caught in the deadly crossfire between their would-be mark Hall and his own victims.

Tempted to find a highly valuable, seven-hundred-pound chess set, hapless crook John Dortmunder musters his merry band of fellow ne'er-do-wells on a haphazard treasure hunt that prompts his investigation of Russia's last czar.

Feating Donald E. Westlake's hapless hero, John Dortmunder, this original compilation of short stories ties in to Westlake's latest Dortmunder hardcover, The Road to Ruin.
It's all Dortmunder, all the time, in this long-awaited collection representing one of the finest achievements in crime fiction. Chosen from hundreds of stories and decades of work, this is the first time that Westlake has offered a compilation of his short form...