Everything I Learned From Richard Stark’s PARKER Novels
If one mark of a good crime novel is that it shows the reader how to get away with something, the Parker novels are a masterclass in crime literature.
Parker, the master thief Donald Westlake wrote about under the pen name Richard Stark, has proved a surprisingly durable character considering his deliberate lack of any traditionally sympathetic qualities. Westlake has said that he wanted the books to be about “a professional at work”, and while they certainly are that, I initially interpreted Parker as a chiefly rational individual, someone whose own assessment of risk and reward drives all his actions. This analysis explains most, but not all of Parker’s behavior: after dozens of heists, he still proves capable of surprising.
What is Parker’s particular talent? He has a gift for violence, and for detail-oriented thinking. Most of all, Parker demonstrates a gift for human psychology: how to reassure the victims of a heist so that they’ll cooperate; what small lies you can tell someone and be readily believed; which tricks someone might use to tip off a bystander that a robbery is in progress. The logistics of Parker’s heists have changed with the times; new safe and alarm technologies would require different tactics to pull off these jobs in the modern day. But the contemporary reader still gets a thrill when Parker is able to pass himself and his accomplices off as folks just going about their business — with the swag in tow.
My rankings of the first sixteen books in the series, before the two-decade hiatus Westlake took from the character and the Stark name:
Butcher’s Moon. The last of the original run of novels is twice as long as the typical Parker entry and packaged as a blockbuster climax to the series. It more than lives up to this reputation. I thought it would be hard for Butcher’s Moon to top the sheer number of heists and the philosophical insights of The Outfit, but in point of fact this sixteenth book proves to be a kind of sequel to The Outfit that seems to both contain that earlier novel and elaborate upon its themes and structure. An uncommonly satisfying read.
The Outfit. Expanded on at some length below.
The Hunter. Although Parker has been operating for many years at the beginning of this first novel, it serves nonetheless as a kind of creation myth for the character, who escapes from prison shortly before the story begins and rejoins civil society, using only his wits to establish a new identity and a source of funds. Some semblance is a backstory is provided: he was betrayed by a partner and by his wife, both of whom end up dead, while Parker ends the novel by disappearing again into the night, as easily as he came. John Boorman’s Point Blank brings a nonlinear, slightly fantastic interpretation to the plot, but the germ of that approach is present in the book.
Deadly Edge. If I could propose a new Parker film adaptation, this would be the one. This novel opens with a long, meticulous sequence detailing the heist of a rock concert, at the end of which a body is discovered in the thieves’ hideout. For the rest of the book the members of the gang are hunted down one by one by a pair of vicious killers, and Parker’s girlfriend Claire eventually comes under siege in the home she has just purchased for herself and Parker. The combination of suspense drama and some light domestic comedy — as Claire attempts to “settle” Parker — makes for an unusual but gripping adventure. Bear with me, but I had the thought that this would be a perfect reunion vehicle for Mad Men stars Jon Hamm and January Jones. Hamm isn’t quite right for Parker in most cases, with too much self-consciousness to his performance style, but I thought his performance in Baby Driver showed that he can play the kind of danger needed for the character, and his gift for comedy would fit the scenes in which Parker has to stretch further than usual to communicate with Claire and keep her happy.
Slayground. After an armored car heist goes wrong, Parker is cornered by the local mob in an abandoned amusement park, with a few hours’ head start to prepare for their manhunt. What do you need, a road map?
The Green Eagle Score. Probably the most interesting and detailed heist in the series, this book introduces Stan Devers, a first-time thief who fingers the job and achieves the rare feat of winning Parker’s respect. Like Alan Grofield, Devers sees romance in the life of crime, and his enthusiasm brings the juice.
Plunder Squad. Westlake’s other long-running character, the sadsack thief John Dortmunder, is a variation on Parker. He’s introduced first in the novel The Hot Rock, which Westlake began as a Parker novel but changed the character when he found the farce plot unsuited for that series. Plunder Squad is close to a farce, as Parker’s run of bad luck sees a number of potential jobs slip away, pushing him into a heist he has serious doubts about. Meanwhile, a mistake from The Sour Lemon Score comes back to haunt him. A disjointed book with an ungainly structure, yet it finds ways to put Parker in a number of unexpected situations with interesting characters. I particularly like the late passage where Parker tries to convince an urbane art dealer to act as a fence.
The Rare Coin Score. Notable for another well-developed heist and for the first appearance of Claire, who initiates the job and goes on to become Parker’s romantic partner for the remainder of the series. This book has a high level of tension, as Parker winds up working with a number of partners he has reason to distrust, yet the point where the job goes wrong still comes as a shock.
The Score. A grabby premise proves somewhat disappointing in execution, as the ambitious plan by a mysterious amateur to rob a whole town winds up being a series of straightforward smash’n’grabs. Still, the large crew needed provides plenty of color, especially by Alan Grofield in his first appearance, who brings his own complication to the job in an unexpected twist.
The Man with the Getaway Face. The second Parker novel sketches the template for most of the series, in which Parker plans and executes a job, a second portion of the novel flashes back to show the betrayal of a secondary character, and a concluding part shows Parker regaining the upper hand and escaping with the loot. The formula isn’t quite worked out here, as Westlake doesn’t bridge the main heist plot with the secondary business that resolves a loose thread from The Hunter. But the heist is simple, concise, and satisfying, as is the manhunt sequence that follows.
The Sour Lemon Score. A simple premise that Westlake repeated many times: someone swipes the payload from Parker, who goes on the hunt. This novel is seriously marred by Parker making a damaging and uncharacteristic error in judgment toward the end. However, one can’t complain too much about a manhunt plot, which Westlake always crafts with style.
The Jugger. A kind of Jim Thompson flavor characterizes this early adventure, in which Parker squares off with a crooked cop investigating the death of an old associate. Parker seems to act uncharacteristically here in checking up on this associate in the first place, but Westlake explains this by making the dead safecracker a keeper of Parker’s secret identity, and thus a risk to his lifestyle. The plot climaxes with one of the more ruthless bits of violence in the series, reassuring us that Parker has not gone soft.
The Mourner. Early in the series Westlake seemed to enjoy fitting Parker into different subgenres. Here he joins a Cold War thriller where a Russian agent comes along for the job. This naturally leads to a betrayal, and the villain provides nothing close to a sporting challenge for Parker. Features an unusual and revealing monologue by Parker at the end.
The Handle. I only found the bottom three novels disappointing, and all elide the convention of the heist in a way I found unsatisfying. In The Handle, Parker is hired to knock over a casino on an island run by a Bond-like villain, and the narration of the job is unusually rushed. It does have an entertaining epilogue in which Parker extracts himself and his accomplice from a very messy aftermath.
The Black Ice Score. Concerns a group of amateurs who hire Parker to train them in a heist, but Parker is peripheral to the main action. Although the job doesn’t go as planned and some interlopers cause additional drama, the stakes never seem all that high.
The Seventh. In my least favorite of the novels, the heist is narrated only briefly in flashback, while the main action concerns an outsider who swipes the payload from Parker’s hideout and begins picking off the thieves in fashion I found repetitive. It does have a good punchline, but the final confrontation only highlights that this is one of the weakest villains in the series.
The third novel, The Outfit, lays out some of the series’ philosophical worldview, in an uncommonly revealing passage. Late in the third part of the novel, the head of the Outfit, a man named Bronson, receives a visit from a man named Quill. Quill turns out to be something like the Outfit’s head of risk management, and he provides his analysis of the series of heists carried out against the mob by Parker and his associates.
Quill held up four fingers. “So there are four things which set the club up,” he said. “They didn’t think they’d be robbed, they hadn’t thought about what to do if they were robbed, none of them would risk being shot to protect the organization’s money, and they didn’t think of themselves as crooks. In a nutshell.”
“Hold on.” Bronson held up his own hand, fingers splayed like a traffic cop’s. “What do you mean, they don’t think they’re crooks?”
“They work for a living. They have an employer; they pay income tax; they come under Social Security; they own their own homes and cars; they work in local industry. They know the corporation they work for engages in illegal activities, but they think what-the-hell, every corporation these days does, from tax-dodging through price-fixing to government bribing.…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. The 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 do our hypothetical crapshooters in the park, they would have torn those robbers’ hearts out.”
This passage suggests that rationality cannot be what separates Parker’s outlook from the people he steals from. The employees of the Outfit surely assessed their own level of risk in deciding to go along with the heist. Rather, Parker’s profession is a vocation, one in which he takes a craftsman’s level of pride and from which he takes a particular set of values. One of the constants of the Parker novels is this difference between 9-to-5 workmen and professionals of Parker’s class who see their work as their true calling.
This difference also manifests in the gulf between Parker’s work of planning and the Outfit’s work of organization: where planning is the essential practice in which Parker puts to use his knowledge of human psychology and behavior, organization is the pattern of behaviors that he exploits. What may begin as a careful plan becomes through routine and codification an organization; an organization can be studied, its weaknesses can be found and exploited. Organization, as Westlake suggests in The Outfit, also breeds new weaknesses of complacency and stagnation. I found this passage in The Outfit to be something I always wanted to read about in a crime novel. What Quill outlines here is a clue to the appeal that the Parker character held to Westlake, and to devotees of the crime genre: the work of the author is to study organizations and through identifying their flaws, to craft a plan that can become a story.
Resist the temptation to interpret Parker as an anti-capitalist project. Parker is all too happy to have wealth concentrated in the hands of a powerful few: the better for him to steal it. If the novels say anything about the American character, they critique the idea of corporate culture, and the idea that perfect competence can be achieved by an executive structure. One counterpoint to Westlake’s views on the Outfit can be found in Kenneth Fearing’s classic suspense novel The Big Clock, in which a man suspected of murder is relentlessly hunted by the very company he works for, saved only at the last minute by an act of God as he hides in the upper floor of a skyscraper, waiting for the hammer to drop. Westlake would suggest that the nature of a highly structured organization makes it less competent, not more.
Westlake has had many of his novels adapted to film, including several Parker stories: among the adaptations are 2013’s Parker, as well as The Outfit, Payback, Slayground, The Split, and Point Blank.
Point Blank seems to me the best of these films, in large part for the casting of Lee Marvin as “Walker”, an appropriate stand-in for Westlake’s description of Parker’s big, swinging physicality and stony features. When I read the line from The Hunter “His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless”, I think of Marvin. One of the principles Westlake draws upon in his novels and in The Hunter in particular is geometry: Parker rises from the dead and in a thrilling opening sequence, re-establishes himself in civil society using nothing but his wits. He continues rising, pursuing the debt he is owed through the ranks of the criminal organization, which is visualized in a series of confrontations at a high level in a hotel and then in a skyscraper. The vertiginous sense of danger, and progress toward a goal, is carried over in John Boorman’s direction of Point Blank, which frequently puts Walker alone in widescreen compositions against the backdrop of Los Angeles, a great ape climbing iron limbs in the asphalt jungle.
I re-watched Point Blank recently with the Blu-ray commentary by Boorman and Steven Soderbergh. Boorman praises Marvin as a collaborator and articulates some of the qualities of his performance that make the film unique: Marvin, a Marine veteran of WWII, found elements of his own biography in Walker, as a man accustomed to violence who must re-assimilate into a world he does not understand. Not everyone was on the same page; Boorman recalls that John Vernon, who played the antagonist Mal Reese, was brought to tears by Marvin unexpectedly slugging him during a rehearsal; as well, the collaboration between Marvin and co-star Angie Dickinson was colored by a grudge she held from the filming of The Killers.
For all its cinematic qualities, Point Blank is also a Los Angeles movie, and one of the better films that draws the city’s character out of its shooting locations. The Parker novels, meanwhile, rarely concern major urban centers; much of their action takes place in anonymous towns of the Midwest and the Plains states. Parker of course does not care to take in the sights wherever he is going, and goes wherever there’s a good job to be done. Unlike Patricia Highsmith, whose taste for travel informed the sensual qualities of her prose, Westlake keeps any sense of romance out of Parker’s narratives. Although Westlake was said to be fond of traveling with his wife, for his characters escape is usually a mental activity, as in the rich fantasy life of Parker’s sometimes-partner, theatre actor and occasional bag man Alan Grofield.
Another notable film was made of The Outfit, directed by John Flynn and starring Robert Duvall, and it is probably the closest in spirit to the novels. Flynn’s gift is for a certain matter-of-fact direction that signposts the entrances and exits in every room, a good match for the Stark voice. This adaptation loses the best aspects of the novel: the Quill character and the episodic sequence of various heists taking place at once. However, it does bring to the table Joe Don Baker in an approximation of the novel’s Handy McKay character, a welcome supporting turn by Karen Black, Timothy Carey as a memorable capo, and a craggy Robert Ryan as the Outfit boss. There are a few very un-Parker touches in the film — I can’t see him allowing Handy to sock an office girl in the jaw without even trying to talk her into keeping quiet, for instance. But although Duvall is not as physically imposing as the literary Parker, he is convincing as the master planner, and he does have those cold eyes that Westlake invokes over and over again.