Shifting from my usual Slog-role as sportswriter and Illinois/Chicago correspondent, I’d like to second Paul Constant’s recommendation yesterday in Slog of Richard Stark’s Parker novels (not to be confused with Robert Parker’s Spenser novels).

These books are kick-ass American crime fiction, and much more. Recently re-issued by the University of Chicago Press in very sleek $14 editions (more on that in a moment) the Parker novels have the utterly cold and heartless approach to people and events that mark crime fiction which, to descend into cliche, transcends its genre. They should be read in order, since each book has a loose end that becomes the main plot of the next book (the first three are: The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit) and the characters develop from book to book.

I re-read these all last fall, along with the next five, and cannot recommend them highly enough. Beyond their interest as what might be called Crime Procedural novels (the symmetrical genre to the Police Procedural, they all center on Parker, alone or with cohorts, planning and executing some crime,) they are also a portrait of American life before so much of what we take for granted: fast food chains, the interstate highways, credit cards. (One marker of how much technology really has changed things: most of these books would have to be completely re-written if set today, due to the omnipresence of cell phones).

The prose is lean and straightforward, and every two or three chapters there’s a line that puts Stark (one of Donald Westlake’s many noms de plume) in the class of Cain, Chandler, Hammett, Thompson, Goodis, Himes and other masters. The plots will grab your entrails and drag you along for the ride, but it’s more than just plot: the characters grow and develop and the American scene is compelling.

The U of Chicago Press got the rights to the books shortly before Westlake’s death due to an editor who noted that the Mysterious Press had dropped the older ones (Westlake let the series lay fallow for decades—I haven’t read the later ones). Academic presses can keep books on back lists and in print due to their non-profit status, so if you cannot find the Parker novels (and, again, start with The Hunter) at your local independent bookseller, you can order them directly from the Press online. (Full disclosure: I do editorial work with the U of C Press.) When I was in Seattle last fall, Elliott Bay had them all, so you could start by looking there. . . There’s also a graphic novel adaptation of The Hunter, but I’d go with the prose first.

(But if you’re a big fan of this genre in fiction or film and want to branch out into comics, you cannot go wrong with Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets (13 trade paperbacks long, an epic American crime story) or Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera’s Scalped, a still ongoing series set on a Lakota Sioux reservation) both from Vertigo.

An interview with Westlake is here.

13 replies on “Richard Stark’s Parker Novels”

  2. Darwyn Cooke, one of the greatest comic writers/artists working in the industry today, is adapting some of the Parker stories into graphic novels. So far, only The Hunter is out, but I think it really says something that these are the only adaptations of these stories to ever have been allowed to actually use the name Parker. Cooke’s work is invariably outstanding, and this is no exception.

  3. Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder series is great as well. The books are hilarious, up to and including the posthumously published Get Real. I haven’t read Parker series, but 361 is an early Westlake novel of the hard-boiled variety, and it’s great.

    All the Dortmunder and Parker novels are available as audiobooks, by the way. Westlake (and probably Stark) makes for good listening.

  8. I got introduced to Parker through Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation, which I thought was fine but definitely not as compelling as the novels themselves. Subsequently, I’ve burned through six Parker novels in the past couple months and am hooked. There’s a clarity to Westlake’s prose, plot, and characters that heightens the inevitable plot twists when everything starts going wrong. The Parker books are pardoxically about a master criminal, a methodical workman who plans for every circumstance, except for that something always triggers a cascade of dominoes leading Parker straight into clusteruck city.

  10. I thought the Hunter novel was better than the comic book adaptation myself, but the adaptation is still really, really great.

    My favorite Westlake so far is Somebody Owes Me Money. Totally innocent and nothing like The Hunter at all.

  12. The Grofield books are well worth seeking out: not quite at the level of the Parker books, but still a lot of fun. Grofield is such a different sort of heister from Parker that it’s fun to see what Stark does to adapt his plotting to Grofield’s sensibility. The best one is, fortunately, the only one currently in print: _Lemons Never Lie_, available from Hard Case Crime. (Hard Case’s other Westlakes, particularly _Somebody Owes Me Money_ and _The Cutie_, are also very good.)

    Parker fans will also get a kick out of one of the Dortmunder novels in particular, _Jimmy the Kid_, in which Dortmunder’s gang plans a kidnapping based on the plot of a book . . . by this guy named Richard Stark.

  13. I read the entire Stark series last year after being impressed by Cooke’s version of The Hunter. They’re amazing – not a bad book in the lot, and the post-hiatus novels from the 1990s and later are just as good as the beyond-hard-boiled 1960s-1970s lot. Stunning stuff. My favorite was “The Green Eagle Score,” mostly because it opens out so well onto other books in the series, but the last three – Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, and Dirty Money – are quite a trilogy.

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