The Guardian, 26/6/1980

Damon Runyon prose and Swiftian self-disgust [...] informs the author's account of a monstrous world with unspeakable people in it. Images of dereliction and disaster - that's what it's all about.

The Daily Telegraph, 26/6/1980

One Zero, who is a cabman working nights, and shares the narration with Angelica, desk-bound night controller of the fleet and ex-whore, has a revealing third person sentence about himself towards the end: "One Zero's verbiage is his bondage."

[...] One Zero's quest is for a wanton your girl called Kaffee [...] who has deserted her elderly lover. Eventually, zig-zagging through a maze of words and a thousand traffic lights, he tracks her down in surreal and Sade-istic circumstances.

The Literary Review, 17/10/1980

Westlake's flair for felicitous phrases is unquestionable. Which emphasizes the novel's onanistic purposelessness.

P.N.Review Jan/Feb 1986

...Chandleresque plot involving a search for a missing girl which explodes in the end in a most unChandleresque way (Chandler rewritten by Rabelais? by Lautréamont?)

P.N.Review March/April 1991

Routledge and Kegan Paul published One Zero and the Night Controller in 1980, [Westlake's] first novel, wholly remarkable, but now wholly out of print.