One of the best crime/mystery writers around just passed away. The work of the prolific Westlake, also wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, was the subject of numerous Hollywood adaptions including the influential Point Blank with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson (the more recent Mel Gibson vehicle Payback was based on the same classic Stark novel), the underrated Robert Redford heist movie The Hot Rock and others. I don’t know if Westlake was a conservative, but he was a favorite author of Bill Kristol and once wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard, FWIW.
UPDATE: Terry Teachout, critic par excellence, was a fan of Westlake and has a nice remembrance here.