Starktober: The Aftermath

Closing Thoughts
I'm assuming I should thank you for your indulgence during Starktober, but the great thing about a blog is that I have no idea who any of you are or if any of you actually read all (or any!) of the Starktober posts. And, if you're coming here from some random link, on November 1, 2013 or sometime later, the place to begin with Starktober is my introduction; that links to all of the other posts.

Reading all twenty-eight novels by Richard Stark over the course of thirty-five days was an exciting and occasionally tiring thing. Interestingly, I sometimes was concerned about making it through when I was between books, but never while actually reading: every single one of the novels, from The Hunter on, is a dark gem, compellingly plotted and compulsively readable. It's always easier just to finish reading a Stark novel than to put one down, which is a rare accomplishment.

I don't have any larger argument here; I wrote a lot of things about Parker and his world -- and the ways that Stark defined that world, which is not quite the same thing -- over the course of those twenty-eight posts, and I think I'll leave them stand, like chapters in a particularly violent story.

The Rest of Stark
"Richard Stark" also wrote four short stories, all published before The Hunter, mostly using a pseudonym because of the speed Westlake was turning out stories. None of them feature Parker -- but they are earlier work by the same writer who wrote the Parker novels, so one could think of them as part of that oevure.

Stark novels have been turned into eight movies at varying levels of budget and faithfulness. I've seen exactly none of them, so I'll direct any interested parties to the movie page on The Violent World of Parker. One interesting tidbit: the most recent movie, starring the suitably Parkerianly violent Jason Statham, is the first and only one to date to actually use the Parker name.

There have been three graphic novels to date based on Stark novels, all adapted by Darywn Cooke, with a fourth, Slayground, coming this month. (And I believe one more is now planned.) I reviewed The Hunter, The Outfit, and The Score previously.

In what is not a startling coincidence, there will also be a new reprint series of Parker novels, illustrated and designed by Cooke, which will start sometime in early 2014 with The Hunter, and continue at some not-yet-specified pace from that point on. If you want hardcovers of your Stark books, this is your first chance in a long time.

(But the first twenty Parker novels are still available in their matching University of Chicago Press editions, though the last four are now mostly out of print. And it looks like Chicago won't reprint those last four, foiling those of us who just want a uniform set.)

The final semi-official Parker appearance, which I didn't and won't review, is in a scene shared between Stark's 1972 novel Plunder Squad and Joe Gores's first DKA Associates novel, Dead Skip, from the same year. (The DKA novels are smart crime fiction, though not nearly as hardboiled as Parker; they're novels about an essentially realistic private-detective agency, which means they spend their time running skip traces and repossessing cars rather than solving murders.) It's written by Gores in Dead Skip, and tells the same events that we saw from Parker's point of view in Plunder Squad.

Acknowledgements
Finally, I have to thank and acknowledge two resources without which I couldn't have done Starktober: first, Donald Westlake's official site, now maintained by his son Paul, has a detailed bibliography and lots of tidbits about Westlake's work as Richard Stark, under his own name, and in other guises. And The Violent World of Parker is utterly indispensable to anyone interested in the Parker books; it's the one internet home for all things Richard Stark. I've referred to Violent World nearly daily while writing these posts, and much of this particular afterword comes directly from there.

And post-finally, if this post series has been amusing or appealing to you, please use this link the next time you want to buy something from that famous hegemonic American mail-order emporium. Antick Musings has no advertising and never will; the only revenue comes when I connect a reader with something that reader finds exciting and worth spending money on. If you find that valuable, I hope you'll kick back a penny or two to me on your next Internet purchase.

Starktober Lagniappe: Jimmy the Kid

Starktober has been dark and serious all month, but Halloween is a day for mischief and hijinks and things that aren't real -- and so we turn today to the Parker novel Child Heist, which is only slightly handicapped by not existing.

Donald Westlake was Richard Stark some of the time, but, as the 1960s turned into the '70s, he was Stark less and less each year as his funny caper novels under his own name -- particularly the new series featuring hapless robber Dortmunder, a sad-sack Bizarro-world version of Parker -- gained Westlake greater fame and money and attention as himself. In 1974, the last Parker novel for nearly a quart-century would be published. And so would Jimmy the Kid, the novel in which Dortmunder and his gang try to use the not-otherwise-existing Stark novel Child Heist as a blueprint for their own job.

Jimmy the Kid includes samples of Child Heist -- entire chapters, in some places -- but Child Heist is not quite pure Parker. The laconic tone is there, but the descriptions are slightly more florid and detailed than a real Stark novel would have allowed, and the style is subtly off, twisted just a bit to function closer to a parody of Stark than a true representation. The crime itself also is unbelievable as a Parker job: sure, he was always good at people, but who would think that he'd pull a kidnapping, especially of as unpredictable a thing as a child? Add the fact that apparently the target was chosen from surveillance rather than a finger, and you have a job that's utterly unlike Parker: sure, all of his jobs have problems, but this job has all of the wrong problems.

But that's just fine, because Jimmy the Kid has all of the right Dortmunder problems. Dortmunder is also a guy who organizes robberies, though he operates on a smaller scale than Parker: a cheap walkup in New York rather than resort hotels, a girlfriend who works in a grocery store rather than a succession of brittle disposable dames, burglaries rather than heists. He's also vastly less likely than Parker to carry a gun, let alone use it -- and that's good, because if Dortmunder did try to fire a gun, he'd probably shoot himself in the foot. Dortmunder keeps trying to tackle big jobs -- before this novel, he made an attempt on a fabulously valuable gem and hijacked an entire bank -- but they never quite work out. If Parker always gets out on the other side of a crime, and usually manages to get at least some money out of the deal, Dortmunder always gets left behind, safe from the cops but with the money traveling at high speed in some other direction.

Dortmunder, also very unlike Parker, works with the same group of people on his big jobs -- though he spends the first quarter of this book blaming Andy Kelp, the most animated and optimistic of the bunch, for his bad luck. (Which is understandable, but untrue: Dortmunder is and must be the source of all of his own luck; he's one of nature's own magnets for misfortune.) Jimmy the Kid is early enough in the series that they haven't all appeared yet, but there's still Kelp, the phlegmatic driver (and unstoppable describer of his driving routes) Murch, and the even grumpier Murch's Mom.

So Kelp, the sunny Grofield to Dortmunder's saturnine Parker, read Child Heist while briefly in jail upstate -- another way the Dortmunder books are unlike the Parker books is the treatment of prison and police as an inconvenience and a bother rather than as a danger and a threat -- and immediately decided that Stark's stripped-down, factual, no-nonsense style made that book the perfect blueprint for a real heist. Eventually, he convinced the others, and they started to follow the plot of Child Heist to identify, snatch, and ransom their own rich New Jersey kid.

Of course it doesn't work out the way they expected, or the way it is in the book. (Though Child Heist must be a snoozer of a Parker novel, since it seems to focus on a hugely atypical job for Parker, in which everything went right.) The boy they pick to kidnap, just for one, is entirely unlike what the book prepared them for.

Jimmy the Kid is one of the earlier, shorter Dortmunder books, when Westlake was just beginning to stretch out and see how funny he could be. Jimmy is plenty funny, certainly, but Westlake could do even better than this, in books like the sublime Drowned Hopes, a masterpiece of frustration and failure. But Jimmy is the best example of how Dortmunder differs from Parker, an object lesson in how a great writer can take the same material and turn it into either drama or farce. And so it's the most interesting Dortmunder book for Stark fans, the one that can lead from the darkness of Parker to the sunniness of Brothers Keepers and Help I Am Being Held Prisoner.

(Of course, even during the great Stark drought, Westlake wrote dark books like Kahawa and the masterpiece The Ax. But that's a different story yet again.)


Starktober Introduction and Index
 

Starktober 28: Dirty Money

This is not the end of Parker's story.

Oh, sure, Dirty Money was the last book Richard Stark published -- it could hardly be otherwise, since his alter ego, Donald Westlake, died suddenly soon after this book came out. But Parker ends this novel the way he ends every one of his books: having just finished dealing with one tough situation, and looking forward to the next one.

There always will be a next one, even if Westlake/Stark isn't able to tell us about them. Somewhere out there, there's an unguarded fur warehouse, or a shipment of worn $20 bills heading to a furnace, or a pile of bearer bonds -- something very valuable, not guarded as well as it should be, and ripe for the picking. And Parker is casing that job, as he will be casing the next one, and the one after that.

There will be problems along the way: unreliable compatriots, and foolhardy guards, and bad luck, and fingers who don't know to leave the details to professionals. There will be shots fired, and sudden silent violence in dark rooms. There will be money lost, money discovered by the police, money left behind. There will be cars stolen, tires shot out, plates swapped. There will be fake IDs, more difficult and complicated each decade. There will be long trips around the country, to meet or hit or relax. There will be men who are worth working with, and men who aren't. There will be men who survive, and men who don't. There will be plans that can't fail, and plans that barely have a chance to succeed. And Parker will be stalking calmly through all of those problems, focused, as he always is, on getting the job done with the minimum of fuss and getting out the other side with his rightful share of the money.

And, of course, both "minimum of fuss" and "his rightful share" are very subject to local variation.

So Dirty Money finished up the trilogy of novels that were the last thing "Richard Stark" wrote: beginning about a day after the end of Ask the Parrot and mostly taking place over the next week. Parker has gotten away from the armored-car heist of Nobody Runs Forever, after the use of Carl-Gustaf anti-tank weapons in that job triggered a massive manhunt and omnipresent police roadblocks in western Massachusetts. He even did a smaller job along the way, during Ask the Parrot, and made it back home to the northwestern corner of New Jersey with a duffel bag full of money and a stolen car. The former gets stashed in bits and pieces around the surrounding houses, in places only Parker knows about. The latter get dropped deep into a lake.

But all of Parker's ID is burned; he can't even drive a car too far from home. And one of his partners from the armored-car job, Dalesia, was captured by the police and then escaped -- leaving Parker unsure whether he'd told the cops where the money was, or about Parker and his other partner, McWhitney. And Parker and McWhitney would sure like to find a way to get that money out -- even though the roadblocks are still up, less than two weeks after the heist. And the surviving bounty hunter from Nobody Runs Forever is still lurking around, causing trouble until her bounty from a dead man comes in. And the FBI make a quick call on Parker's girl Claire's house, following up on a call Dalesia made there before the heist.

So Parker should go somewhere else -- somewhere safe -- and get a new name, and wait for the heat to die down. Instead he goes, with Claire, right into the center of that police search, trusting in the camouflage of a "leaf peeping" couple to let him check on the money. And that was probably a bad idea, but Parker's bad ideas tend to work out for him in the end -- though not before a lot of commotion and tension and violence and danger.

Dirty Money could have led to another era of Parker, if Westlake had survived. He gets his new ID over the course of the book, but works -- deliberately -- with a minor mob operation to get it. Would Parker's next story involve that handle he let the mob get on him? Would Parker agree to some organized-crime job to square that debt? Or would that just lead to more trouble and complications?

We can never know what happens next. But we do have the twenty-four Parker novels that Stark did write. And those still are the strongest sustained accomplishment in American crime fiction of the 20th century: a forty-six year span of excellent novels about a great character. And that is definitely a lot.


(I also read and reviewed Dirty Money here when it was originally published in 2008, just a couple of months before Donald Westlake's untimely death on New Year's Eve.)

Postscript: This is the last Stark novel, but Starktober isn't quite over yet. Come back tomorrow for a bit of lagniappe, and then an afterword/wrap-up on Friday.

Starktober Introduction and Index 

Starktober 27: Ask the Parrot

Ask the Parrot begins only a minute or two after Nobody Runs Forever ends; Parker is climbing a slope behind a diner, having just learned that the name he's using -- that he just used, for that meal -- is being broadcast widely and tied to the robbery he and two compatriots just committed. There's a bad drawing of his face circulating; people might have to look twice at it to tie it to him, but a little attention could easily blow him up. He's stuck in the middle of countryside, a patch of small towns on the Massachusetts-New York border, filled with roadblocks without any ID to get him through. And the money he pocketed for immediate expenses from that robbery is all new bills, with numbers recorded and tracked. A helicopter is methodically searching nearby, and trackers are starting to come up that hill after him.

So what does he do? He runs into a guy who has an idea for a heist.

You have to give it to Parker: he's a magnet for trouble, certainly, but he's also a magnet for potentially lucrative robberies. His first choice would be to get far away from western Massachusetts entirely, and come back later to get the stashed money from the armored-car job in Nobody Runs Forever. Second choice would be to find somewhere comfortable to hunker down until the heat dies down. Actually doing another big robbery in the same area probably wouldn't make tenth place.

But Tom Lindahl is a sour hermit with a beef against the race track where he used to work: he blew the whistle on their scheme to launder money to politicians, but, when it was all over, the only thing that changed was that he lost his job, his wife, and his happiness. Four years later, he still knows all of the operating details of that track -- and sneaks back all of the time to keep his keys up-to-date and keep picking at the one open wound of his life. And he has the heist all planned out in his mind, but he knows he'd never have the courage to do it by himself.

Parker, as always, can be convinced to do a big robbery even when it's objectively a bad idea -- that's an underlying theme of a good third of the books in the series -- and, if nothing else, that track is further west than he already is, over the border in New York and closer to the edge of the police cordon. So Parker takes Lindahl's plan, changes it just a little to make it workable, and pushes to do it immediately.

But even the house of a hermit in a sparsely populated landscape is too busy for the heat on Parker; he and Lindahl get dragged into a search party for those mysterious bank robbers, causing one of Lindahl's neighbors to fall into a nearly suicidal depression and two dumb brothers to decide to shake Parker down. And the more people that get mixed up in a Parker heist, the more trouble there is -- and the more of them end up dead.

Parker does get through another heist here, but this is still the middle book of the final Parker trilogy -- coming up is Dirty Money, which sees him deliberately head back into the middle of that police cordon to get at the stolen money.

(I also covered Ask the Parrot here when it was published in 2006.)

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 26: Nobody Runs Forever

All of the Parker novels are connected, at least slightly, to others in the series, with recurring characters and old problems that turn back up. But until Nobody Runs Forever each novel stood completely alone -- sure, Butcher's Moon was a direct sequel to the events of Slayground, and, to a lesser extent, so was The Outfit to The Hunter, but each of those novels began from a new place.

Nobody Runs Forever, on the other hand, begins a trilogy -- the last three Parker novels run into each other directly, telling three closely connected stories with many of the same characters, situations, and locations. But, like so many Parker novels, it begins somewhere else, during a meet in Cincinnati for another job that doesn't come together. (Given how many jobs don't work out, it's mildly surprising that there can be established heisters that Parker doesn't know -- this particular scene has seven men, and multiply that by a few times a year, and you're left with three possibilities: the heisting world is huge, turnover is massive, or Parker already knows everybody he could possibly work with.)

When a job goes wrong from the start, it's usually someone's fault -- someone tipped off the law, or is wearing a wire, or organized the job so badly that it never could work. In those cases -- like this one -- that guy often needs to be taken care of. But that's not Parker's problem -- he didn't bring the problem in this time, so he can walk away. Of course, since that job fell through, he still needs a new job, to replenish his money. And so, on the way out of that failed job, he talks to another guy, Dalesia, about another thing that might be happening -- it didn't look as solid to begin with, but a man's gotta work, right?

So Parker checks out Dalesia's other thing -- a planned robbery in western Massachusetts, hitting the armored cars finishing up a merger of two small local banks, which has a lot of the usual problems. The finger this time is two amateurs, one of them Elaine Langen, the wife of the current head of the bank being swallowed up -- she's sour at the loss of her Daddy's bank, angry at her husband, and just wants to get out of everything. The other is Jake Beckham, a pro by courtesy; he used to run security at that bank (and screw Langen, which they both thought was secret until it was too late), but he went to prison for re-purposing the bank's money for his own use, or for being too dumb to cover his tracks. The big problem is that neither of them is reliable at all, and both of them are the obvious suspects if a job does happen -- particularly since they re-started their affair when Beckham got out of jail.

But that's not Parker's problem, as long as he and Dalesia (and one more guy they bring in along the way) can do the job and get out of the area. If he leaves behind Langen and Beckham, expecting to go on with their lives and hide their new wealth, and bad things happen to them -- well, Parker's not there to give them a lesson in how to live their lives.

The problems don't end there, though: there's a pair of bounty hunters snooping around, looking for the guy who messed up that first meet in Cincinnati -- who they're never going to find above the ground. And there's a female Detective for the state cops, Gwen Reversa, who is too smart for Parker's comfort and is already poking around the lives of Langen and Beckham (who are too dumb and impetuous for Parker's comfort).

And then the aftermath of the job is worse than anyone expected: this is the first Parker novel set fully post-9/11 (though Stark never specifically says that), with a militarized police response, including massive roadblocks and continuous helicopter sweeps. The whole area is locked down tight, and no one is getting out of it with a million and a half in stolen bank money, no matter what.

Even getting out at all might be too much to ask for -- remember that our title this time is the ominous Nobody Runs Forever. But, unlike this book's first readers in 2004, we now can move right on to Ask the Parrot and Dirty Money, to finish up not just this story, but all of Parker's stories. Tomorrow, we'll look at Ask the Parrot.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 25: Breakout

For all of Richard Stark's laconic style and taut plotting, there's a depth of detail about Parker and his world stated or implied -- usually implied, so Stark can allow his readers to figure it out for themselves. For example: before the great hiatus, Parker and his fellow heisters were finding it harder and harder to find jobs with a large amount of money in one place. And, clearly, the twenty years in between only made that worse -- not only are there no payrolls, but even banks and stores don't have the piles of cash that they used to.

But there are still valuables: paintings, jewels, gold plumbing fittings. And so Parker's later adventures increasingly see him turning to stealing valuable things instead of money. That always adds additional complications, of course -- money you can just spend, but valuables need to have a buyer to launder them back into society, and that's one more way for a job to go wrong or for someone to decide he'd rather not split the take. In the first dozen or so novels, Parker avoided non-cash jobs whenever he could, but, as times change, men must change with them or perish.

And if we know only one thing about Parker, it's that he's not going to simply perish.

But that's all undercurrent; Parker never talks about things like that, and Stark doesn't dwell on the details of his world. So there's a jewel heist in Breakout, but it's almost beside the point: Breakout is a novel about escape. In the twenty prior books in the series, the only time Parker has been in police custody more than momentarily was a California prison farm, as part of the backstory of The Hunter. Perhaps Stark realized that string of good luck was unrealistic, or perhaps he just thought this was one more complication he could throw at Parker. Either way, Breakout begins with a heist going wrong, and Parker is behind bars in a local jail -- in an unnamed city in a flat, square Midwestern state -- within ten pages. (Again, Stark doesn't waste time or space -- every word is precisely chosen, and events move forward at speed.)

Parker then spends the rest of the novel breaking out -- three of the novel's four sections (all but the second, the obligatory part from other points of view) involve Stark trying to get someone out of somewhere. First, he has to get himself out of prison. Later, three men need to get out of another heist gone wrong -- gone wrong in a new and dangerous way Stark hadn't used before. And then, at last, Stark has to get someone else out of police custody, before he can finally get out of that flat, bland state himself and get back to his regular existence.

Stark also nods in the direction of racial tensions, this time out: in prison, the color of your skin is more important than it is outside -- or, perhaps, just more obviously a sorting mechanism. So the fact that one of Parker's string in that jail is black is notable -- to the rest of the prisoners, to the jailers, to the job they immediately dive into on the outside to get some money to get away. But once things start going wrong -- and it wouldn't be a Parker novel if a lot of things didn't go badly wrong very quickly -- how reliable or compromised a man is is much more important than his race. And Parker has made a long career of ignoring human dimensions as long as they don't impinge on the current job -- it's what he does best, even more than violence.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 24: Firebreak

As Terry Treachout notes in his introduction, Firebreak has the best first line of any Parker novel, and one of the very best of all time: "When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man." Stark did many things well, but one of the most important was knowing exactly how to grip the reader from the beginning and not let go.

Some years ago, somewhere else, I noted that the late Parker novels were set in small, forgotten industrial cities, places where it might as well have been still the '60s and where Parker could still operate as if it was. I implied that, though wonderful and gripping, the modern stretch of Parker books was essentially an extended period piece.

I was wrong.

In ways small and large, Firebreak is both entirely of its time -- the tech-bust days of early 2001 -- and clearly and deeply tied to the previous Parker novels. This is the book where Stark squares the circle, stating almost baldly that 1969's The Sour Lemon Score happened about a decade before this novel about the theft of an Internet billionaire's secret stash of stolen Old Masters. (One minor character had three young children in Sour Lemon; the oldest was then ten. They're all in college in Firebreak.)

Firebreak also sees Parker incorporate a computer expert into a string for the first time, and that expert, Larry Lloyd, is almost completely non-embarrassing a decade later, in sharp distinction to most of the hackers and crackers that suddenly infested mystery fiction and movies around the turn of the millennium. And when Lloyd is embarrassing, it's entirely because he's new to the heisting life, alternately overeager and overemotional, and the reader wonders alongside Parker if he's going to make it to the end of the job or not.

As usual with Parker, that job isn't as discrete and contained as he'd like it to be: Lloyd is on parole, for attempted murder on the partner who stole his tech start-up. The other two men in the string are under time pressure; they need to pay off two other former partners to let the latter skip their own parole on an arrest from the prior attempt to rob that Internet billionaire. And Parker still has those killers on his back trail, which lead him through a mob-fronted company in Bayonne, New Jersey before leading back to some thought-dead old enemies from the Sour Lemon days.

But it wouldn't be a Parker job without complications and last-minute changes to the plan. Parker and his string do make it to that billionaire's secret stash of paintings, in a rural hunting lodge near the Canadian border. Then, they just have to evade the best security a billionaire can buy, plus the attention of several kinds of Feds, to get their priceless cargo away safely and turn it into cash.

How do they do it? Brilliantly.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 23: Flashfire

Flashfire has the longest sustained string of larceny and mayhem in any Parker novel, and it's all in the service of doing something else. This is the story of the job Parker didn't do, and all of the jobs he committed on the way to not doing it, after he told his partners to count him out.

It starts, like all of the later run of Parker books, at a moment of violence and tension. This time out, it's during a bank robbery somewhere in the Midwest, with three guys Parker has never worked with before. They had a big job lined up, but did this "little" one to test him out -- and now they like what they saw.

But Parker doesn't like the job they describe: a flashy assault on a well-guarded target, in a place impossible to escape from, to get loot that will be hard to dispose of. He doesn't do jobs for the thrill or the challenge, but for the money, and he has no confidence that this one would work out profitably. (Or, at least, that's what he tells himself: his actions in this book tend to argue otherwise: that he likes the money, but needs the control and the respect and the danger as much or more.)

Those three guys, in their turn, don't like Parker's answer, but they consider themselves professionals: they'll let Parker go, and give him his cut from this heist (which they need to fund the Big One) in six months, when the Big One is over. They'll keep tabs on him, so he can't mess up that job, but they don't want to hurt him. They're real gentlemen, they think.

Parker disagrees, and sets off on that cold-blooded rampage across the South, stealing guns and money and cars and more money, all to build up an identity just so he can be in place to catch them after that Big Job, kill them, and take all their money. (And, once again, we see that Parker has an idiosyncratic sense of what needs to be done: he burns through as much money as this Big Job -- which he has already turned down because it's too risky -- could possibly make him, particularly since he doesn't have the fence lined up the way his new enemies do.)

It's worse than that, actually: Parker's bad luck puts a new enemy on his back trail, one who sends killers against him in this book and afterward. He needed a new identity for his plan, and bought one -- but went to pick up that identity on the day some other, even more security-conscious man did as well, and came upon the attempted murder of the creator of that identity. (And, yes that is an echo of The Man With the Getaway Face -- one skilled man, providing a service for men outside the law, is killed and that murder puts killers on Parker's trail. It seems to be an occupational hazard.)

Still, it all seems to work: Parker ends up in Miami Beach as Daniel Parmitt, an idle, amiable man from Texas oil money, looking for a place to live. And the identity is strong enough to sustain a bit of attention -- though not too much, if the cops ever get involved. He even meets a local real estate agent, Leslie Mackenzie, who might be able to help him. And he gimmicks up the other heisters' safehouse to be ready for his play to take the loot -- jewels from a charity auction, appraised at twelve million -- once they've done the difficult part.

That's before the killers behind Parker catch up, and only luck -- good, this time, for once -- puts him the hospital instead of the morgue. And he's left with the tatters of a plan and only a few days left, with only that civilian real estate agent and his own weakened body to count on.

Does Parker make it out of Palm Beach with the jewels? And what will he do about those killers who keep coming up behind him? For the first answer, you'll have to read Flashfire. For the second, come back tomorrow for Firebreak.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 22: Backflash

Comeback proved that Parker was back, after his long hiatus. And then, a year later, Backflash showed that he wasn't alone: many of his former associates and fellow heisters were still on the job, not a step slower or a bit less ruthless than they were the last time we saw them. So the grumpy Sternberg, who lives in London between jobs in the US, returns here to impersonate an even grumpier state assemblyman. And the wrestler Wycza is back to provide muscle, though he seems to have swapped some DNA with Dortmunder's friend Tiny Bulcher over the past two decades. Also back are Carlow, part of the gang in Butcher's Moon, and Noelle Braselle, who was a distraction in Plunder Squad but has quietly gotten a feminist upgrade since then, and is now an equal member of the crew.

The job this time is one of Parker's least favorite places: a boat. It's another casino -- like The Handle -- but this one is completely aboveboard, run by the state of New York for an easy revenue increase and plying its slow way up and down the Hudson every evening from Albany to Poughkeepsie and back. Because of political infighting, all of the gambling activities have to be paid for by cash, which means a rich money room by the end of each trip. As usual, Parker doesn't like it up until he figures out a way to do the job, and then he stops complaining.

The finger is another amateur with obscure motives, named Cathman, a former mid-level Albany government functionary who hated and fought against legalizing gambling, and whose post-retirement consulting business seems to be dying on the vine. Parker believes Cathman wants to see the robbery happen to give bad press to the casino boat, and to save his own financial hide -- but unreliable fingers are never that simple in a Parker novel.

And, like Comeback before it, this is a job that should be secret but isn't -- word gets out two separate ways to the kind of men who think a big robbery is a fine excuse for killing a few people and taking their hard-stolen money. So the job itself goes well -- a rarity, in a Parker novel -- but the novel begins in the aftermath of one bad job, and the aftermath of this one is messy for Parker, as well, with that finger showing exactly how unreliable he is and those two outsiders each making their separate play for the money. 

It's all in a day's work for Parker, though -- this is what he does. He thinks through all of the things that can go wrong on a job, and works out ways to avoid or minimize or control them, and then rolls out his plan. The true test of a consummate professional is how he deals with stress, after all.

Oh, and Backflash is the novel where Parker's little hidey-hole in the northwest corner of New Jersey -- where he lives between jobs, and his woman Claire lives all the time -- gets a name: Colliver Pond. I'm half-surprised Stark didn't decide to call that "Monequois," as well -- he hasn't used that name for a while, and I'm beginning to miss it.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 21: Comeback

...and then twenty-three years passed, in the wink of an eye.

Parker skipped Carter and Reagan and the first Bush to land deep in Clinton's second term, as hard and tough and professional as ever, in a world where even payrolls by check were quaint and antique, and the biggest, headline-grabbing thefts would be done by the click of a mouse. But, even in a world of credit cards and Pets.com, there are still operations that have a lot of cash on hand, and Parker and his fellow heisters specialize in finding those operations and relieving them of that cash.

The first sixteen Parker novels form an unbroken sequence, from The Hunter to Butcher's Moon, telling the story of one man and around sixteen heists (depending on how you count things like The Outfit and the aborted heists in books like Plunder Squad). The Hunter gave Parker a history that was never mentioned again -- that he was just shy of forty in 1962, eighteen years into that career after leaving the Army under bad circumstances (for theft, naturally) in 1944. In those books, Parker aged in real time -- or, rather, those books happened in real time, and Parker was basically the same man all through his early middle age. By Butcher's Moon he was about fifty, and still good at his work and fine for another decade on the job. Over the course of the first sequence we saw plenty of older heisters -- usually safe men or "utility infielders" rather than muscle. And we know that it's more shakiness and mental slowness that trip up an old heister, not age itself -- Joe Sheer got old, got retired, got weak, and got dead in The Jugger, but Handy McCay came back from retirement just fine in Butcher's Moon.

Comeback begins the second sequence of Parker novels, which are linked much like the first set -- they do refer back to the older novels, but without any specific time put to them, as if two years or so passed between Butcher's Moon and Comeback. And Parker is still the same tough character from The Seventh or Slayground, even if Stark doesn't set those past stories into any sequence any more. Parker goes to the heist in Comeback from the New Jersey house where Claire lives -- the one she bought in Deadly Edge -- but she and he are clearly not twenty-plus years older. Parker is still about fifty, let's say, and he'll stay about fifty for the remainder of the series. And he may still have killed a mob boss a decade before, or knocked over an offshore casino, or robbed an entire mining town in North Dakota, even if we suspect the exact details of those heists would have had to be different in the '80s and '90s. It doesn't matter: Parker is the epitome of the big-robbery man, and since there's never a perfect security system, Parker will always be able to find the weakness and get in.

This time around, Parker and his temporary associates are hitting a stadium show: one night of a popular evangelist's traveling revivial, where all of the gate receipts and "love offerings" are in cash. As happens so often with Parker's jobs, the inside man is shaky, a close associate of the Reverend who recently has started feeling guilty about all of that accumulating money, and wants to get it away so it can "do good." Parker wants to be sure he won't fall completely apart after the heist, since he could lead the police to at least one of the gang, but he figures that will be his worst problem.

But, of course, it isn't.

The inside man told his girlfriend about the plan, and she told her brother, who told a couple of friends. And those friends are just a bit too violent, and a bit too dumb, to do anything good with the knowledge.

And one of the heisters, as so often happens, decides that he'd really rather not split the take three ways; it would be so much nicer to walk off with all of it himself.

And the Reverend's own head of security is pretty smart and savvy himself, while the cop in charge of the investigation is nearly as violent, if slightly less dumb, than those outside friends lurking around.

It all adds up to complications, and confusions, with Parker separated from his remaining partners -- and, much more importantly, the money -- one the run at night in a strange city, with several known and unknown groups chasing each other and that money around until someone comes away with it and heads out of town at high speed.

Comeback has a slightly wider canvas than most of the earlier Parker novels, and doesn't entirely close off all of its side-stories by the end -- as usual, the four-part structure widens out to other viewpoints in the third section, and the Reverend and his entourage don't get a satisfying ending, there or later -- but it's very much the same kind of book as the earlier Parker novels. Parker himself is exactly the same sort of man as he was in the '60s and '70s books -- remembering that in Butcher's Moon one important scene hinged on his associates seriously questioning his motives and actions. Parker isn't a cartoon, which is what makes his novels re-readable and deeply enjoyable: he's a real man, with personality quirks and obsessions only partially masked by his cold professional laconic air. And he's capable of doing things that surprise us, things that seem absolutely right for him after that moment of surprise.

So this is not really a comeback -- for that, you have to go away. Parker never went anywhere; we just stopped hearing stories about him for a while. But he was still out there, running jobs, even when Stark wasn't telling those stories. And the new stories are just as crisp and taut and sudden and sharp as they ever were.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 20: Butcher's Moon

If noir can be epic, Butcher's Moon is its The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The culmination of all of Stark's previous novels -- most obviously a direct sequel to Slayground, but with strong connections to The Hunter, The Score, Plunder Squad, and several more -- Butcher's Moon shows what Parker is capable of when something finally gets him angry, and what Stark can do when he has a canvas twice as long as the average Parker novel and a cast packed full of names from earlier in the series.

Back in The Hunter, that first Parker novel -- published twelve years before Butcher's Moon, and about that long ago in the internal chronology of the series -- Parker demanded "his money" back from the mob, with his usual emphasis on bullheadedness over finesse, after one of their men stole from and nearly killed him. He got the money back and lost it, and two books later, in The Outfit, pulled the trigger on his threat to the mob: that he'd tell all of his fellow heisters about his war, and encourage them to hit any mob operation they wanted to, secure in knowing that it would all be blamed on Parker. He didn't coordinate attacks on the mob: he just told his compatriots to have at it if they wanted to, and they did.

Butcher's Moon has a similar threat but a much more operatic finale; it's another example of Stark re-using similar plots and set-ups, over and over again, as if to work out every possible permutation, to examine how Parker reacts in every situation he could be put into. In Slayground, Parker had to leave behind the take from an armored-car heist in the Fun Island amusement park in a small city Stark didn't bother to name. Parker only just got out of that park alive himself -- he was being hunted by the local mob boss, Adolf Lozini, with dozens of his men -- but he expected to come back for the seventy-three thousand dollars he left behind.

(The Parker novels, by the way, have a very American and very noirish particularity about specific sums of money, as part of Stark's general emphasis on details. Every job brings in a specific sum of money, which has to be divided in a particular way among the men -- some to the finger, so much back to the man financing the job, generally even shares to the heisters after that -- and those precise sums are lingered over and described carefully, down to the heisters' disdain for coins and sometimes for small bills. And, of course, disputes over that split are what often lead to problems before, during, or after a job.)

Parker has been on a streak of bad luck, as he puts it: a number of jobs over the past few years have worked out badly, with no or very little reward. Perhaps that's luck, or perhaps that's changing times -- Stark never says so explicitly, but he's clear that there are fewer opportunities for big heists: all payrolls are by check, so there aren't the large piles of cash sitting around in armored cars and payroll departments and branch offices that there used to be. Another thing Stark doesn't say outright is that the mob still operates entirely in cash, and so they are the only ones left with those large piles of money, sitting provocatively available. None of the heisters have put two and two together by the end of Butcher's Moon, but Stark paints a picture of a world where the uneasy truce between organized and disorganized crime could break down entirely: the only good big jobs left could well be knocking over mob operations.

Alan Grofield, one of the major supporting characters of the series and the star of four of his own books, was part of that Slayground heist -- he ended up in the hospital, from which he was propelled into the events of his own novel The Blackbird -- and he's been having a bad streak of his own. His last novel, Lemons Never Lie, is very parallel to the roughly contemporary Parker novel, Plunder Squad: both men traveling at haste around the country, dealing with a murderous loose end from a prior job and trying to get into a new profitable job, both men making it out at the end with their skin intact but the bad-luck streak equally intact.

So Parker comes to Grofield and proposes that they go and get their seventy-three thousand dollars back. They both travel to the city of Tyler -- newly named in this novel -- somewhere in the Old Northwest (no further east than Ohio, but not far from there), to get back into Fun Land and retrieve the money. They don't find it, of course -- someone else got to it before them, in the two years since the caper.

Most men would shrug and move on, but Parker is not most men. He's incapable of giving up on money he considers his, as seen in The Hunter and The Outfit, even when giving up would be vastly better and easier for him. So he contacts Lozini -- the man in charge of the only other people who knew the money was there -- and demands his money, just as he contacted Bronson with a similar demand back in The Hunter. And Lozini, at first, is just as willing to pay Parker off as Bronson was: not at all.

But Parker can cause all kinds of trouble to Lozini's operations, particularly on the eve of the upcoming mayoral elections, where a well-funded reform candidate just might upset the man who's been in Lozini's pocket for years. And the stress of Parker's arrival brings other things into the light: Lozini's grip on the city of Tyler has gotten loose in the last few years, and at least one of his lieutenants has gotten ambitious and greedy, ready to depose Lozini and take over himself. This might be the last chance Lozini has to fight back and reclaim his position, and he realizes that -- at the same time that he realizes that he doesn't know which of his lieutenants is preparing his back for the knife.

So Lozini may want to work with Parker to smoke out the traitor. And Parker may be willing to do that to get his money. But then, as usual in a Parker novel, everything goes to hell and all plans are smashed. The players and their loyalties are scrambled, Grofield is captured and nearly killed, and Parker seems to have no leverage left. But Parker always has leverage, even if all he has to work with is the power of his own personality and will. And so he calls in some friends to provide leverage, to get a big score for them and then a big hit for Parker:

"Then you come with me," Parker said. "The twelve of us hit Buenadella's house and get Grofield out of there. And if they moved him somewhere, we find out where and go hit that place." He checked off names on his fingers, saying, "And we make them dead. Buenadella. Calesian. Dulare."

His intensity had startled them a little. Nobody said anything until Handy McKay, speaking very quietly, said, "That's not like you."

What kind of shit was this? Parker had expected a back-up from Handy, not questions. He said, "What's not like me?"

"A couple things," Handy said. "For one, to go to all this trouble for someone else. Grofield, me, anybody. We all of us here know we got to take care of ourselves. We're not the Travelers Aid Society. You, too. And the same with Grofield. What happens to him is up to him."

"Not when they send him to me piece by piece," Parker said. "If they kill him, that's one thing. If they turn him over to the law, get him sent up, that's his lookout. But these bastards rang me in on it."

Handy spread his hands, letting that point go. "The other thing," he said, "is revenge. I've never seen you do anything but play the hand you were dealt. Now all of a sudden you want a bunch of people dead."

Parker got to his feet. He'd been patient a long time, he'd explained things over and over, and now he was getting itchy. Enough was enough. "I don't care," he said." "I don't care if it's like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I'm going around in circles, I'm not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? I'd like to burn this city to the ground, I'd like to empty it right out to the basements. And I don't want to talk about it any more, I want to do it. You're in, Handy, or you're out. I told you the setup, I told you what I want, I told you what you'll get for it. Give me a yes or a no."
(p.216)

Butcher's Moon is as big and expansive and all-encompassing as any noir or crime novel could ever be, working a territory defined not just by the prior Parker novels and other heist books, but the crooked-town novel from Red Harvest on and the mob novel in the vein of The Godfather. Stark takes everything he's built and learned and created in the prior fifteen Parker novels and pushes it all into the middle of the table, into one gigantic gamble that pays off, for Stark and the reader, just as well as it pays off for Parker.

Stark ended the Parker series after this book -- for two decades -- and it's clear why: he'd pushed the form as far as it could go, and threw in everything he could think of. Writing another caper novel after Butcher's Moon would have been going backwards, and Stark, like Parker, was a finely-tooled machine that would only go forward. This is easily the best book in a stellar series, though no one should read it first -- if you're strapped for time, read Slayground and Butcher's Moon together, but even the first sixteen Parker novels should take less reading time, and be vastly more entertaining, than some doorstop bestseller.

Starktober Introduction and Index
 

Starktober 19: Plunder Squad

The '70s were a tough time for Parker -- he only had four novels, and all of them were grinding uphill struggles, where he fought to survive rather than for reward. And Plunder Squad, the third of those four novels, may be the most exhausting for Parker.

Like the Grofield novel Lemons Never Lie, published at about the same time, this is the story of a heister who needs to find his next big score but can't find any job worth doing -- and, at the same time, he's dogged by a man from his past. In both cases, that man isn't really someone done wrong -- Grofield just declined to join a string with Meyer, and Parker gave George Uhl the gift of his life when there was no damn reason to do so -- but both of those men are bull-headed and stupid in the worst ways, unable to see the smart way out right in front of their faces.

Yes, that George Uhl: the man who caused Parker so much trouble in The Sour Lemon Score, who ruined a good job and tried to kill Parker and stole his money, the man Parker didn't kill when he had the chance because Uhl was drugged at the time. And he's only one of the complications in Plunder Squad, a novel that feels like Stark's trying to pile every possible complication and problem on Parker's back, just to see if it's possible to grind that hard bastard down.

From the evidence here, it isn't. You can shoot at Parker, steal his money, ruin his jobs, fail him deliberately or through incompetence. But Parker just keeps going, and comes out the end -- with the money if that's possible, just alive and free if that's all he can salvage. By the end of Plunder Squad, the reader is sure that if there's only one heist worth doing in the entire United States, Parker will find that heist and he will pull it off.

There is a heist in the middle of Plunder Squad -- not the one being organized in the first chapter, before Uhl pops up and takes a shot at Parker, but one along similar lines -- but it goes badly in a dozen ways almost immediately. It was too complicated for its own good -- even more complicated that Parker and the other heisters knew -- and soon some of them are assisting the police with their inquiries and the path to selling the very un-fluid assets they've stolen has completely disappeared.

Stark's plotting has always been complicated and recursive, with a four-part structure that returns regularly to Parker but moves both through other points of view and through flashbacks to give more depth to the story, but Plunder Squad gets even knottier and less predictable, with Uhl dealt with by the half-way mark and the final complication coming almost out of nowhere. Stark had clearly run all of the changes on his basic plot, and now was trying trickier moves -- and they all work in Plunder Squad just as Stark intended.

As the Parker books went on, they picked up a theme, and that theme was Parker's bad luck. On every heist, at least one thing goes wrong, and sometimes -- as in Plunder Squad -- every single thing goes wrong, one after the other, before and during and after the job. But Parker, by definition, is the man who comes out at the end of the complications, who fights through the bad luck and survives. We first met him after the betrayal of his wife, his near-murder, and the loss of all his carefully-saved wealth -- and nothing else that's hit him since those first page of The Hunter have managed to get worse than that.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 18: Lemons Never Lie

In his three previous novels, Alan Grofield traveled to exotic locations like Acalpulco, Puerto Rico, and Quebec City, but Lemons Never Lie sees the sometime stage actor, sometime large-robbery man visiting such exciting locations as St. Louis; Mead Grove, Indiana; and Stark's favorite fictional town, Monequois, New York. OK, he does start off in Las Vegas, which is mildly glitzy, but it's got to be a comedown from his previous adventures.

Lemons Never Lie is also a very different kind of book than the previous three, a heist thriller along the lines of the Parker books, just with a different protagonist. Grofield is more personable and quirky than Parker is, but, in the end, he can be just as cold and professional and merciless when he has to be.

The subtext of the early-'70s Stark books is that it's getting tough out there for a heister: payrolls are going to checks, and the large quantities of cash that used to roll around the country are few and far between. Deadly Edge and Slayground had dialogue bemoaning that fact, and the reality is hitting Grofield hard in Lemons: the big heist from The Handle is a long time ago, and his last job (in The Blackbird and Slayground) ended without bringing him a penny. Worse, Grofield's acting day-job not only doesn't bring in any income, it actively eats into his capital: running his small repertory theater every summer for half-full audiences of Indiana farmers costs him ten thousand or so a year, and it's now run him down close to empty.

So Grofield needs a score, and he's hoping this meet in Las Vegas will be the one. Unfortunately, it's a bad scheme -- set up by yet another one of Stark's dangerously deluded amateurs, named Myers, with plenty of things wrong with it, starting with Myers's bad planning (he's already cut the local mob in for ten percent, just to not bother the heisters) and delusions of grandeur. Grofield walks out midway through the meeting with Dan Leach, a man he's worked with before, and watches Leach then win a big bundle at the craps table.

And when the two of them are beaten and robbed later that night, who could be responsible?

Grofield travels across the country, chasing Myers and the next job, in a plot structure Stark would duplicate nearly exactly in the next year's Parker novel Plunder Squad. Along the way, he nearly joins a few heists, and sees the marvelous sights of St. Louis and Monequois. And if he doesn't come out at the end with as much money as he'd hoped, at least he does come out in the end -- plenty of the men he meets along the way don't.

Lemons Never Lie is the oddest Stark novel: a Grofield story unlike the other Grofield stories, with a plot that Stark immediately adapted for his very next book. It's also in part an early '70s revenge thriller, like one of the many bastard sons of Straw Dogs -- though the timing might be too tight for that to be actually true. So it comes out of nowhere and leads to nowhere -- it's yet another failed pilot for Grofield, the actor who would never stoop to movies or TV and whose printed adventures never quite made it to series. From this point on, every book by Stark would be about Parker, and Parker alone.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 17: Slayground

Every good series needs at least one tour de force, to give the creator room to show off. For the Parker novels, that's Slayground: the fourteenth book (and the second one published in 1971, after Deadly Edge), which takes place almost entirely during one twenty-four hour period in one place.

Further underlining Stark's love for formal experimentation, Slayground also shares a first chapter -- the two are nearly identical, except for details of viewpoint -- with the Grofield novel The Blackbird, published two years before. That chapter sets up the armored-car heist that goes wrong when their driver panics, and sets Parker on the run in a deserted section of some unnamed town. (Grofield, by the way, was knocked unconscious, and The Blackbird follows his very different subsequent adventures.)

The only plausible place to go to ground is the Fun Island amusement park, closed up for the winter, around which their escape route looped. And it's just Parker's continued bad luck that he leaps over the fence into Fun Island's entrance plaza just in time to see two hoods giving a payoff to two cops. They learn quickly that Parker's the one who took the loot from the car, just as he quickly learns that there's only one way in or out of Fun Island: past those four men with guns.

So Parker searches, and fortifies, and sets traps, and prepares. He knows they'll come in after him, under cover of dark if not before. There may be more than just the four of them -- mobsters tend to run in packs, even if the crooked cops aren't likely to report him or call in reinforcements -- but he thinks he can be sneakier and smarter and quieter and more vicious than they are, and get away in the end. And he's ready when they do come into the park that evening.

He doesn't count on losing his gun. He doesn't count on getting wet and chilled. He doesn't count on falling asleep, even in a relatively safe, secure place, and waking up to find the local mob boss with overwhelming reinforcements in the middle of the park. But he does count on getting out alive, and never bet against Parker doing what he sets out to do.

Slayground is a great novel to introduce new readers to Parker: it stands alone, as all of his novels do, but it's easier to describe than most of his heists and has a unique cinematic power from its location and condensed time-frame. If you don't want to just hand someone the first book, The Hunter, this would be a great choice.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 16: Deadly Edge

This was one of his specialties, as electricity was one of Keegan's specialties and driving was one of Morris's. Rare is the high-number robbery that isn't cluttered up with people -- bank customers or armored-car guards or store clerks or whatever. One of Parker's specialties was handling the people, which meant keeping them quiet, making sure none of them got killed, making sure none of them loused up the routine. The last was the most important, and the others would be sacrificed to it, if necessary, though a neat job was always better.
(pp.21-22)

The last quartet of Parker novels before the big hiatus are the only novels in the series published in the 1970s -- after a dozen during the '60s and to be followed by eight in the late '90s and aughts -- and Deadly Edge takes its new decade as an excuse or reason to be suddenly topical and timely. This time around, Parker and his string begin the novel stealing the take from a loud rock 'n' roll show -- cutting through the roof and sneaking in during the middle of the last midnight show of a venue somewhere undefined to carry off the all-cash take, in an echo of the heist in The Seventh five years before.

The antagonists in Deadly Edge are very of-their-time as well, a duo of young thrill-seekers, one of them a junkie and the other one an actual psychopath. (Perhaps Stark had already heard some readers and critics characterize Parker that way, and decided to illustrate the difference?)

In a Parker book, there are always two kinds of people: wolves and lambs. But before Deadly Edge, the wolves were all professional criminals, either heisters like Parker or hoods from what Stark has mostly stopped calling the Outfit by this point. Manny and Jessup are the first amateurs in a Parker novel dangerous for the violence they can do rather than for their mistakes.

Violence in the previous Parker novels was always cold and measured, the product of hard men making decisions and fixing problems -- even the mob bosses of the first few books were vastly less hot-headed than the usual media depiction today. In the first dozen Parker novels, murder and mayhem are jobs for professionals, and only professionals could do them right. But Jessup and Manny are of the new breed: '70s-style thrill killers, motivated by a feral hunger as much as a desire to grab cash.

So these two young men learned about this heist almost accidentally, and decide to take the money. Or maybe they decide it's a fun project to find all of the heisters, kill them, and take the money, because they seem even more interested in the killing, and what leads up to the killing, than they are with the money.

Normally, Parker would be hard to track, and there would be nothing on his back trail to draw them in. But Claire, the woman he met in The Green Eagle Score, has been with him for a few years now, and has convinced him to let her buy a secluded house, in the northwest corner of New Jersey, under the name of Willis. And she is as reflexively protective of that new house as Parker is of the sanctity of his heisting deals, so she utterly refuses when Parker, in his usual cold way, tells her to go to New York for her own safety.


Of course Jessup and Manny find their way to that house, and of course Parker is close behind them. What happens after that I'll leave it for you to discover for yourself.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 15: The Blackbird

After pointing out a few days ago that the Parker novel The Black Ice Score was "amazingly non-racist" in its view of African political skulduggery spilling into the streets of New York, I may have to take a more nuanced view of another novel Stark was writing at the same time.

The Blackbird is the third Alan Grofield novel; those three books form a loose trilogy, taking Parker's sometime heisting comrade far afield (Mexico in The Damsel, Puerto Rico in The Dame, and Quebec and points north in The Blackbird) and mixing him up in international intrigue. And the titles of those books each reflect the main female character: The Damsel was Elly Fitzgerald, who crept into Grofield's Mexico City hotel room and set him off on an adventure to save the life of a despicable Central American dictator. The Dame was Belle Danamato, who tried to hire him to protect her during a divorce from her gangster husband. And now The Blackbird is Vivian Kamdela, an African revolutionary he meets in the middle of his newest adventure. Calling her a "blackbird" probably didn't seem particularly racist in 1969 -- and was even clever -- but it has much more power to offend these days.

The book under that title, though, is as clear-sighted about international politics as Black Ice was (and as were the two prior Grofield books). Politics, in the novels of Stark and his true name Donald Westlake, are exercises in power and control, and the jockeying among nations is not that different from the jockeying among individuals for influence and wealth.

Grofield gets dragged into international intrigue in a more direct way this time; the first chapter of Blackbird, like so many other Stark novels, depicts a heist that goes well up to the moment that it goes completely wrong. One of Grofield's compatriots is killed, and another gets away: Parker himself, whose side of that story will be told in Slayground a few years later. Grofield himself is injured but not horribly so, and a couple of men calling themselves Murray and Ken arrive in his hospital room to ask him some questions. As so often happens in '60s paperbacks, they offer him a deal: there's something only he can do, and they'll clear this crime from his record if he goes along. Grofield would rather keep his current double life, and re-establishing himself as an actor under another name would be very difficult, so, after a few attempts to get away, he resigns himself to the job.

At the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, the heads of seven minor nations -- all in the Third World, neither US nor Soviet client states, from across the Americas, Africa, and Asia -- are meeting secretly. The nameless organization for which Murray and Ken work fears that this means some kind of alliance, and it assumes this can only be bad for the US. So Grofield -- who knows both General Pozos, the dictator he saved in The Damsel, and Onum Marba, a dignitary from the African nation of Undurwa whom he met in The Dame -- is to insinuate himself into that meeting, somehow, playing on both men's assumptions that he's an international soldier of fortune looking for an angle.

But Grofield's on-site handler, Henry Carlson, is soon murdered, and Marba isn't ready to believe Grofield's story. (And Marba's aide, the beautiful Miss Kamdela, suspects him much more strongly.) Events quickly escalate, and Grofield first finds himself at a lodge far to the north and then precipitously running through the snows outside that lodge, in danger of his life. And the real reason those nations are meeting turns out to be a much more immediate danger to the US than Murray and Ken could have guessed.

The Blackbird was a '60s paperback, and so Miss Kamdela warms up to Grofield before the end, and they together foil all of the plots and save the world. And this could have led to more novels about Alan Grofield and his international misadventures -- perhaps along the lines of Westlake's friend Lawrence Block's Evan Tanner thrillers -- but it didn't; there would be just more Grofield novel, Lemons Never Lie, in a mode much closer to Parker than to the prior novels. But, then again, the '60s were over by then, and international intrigue was on its way out, to be replaced by the Me Decade and the death of the belief in reflexive American superiority. Grofield just fell into international intrigue too late to make his mark there, so he'd have to go back to his day-jobs: acting and major robberies.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 14: The Sour Lemon Score

It was stupid. There was no sense in it, and things without sense in them irritated him. Uhl was too docile, too easy. Somehow he was too much like a trusting child. Today or tomorrow he would wake up with a blinding headache, and he would be again the guy who had twice tried to kill Parker, who had turned a very sweet job sour, who had killed his partners and stolen money that belonged to Parker, who had caused him trouble and discomfort of all kinds for five days in a row That's who he'd been yesterday and that's who he'd be tomorrow, and Parker wouldn't think twice about exing that George Uhl out of the human race. But that wasn't who George Uhl was today. Today he was a docile child, and with angry irritation Parker realized that today he wasn't going to kill George Uhl.

But neither was he going to leave Uhl capable of getting back into the action. Nothing could make him quite that stupid. He put his pistol away and bent over Uhl and broke three bones, all fairly important. Uhl groaned once and frowned, but that was all.

Parker walked back to the car and set off for Philadelphia.
(p.147)

A lot of commentators call Parker a sociopath, or even a psychopath, assuming that he has no human feelings towards others. That's simply untrue. Parker doesn't like most other people -- and I'm sure I'm not the only person who shares that attitude with Parker -- but he has no problem understanding them, or seeing the world from their point of view. It's that ability that makes him so good during a heist: he plans carefully to control the victims' range of action and fright, to keep them quiet and docile and eliminate the opportunity for stupid heroics. A sociopathic Parker wouldn't be able to do any of that.

Parker, as Stark actually depicts him, is actually quite good at empathy, when it suits him. But he almost never cares what other people think of him, and has very little patience for social niceties. He's a misanthrope, not a sociopath: he lives outside of society and disdains the strictures of that society, but he understands every one of those strictures, and he can work within them when it's worthwhile for him.

Parker has repeatedly said that he doesn't like to kill people because that makes a job messy and complicated -- but he's also said that he doesn't kill people because heisters who kill people get sloppy. The trigger-happy heister finds it easier to keep killing people and goes on to make other mistakes. Parker knows that road; he knows what kind of a person he could turn into, and he doesn't want to become that man. Perhaps he mostly doesn't want to because that man always quickly ends up in jail or dead -- the sloppy heister doesn't stay on the job long -- but it's still a line he doesn't want to cross.

The Sour Lemon Score is the fourth of a cluster of Parker novels, all ending in the word "Score," and all about jobs going horribly wrong. It's also the twelfth Parker novel to be published in seven years; there would be four more books before the big gap, spaced over the next five years, but never again would Parker appear at such a furious pace.

Stark always liked to get right into the action, and Sour Lemon is yet another Parker novel that begins at the moment right before the heist starts. But unlike many of its predecessors, Sour Lemon doesn't spend any sizable time on flashbacks: this is a book all about consequences and aftermath. George Uhl, the driver, tries to double-cross the other three during the split of a bank job, less than twenty pages into the book. But he shoots the wrong guy first, and Parker has a moment to dive out the window and get away.

Uhl kills the other two and gets away with the money, rigging the old farmhouse to blow up right after he leaves. But Parker got away into the woods, and he's soon on Uhl's trail -- hampered slightly by the fact that he's never worked with Uhl before, and the man that vouched for Uhl is one of the two dead back at the farmhouse. Parker follows his leads -- including the name Uhl kept throwing around, Matt Rosenstein -- but Uhl is ahead of him, trying to cover his tracks.

It gets more complicated from there, as Rosenstein learns of the heist from Parker's inquiries and decides to grab the money himself. And so Parker and Uhl and Rosenstein race around the same cities spread out on the eastern seaboard, chasing each other and the money, "talking to" the same few friends and girlfriends and cut-outs of Uhl's, getting closer and closer to each other.

The Parker novels were always dark, but they found ways to get even darker as they went along; most of the early books kept the mayhem purely among the professionals, but by this point civilians were often in the crossfire, and there's some particularly nasty moments, both depicted in this book and implied by it. Stark, as always, doesn't dwell on that, but it's part of the world he's building, and he certainly doesn't flinch, either.

If you're looking for flinching, the Parker books are the wrong place to go.

Starktober Introduction and Index