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

Sad But True

"There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power."
 -- Josh Barro at Business Insider (that noted lefty rag)

And I say this as a guy who is still a registered Republican -- even though I pulled the lever for the Democrat in NJ's special Senate election last night and will probably pull levers for more D's in a couple of weeks. I want to vote for R's, but they need to be non-crazy to make that happen.

The scattered remnants of the Bush-era GOP establishment are discredited and completely unable to run on their appalling records. And the Tea Party is frankly an astrotruf campaign to destroy as much of the federal government as possible in pursuit of a Gilded Age-style laissez-faire hellhole for anyone who isn't a billionaire. And there doesn't seem to be anything else in the GOP than those two horrible poles.

 Some of them are stupid. Some of them are incompetent. (Many are both, particularly when it comes to basic math and science.) A great many of them seem to be either active liars or completely untethered from consensus reality.

It's a sad day when the best centrist Republican in the country is our Democratic president.

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

Starktober 13: The Black Ice Score

Parker does not take well to being told what to do. He always claims to be a cool professional, but, like so many other people, he has a contrary streak, and demanding he abandon a job is the fastest way to make him commit to it.

The Black Ice Score is one of those jobs; the novel opens, as a a couple of previous books have, with someone trying to scare Parker off a job when he doesn't even know what the job is yet. He's in New York, not even expecting a meeting, traveling under his current peace-time alias Matthew Walker and chaperoning his woman Claire while she does some serious shopping. He had no intention of doing any job while in town this time -- until men with guns try to drive him away.

It takes Parker a while to unravel the whole complicated scenario, but this is what it comes down to: one of the many new nations of the previous anti-colonial decade is the small African country Dhaba, which has been ruled in the usual corrupt manner by Colonel Joseph Lubudi. The Colonel's position is very shaky, and everyone knows he will be forced out soon. He has smuggled a quantity of diamonds -- not quite a million dollars worth -- into the US, using his brother-in-law, Patrick Kasempa, to guard it with a few men at the little-used Museum of African Arts and Artifacts, on 38th Street just off Park Avenue. The Colonel is traveling to New York in a few weeks, to make a speech to the UN, during which he will abdicate his position and allow free elections back in Dhaba. His plan is to take his diamonds and live as a rich retired dictator somewhere amenable.

There are other plans, of course.

Major Indindu, who is guaranteed to succeed the Colonel once he falls, controls the UN staff, knows where the diamonds are, and wants to retrieve them for cash-poor Dhaba -- but is willing to cut in a local professional on the take in return for a fool-proof plan. The white men who ran Dhaba before independence have a front candidate, General Goma, and those white men know the diamonds exist but not where they are: so they're nosing around, looking for the money that will fuel their planned insurgency. And the Major's team first sought out a local expert, and found instead Hoskins, who is much more of a con artist than a planner of major robberies -- but now he knows about the diamonds as well, and he won't go away.

Parker agrees to plan the robbery for the Major's team, less because they're the vaguely legitimate owners than because they have the best plan and organization. They want to execute the job themselves, which suits Parker fine. So he examines the location, and works out a plan, and hands it over to the Major's men.

It all goes to hell, of course. Because Parker's everyday identity was mixed in from the beginning, the opposition knows about Claire, and she's placed in danger. The attack on the museum goes reasonably well, but complications multiply from that point, and Parker must personally try to save the job, Claire, and himself. Since there have been thirteen more books in this series since then, I don't think I'm giving anything away to say that he succeeds.


As a side note, for a forty-five-year-old book about African revolutionaries, The Black Ice Score is amazingly non-racist; I didn't even notice a single instance of white teeth gleaming in a dark face, and the white African ex-colonial leaders are the clear villains. (Well, antagonists; it's not fair to talk of heroes and villains when discussing Parker books.) At least half of the cast of this book is black, and they're all individuals -- like every other Stark character -- and do not run to stereotype or raise cringes. They're not necessarily good people -- even the ones working for their country are willing to commit murder and mayhem -- but they're particular people, which is vastly more important for fiction. The Black Ice Score also somewhat prefigures the Donald Westlake book Kahawa, another take on African corruption and bloodshed from nearly twenty years later.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 12: The Dame

Richard Stark's Parker novels are all very much the same thing: taut crime thrillers, propelled forward at speed by a single-minded and almost inhumanly focused protagonist, a man designed to be the perfect executor of large robberies, who forces his way through all of the complications his creator can throw at him. But Stark also wrote four novels about Parker's occasional co-worker, the itinerant actor and occasional heister Alan Grofield, and those novels are very different: still crime thrillers, but more worldly, more likely to wander into international intrigue, with a tone somewhere between the noir seriousness of Parker and the goofball charm of the humorous crime stories that "Stark" was beginning to write under his real name, Donald E. Westlake, around the same time.

The Grofield books aren't really stepping stones from Parker to Dortmunder -- Westlake's other most famous character, a masterful organizer of big robberies like Parker whose bad luck is always funny as Parker's is always gripping -- since they're not heist books in the same way. They're really closer to The Spy in the Ointment or a later book like Brothers Keepers, mixing the mid-'60s mania for "secret agent" stories with the major-robbery world Westlake/Stark had already made his own. By the time the second Grofield novel, The Dame, was published in 1969, Parker had appeared in ten novels over the previous seven years -- Grofield would only get two more of his own, while Parker would get six more through 1974, and then an additional eight starting more than twenty years later. So the Grofield series can be seen in the same light as Westlake's other short series -- the five late-'60s traditional private eye mysteries under the name Tucker Coe or the four cozies as Samuel Holt in the mid-'80s -- as experiments that worked well enough to generate books, but didn't catch on with an audience the way Parker and Dortmunder did.

Still, "not catching on" is not even close to "not done well," and The Dame is another superb entertainment from Westlake/Stark, picking up immediately from the end of The Damsel. As The Dame opens, Grofield has still not made it back to his very understanding wife -- the girl he "rescued" from Copper Canyon back in the Parker novel The Score -- since he was sidetracked by another offer, mysterious but promising profit, that sent him to a specific large house on Puerto Rico.

There, he's rubbed the wrong way by the lady of the house, the haughty and demanding Belle Danamato, and decides to just leave. But it's not that simple, and Grofield finds himself dragged back to that house by the henchmen of the American gangster husband Belle is trying to divorce, and, by the end of that night, there's a murder in that big house, and Grofield is framed as the killer.

The Dame then alternates cozy-mystery elements -- down to a climactic, everyone-gathered-in-one-room Grofield speech and reveal of the real murderer -- with the thriller plotting Grofield's more naturally involved in, including car chases, gunfights, and sneaking escapes out of and intrusions into various locations. It doesn't entirely become one thing, though those elements flow into each other reasonably while reading, and Stark maintains a consistent tone. Grofield could have worked in a series of cozy mysteries, perhaps connected to his other life as an actor, but that's not how Stark/Westlake went with him. And he certainly does work in Parker-esque thrillers, since that's where we met him.

So The Dame is something of a chimera, but a plausible one. It would read much better in a run straight through the Grofield books, or on its own, than it did in the middle of a pack of Parker -- but, even for me this month of Starktober, it was a nice palate cleaner, even if it's not nearly as fun and consistent as The Damsel.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/12

Nearly every week, I get some books in the mail, sent to me by the hard-working publicists of trade book publishing. I will never manage to read and review them all here, and (if I'm honest), I don't really try to review many of them. But, still, I want to at least let people know they exist, because the book I don't quite manage to pick up could be the book you absolutely love and cross the snowy tundra to grab a precious copy.

So these are the books that showed up on my doorstep this past week. I'll do my best to present what's good or special about each of them, though I should note that my default tone is amused disdain, so that may come out unexpectedly. This week, I've organized them in strictly size order, from the smallest to the largest, because that's the easiest way to stack them on my desk.

And so first up is the new paperback edition of Noble Smith's The Wisdom of the Shire, a guide to living a happy life inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. It aspires to be The Tao of Pooh for this generation, and is only slightly handicapped by not having an ancient and respected religion to map its particular cultural artifact to. Instead, Smith excavates his lessons for living directly from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings -- more on the "live quietly and happily" side rather than "stand up to the great evil of your time no matter what the personal costs" side, I gather -- and presents them in the standard self-help book format. This is a small trade paperback from Thomas Dunne Books, available just before Halloween.

Next up is the first book in a secondary-world fantasy series, Masks by E.C. Blake. It's not being published specifically as a "Young Adult" book, but it has many of the marker of the modern type, and is noted as being "young adult friendly." So we have what I'm sure will turn out to be a despotic ruler, the Autarch of Aygrima, and the Very Significant Ceremony of Adulthood, in this case the bestowal of individual magical Masks that both define the bearer's magical Gifts and profession and bind them to that Autarch. Our heroine, Mara, is the daughter of the Master Maskmaker, and of course her Masking leads to a vastly different outcome than she expected, and I would wager a sizable sum of quatloos that she and her eventual allies will topple that Autarch by the end of the trilogy. Masks is a hardcover from DAW books, on sale November 5th.

Another is a big fat manga volume -- apparently complete in one book, which is rare and notable for manga -- adapted and drawn by Hiro Kiyohara from the original novel of the same name by Yukito Ayatsuji. It's a mystery/horror story set in a Japanese middle school: a boy joins a class, and discovers that a student of the same age died twenty-five years before, and is still haunting the class (or something like that). With a girl who may be related to the dead boy, he has to unravel the mystery before the escalating deaths among his classmates and their families reach him. It's from Yen Press, and is available now.

Tom Lloyd wrote a fantasy series called the Twilight Reign -- five books so far, starting with The Stormcaller -- and now there's a companion book of short stories set in the same world, The God Tattoo. It's a trade paperback from Pyr, hitting stores on November 5th.

And last for this week is the new Xanth book from Piers Anthony, Esrever Doom. It's the 37th in the series and is guaranteed to contain more bad puns than any other book published this year. Once again, a young man from Mundania (our world) arrives in Xanth after a magical transformation, and must find the Good Wizard to set things right. (And if that plot description seems vaguely familiar in a pre-Xanth sense, you won't have been the first to note it.) It's a Tor hardcover coming October 22nd, and the big danger this time is decoded by reversing the title.

Starktober: Who Do You Want to Be?

"Let us suppose, let us suppose there's a crap game going on in that park across the street. In the crap game there's two burglars, a mugger, a professional killer, and an arsonist. Now, let us suppose you -- let us suppose I go over there with a gun to hold them up. What will happen?"

Bronson smiled grimly. "They'd tear your heart out," he said, enjoying the image.

"Of course. And why? Because they're crooks. They're outlaws, crooks. They don't think of themselves as part of society, they think of themselves as individuals, alone in a jungle. Therefore, they are always on the defensive, always ready to protect their own. They'll never call for the police, never put in a claim in their fire and theft insurance, never look to society to protect them or repay them or avenge them. Shouldn't people who work for the syndicate think the same way? But they don't. They people at Club Cockatoo don't think of themselves as crooks at all, they think of themselves as average working stiffs. Therefore, they let two robbers come in and walk all over them. Whereas, if they thought of themselves as our hypothetical crapshooters in the park, they would have torn those robbers' hearts out."

-- Richard Stark, The Outfit, pp.152-153

Starktober 11: The Green Eagle Score

Parker looked at them, Fusco scared, Devers confident, Ellen angry. He considered, and finally shrugged, letting it go. For now he'd take their word for it, and just keep his eyes open. Over the years he'd come to accept the fact that the people involved in every heist were never as solid as you wanted them. They always had hang-ups one way or another, always had personal problems or quirks from their private lives that they couldn't keep from intruding into the job they were supposed to be doing. The only way to handle it was to watch them, know that the problems were, be ready for them to start screwing up. If he sat around and waited for the perfect string, cold and solid and professional, he'd never get anything done.
(p.34)

I've said it before, but it's still true: there's a surprising amount of management theory and analysis of small-group behavior in the Parker novels; Parker himself is a precise observer of human behavior, for all that he has very little patience for most of it. Parker views people as tools to get what he wants -- large sums of money one or two times a year, and peace and quiet the rest of the time, and, perhaps even more so, the intellectual and physical challenge of working out a tough heist and then seeing it through -- but he's a thoughtful workman, careful with his tools. He doesn't want to break them unnecessarily, so keeping them focused and working towards his ends is of vital importance. (And sometimes that's "shut up and don't go for the alarm," and sometimes it's a more complicated process of sounding out and calming down a shaky crew of heisters.)

The Green Eagle Score is another job with a set-up Parker isn't happy with: his old compatriot Fusco comes to visit him on a beach in Puerto Rico, with a plan to rob the payroll of an Air Force base in New York state, up near the Canadian border. (It's in a small town named Monequois, which otherwise seems to have nothing in common with the Ivy League college of the same name from The Seventh -- the towns have very different layouts and feels, to begin with.) Fusco's ex-wife, Ellen, is now living with Devers, who works in that base's finance office, and knows the payroll routine.

So this is yet another job full of the cardinal sins: set up by an amateur, with a hungry ex-con in the string and a woman smack in the middle. And yet that payroll is over four hundred thousand dollars, twice a month, just asking to be stolen. And no matter how much Parker protests, and insists to himself that he only wants to work a few times a year, he always craves a heist: the cool intellectual work of setting it up just right and the quick physical work of executing it. Who can say whether Parker keeps getting involved with these tricky, complicated, misshapen jobs despite their dangers, or because he likes the danger, likes thinking that he's smart and tough and quick enough to get away with anything?

As usual, Stark finds a new way to screw things up for Parker this time out -- it is related to those cardinal sins, but it's a new idea, one the book lays out carefully for the suspicious reader but which a more action-oriented browser might not notice until everything goes to hell in the aftermath of the heist. And, as usual, the joys of Green Eagle Score are equally in seeing Parker in control of his careful plot and in watching him recover from calamity and find a way to make it out (and back to Claire, on that Puerto Rico beach) with as much of the money as he can.

Five years and ten books into the series, Stark is still taking the very same ingredients -- the problems with this heist are almost exactly parallel to those in the previous book, The Rare Coin Score -- and mixing them up into a different souffle of danger, larceny, and excitement each time. It's a thrill to read one of these books, but reading them en bloc is even more enthralling: it's easy to overlook Stark's skill and craft when you only read one. And, since most of the books are so short and precisely pointed, why not read a bunch if you're going to read one?


Starktober Introduction and Index
 

Starktober 10: The Rare Coin Score

The Parker novels, read closely, start to look like Richard Stark giving himself very specific plot triggers and then trying to get through them: The Score is the one where Parker's crew knocks over an entire town, The Jugger is the one where he's trapped by a corrupt cop, The Seventh is set entirely in the aftermath of a job that went wrong in a completely random moment, The Handle is the one where he's working for the mob and the Feds. And then The Rare Coin Score is the one that forces Parker to go against two of his rules of self-preservation: never bring an amateur into the job and never work with a woman.

The woman and the amateur -- Claire, who Parker fans will recognize from later novels, and Billy Lebatard, the overgrown boy who thinks he can buy her with enough money -- are part of the job from the beginning; she's the widow of a man distantly related to Lebatard, hanging around Indianapolis until something better comes along, and he's a major local coin dealer with a plan to rob a major coin convention coming to town in a few weeks and the weak man's need to have a woman he knows will never come across.

Parker arrives in Indianapolis to learn about the job from an old compatriot named Lempke, who just got out of prison and may be a little too eager to get that next big score. Along for the briefing is Jack French, who Parker's never met before but respects immediately: French is another Parker, basically, perhaps a little less cold or not quite as good at planning. Neither Parker nor French likes the job: they set Parker up in the hotel where the job will be (strike one), the take will be illiquid until Lebatard can turn it into cash over the next month (strike two), and then there's Lempke's obvious hunger, Claire's place in the middle of it, and the central role of the clearly unreliable Lebatard (strikes three and up). Parker and French both walk out, agreeing to work together someday on something better, and French leaves town -- he's nearly as hungry as Lempke is, though not as desperate.

Parker goes back to his hotel, though, and Claire meets him there later that night. And Claire is the first woman since Parker's dead wife -- the one who double-crossed him back in The Hunter -- to be more than a distraction for him, for reasons he's no good at thinking about or articulating. She half-convinces him that the job is worth doing for its own sake, but what finishes the convincing is Claire herself; Parker just doesn't want to walk away, for once in his career.

And then the job goes forward, with a couple of new men brought in to replace French, and it's as smooth and as rough as every other Parker job -- made up of men (and, this time, one woman) whose flaws he thinks he can plan around, and a physical set-up that he's thought through as entirely as possible, so that nothing can go wrong...until the one moment something unexpected happens, and it all goes to hell.

As it always does; the Parker novels are a catalog of the ways that things can go to hell: ulterior motives, bad luck, betrayal from inside, betrayal from outside, people smarter or stupider or just less predictable than Parker expected. Every good heist is the same, but every bad heist goes bad in a different way. And The Rare Coin Score goes bad in a very pleasing way -- at least, it does so, in the end, for Parker and Claire, who begin a relationship that would be unusual for most people.

But what's really unusual for a heister and his girl? Like any job, what matters is that you get out at the end with your hands on the valuable stuff -- and they do.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 9: The Damsel

Parker doesn't appears once in the pages of The Damsel -- just so you know. This time out, Stark follows the adventures of Parker's fellow thief (and occasional compatriot) Alan Grofield, using a lighter, breezier tone, longer sentences, and a sensibility tuned a few stations away from hardboiled in the direction of wry amusement -- the Grofield books are clearly a waypoint on the journey from Parker to Dortmunder, but, as of The Damsel in 1967, Stark (aka Donald Westlake) hadn't made it all the way yet.

(If anyone wants to argue differently from the evidence of The Fugitive Pigeon or The Spy in the Ointment, other books Westlake was writing in the same stretch of mid-60s, I'd be willing to listen to it; he was clearly on that road for a while.)

After the events of The Handle, Grofield is recuperating in a bed in a Mexico City hotel, several bullets having been removed from his body but their damage still healing. He has no passport or other papers, but, perhaps to make up for it, he does have a suitcase full of money, his take from the heist in The Handle. And he gets a gorgeous young woman dumped into his lap when she climbs into his window, shimmying down a rope of sheets from the room just above where she was being held captive.

Elly Fitzgerald runs through a few stories about those kidnappers before settling on something close to the truth -- but Grofield never quite tells her the full truth about himself, either, or not in a way she's expected to believe. Elly is caught up in a complicated plot of international intrigue, in which the ex-Governor of Pennsylvania has cozied up to General Pozos, the dictator-for-life of the banana republic Guerrero -- to the point of practically exchanging sons, one a press secretary, the other as college-student ward -- but now wants to knock off Pozos and install the college student as the new dictator with the ex-Governor the power behind the throne. Elly's father is to be the new personal doctor for Pozos, and the one to actually make sure he dies in a plausible manner. Pozos will be in Acapulco in a few days, and Elly must get there to warn him.

Elly needs someone's help to do that, and Grofield is there. Luckily, Grofield is much less mercenary, much more susceptible to the charms of young women, and much more puckish than Parker would be -- Stark/Westlake was clearly playing around with the personalities of his heroes at this stage in his career, finding the right tone for each kind of man and building plots around their strengths and weaknesses. For Grofield, this first time out, that means an escalating spiral of danger entered and danger escaped, with a few moments of peace and tranquility with Elly in between. After all, Pozos is cruising the Pacific in his yacht until Friday, and there's only one road to Acapulco -- so Elly and Grofield are in no hurry up until the moment where they're in a total hurry.

It's a silly plot -- much more like Fugitive Pigeon or Spy in the Ointment, though not played directly for laughs, than a Parker book -- but it's serious enough for Honner, the head of the thugs, and for the bullets he and his men are shooting at Elly and Grofield. The Damsel takes its international intrigue from the pages of other paperback novels, though Stark does nearly polish up to the point of believability. It could have made a great movie anywhere in the stretch 1968-1974, but it didn't. There are car chases and gun battles, two separate assassination attempts on different people, and even a last-minute entry by two people on horseback.

If you've been reading a stack of Stark, as I have, a Grofield book is a lovely dish of sherbet in between the heavier courses of Parker -- which, in this metaphor, must be some variety of red meat. I'm looking forward to the other three of them -- nearly as much as I'm looking forward to even more Parker.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 8: The Handle

Parker is a professional thief, and his jobs usually fall into the same broad outline: some private company has a lot of money in one location, so Parker and a few independent men in the same line of work take it upon themselves to relieve that company of that money. They don't go up against governments, they don't have long-term alliances or working groups, they don't work for or against organized crime, and they certainly don't have any connection with any international intrigue.

But in The Handle, like The Mourner a few books earlier, Parker -- and his co-conspirators on this job, including the devilish actor Alan Grofield -- are looped into a job connected to both organized crime and international intrigue. And, as usual, the one thing that can make Parker and the others bend their rules is the promise of a huge payoff: as much as fifty thousand apiece for four men.

A man who calls himself Wolfgang Baron recently set up an offshore casino in the Gulf of Mexico -- on a small island not previously attached to any country, though he got Cuba to claim it as a shelter for his operation -- close enough to get a lot of traffic from US ports like Galveston. The Outfit is angry about this because Baron's operation competes with their own casinos, and because Baron refuses to cut them in. And the US government is angry because "Baron" is actually Baron Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein, whose activities on behalf of his native Germany during WWII -- though possibly more harmful to his Fatherland than helpful, due to his larcenous ways -- have put him on the war criminal list. So the Outfit wants Baron to teach him a lesson, and the feds want von Altstein to throw him in jail.

Parker, on the other hand, just wants Baron's money -- he's got at least a hundred and fifty thousand on hand at all times, and as much as a quarter-million some days. With three other men and the backing of the Outfit -- the most unusual wrinkle in this job when Parker agreed to it, though many more would come along the way -- he's confident that he can steal the money, burn down the casino, and get away. He also promises the Outfit that he'll deliver Baron to them, with no intention of ever carrying that out. And they'll stay off his back until after the heist, not because they trust him, but just because they know he'll try the job, and, at the very worst, the four heisters will get killed on Baron's island and cause trouble along the way.

But the Feds, once they learn what's going on, are both more insistent and better equipped, with a helicopter to follow Parker's boat out to the island and enough agents to keep tabs on the whole gang until the day of the heist. They won't be satisfied with promises, and the agents in place on the island to keep watch might just ruin the job -- if a rejected member of the team, a pedophile just sprung from prison by the Feds as their obvious mole, doesn't ruin everything first.

It all comes together into explosions and fire on that remote island, with Baron's men shooting at the heisters and the heisters shooting back, with the Feds circling nearby, ready to swoop in once someone reaches US waters or soil. And it all ends with Parker, Grofield, and Baron all separately reaching a remote Mexican beach with most of the loot, branching out from there to the next two novels: The Damsel, to follow Grofield from his recuperation in a Mexico City hotel to Acapulco with a young American woman with even more secrets than he has; and The Rare Coin Score, to see what Parker got up to next after he got out of Mexico himself.

Starktober Introduction and Index

Starktober 7: The Seventh

In the aftermath of The Jugger, Parker is on the run, his former leisure-time cover as Charles Willis blown and with no resources except a hundred dollars in his pocket and whatever cars he can steal. He's in no position to be picky about his next job, so he clearly lept at a nice professional job knocking over a big college-football game with six other professionals, most of whom he knew. This is the seventh Parker novel -- Stark is being sneaky with the title, as he often is in these stories -- but The Seventh most directly refers to Parker's cut of the heist: one-seventh of the take, which is being split evenly.

The heist at Monequois -- a fictional Ivy League school away from big cities; call it Dartmouth with a sillier name -- went well, and Parker had settled into an apartment with all of the loot and a willing young woman to wait out the few days of hottest police attention. After three days in one small apartment, he went out to the corner for beer and cigarettes and came back ten minutes later to find that girl dead -- stabbed through the headboard with a sword that had been on the wall -- the money gone, and police coming through the door minutes later.


Parker gets away from the cops, and immediately chases down Kifka, the man who organized the job -- but he's stuck sick in bed, cared for by his own girl, and clearly hasn't gone anywhere recently. And none of the rest of the crew knew where Parker was, so this clearly was some outsider -- Parker quickly seizes on the idea that it was someone connected to the dead girl, not to him, and that the theft was a surprise opportunity.

But whoever the killer is, he hasn't gone away -- he shoots at Parker twice more over the next day, clearly wanting to clear up that loose end. And the police are sure the murder is connected to the robbery at the game, and are closing in from both ends. So they're all chasing each other: police chasing the killer and the heisters, the heisters chasing the killer, the killer chasing the heisters. And they all find each other, at the end of this short, sharp novel -- which, even in its brevity, gives Stark enough space to give viewpoints and agency to most of the heisters and the main cop, Detective Dougherty, alongside the implacable Parker -- out of which most of them will not emerge alive.

The Seventh is yet another job gone sour for Parker, one where everything goes wrong and he's left scrambling just to get out alive with his money, or any money at all. It's lucky for Parker that's what he's the very best at: getting out alive ahead of his troubles, moving on to the next job or problem. By this point, it's a clear pattern: each Parker novel stands alone, certainly, but they're all connected, like jewels on a strand (stolen from some bank vault, and fenced quietly later), each one leading inexorably into the next. Parker's troubles here will certainly follow him into the next book, The Handle.

Starktober Introduction and Index