Neal Pollock on Richard Stark's Parker Novels at LARB

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Neal Pollock has a great piece about the Parker novels, written by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake).

In a world ruled by weak bureaucrats and populated by scared alcoholics who eat at cheap diners, Parker is an existential anti-hero, an underground man almost wholly driven by self-interest who hates hippies and mobsters equally. He kills without mercy, though never without reason, and he seems to live almost entirely in the moment. “He was impersonal, not cruel,” Westlake writes. Westlake has called his Parker novels portraits of a “man at work,” and it’s true that Parker is better at his job than you’d ever hope to be at yours. Things often go to shit, but it’s never his fault.

Read the full piece here!

Brian Garfield on Playing Poker with Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block

Imagine a poker game with Brian Garfield, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and occasionally Robert Ludlum. That's one game I'd gladly pay to sit in on! (And I'm sure I would pay--my poker days ended in middle school, and even then I wasn't exactly Orono, Maine's sharpest card shark.)

Head on over to The Chicago Blog (courtesy of the University of Chicago Press) to read the interview with Brian Garfield. And dig those crazy beards!


Here's a little sample:

LTS: First off, why don't you just tell us a bit about your friendship with Donald Westlake. When and where did you meet? Were you friends for a long time?

BG: We met at a poker game in New York, 1965. It was a regular weekly quarter-limit writers' game. Lawrence Block and agent Henry Morrison were regulars. The game was a wonderful source of one-liners—now if only I remembered them. . . .

[…]

Our "lit'ry" discussions might have seemed odd to people who weren't writers. For example I remember Don's fascination with the way Ira Levin had cleverly concealed the identity of the killer in A Kiss Before Dying, and we all admired the way Mickey Spillane solved the mystery in Vengeance is Mine in the final word of the novel. I don't know that it's ever been done that way before. Spillane was a comic book-style writer, but we all thought he was much underrated as a storyteller. We didn't talk about his writing style; we talked about his inventiveness. It helps, I suppose, to realize that we all had worked our way up through the pulps—probably the last generation to do that, as the pulps mostly died by the early 1960s. Don and Larry wrote crime stories and softcore porn; I wrote crime stories and Westerns. (They came from the Northeast; I came from the Southwest.) We all had been published since the end of the 1950s. By the mid-60s we'd found a way to do the apprenticeship and make a sort of living out of it, although it wasn't a great living; most of my early books earned somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dollars. All that meant was we had to write them fast. We thought of the work as fun, challenging but easy to do.

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Thanks to Sarah Weinman for the tip!

"The Jugger" by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1965)

Richard Stark’s sixth incarnation of Parker, The Jugger (Pocket Books #50149, 1965), find his anti-hero looking to avoid trouble, for once. When Parker receives a letter from Joe Sheer, an old-time “jugger” (slang for safe cracker) who was supposed to be hiding under an alias in retirement, he begins to worry. Someone is on to Sheer, and in his old age he seems to be cracking. And if he cracks, that means he will expose Parker. So, hoping to preempt any major problems, Parker heads to the small town of Sagamore, Nebraska. However, it is too little too late – Sheer is mysteriously dead. To make things worse, an annoying amateur crook is also hanging around, convinced that Sheer left behind a big score—and that Parker knows where it is. And as if Parker didn’t need any more worries, the local sheriff seems to have the same idea and won’t leave Parker alone…

The Jugger is everything we’ve come to love about the Parker series. Stark’s streamlined plotting, devoid of excess complications, plays out like an architect’s blueprint, but without ever feeling overly deliberate. There’s spontaneity to the action, which demands Parker’s split-second intuition. Guided by professionalism, it’s fascinating to watch him assess his situation, the different options available, and finally execute his plan. There’s something admirable about his levelheaded logicality and ability to improvise and change his course at any moment. His choice of profession and willingness to do away with anyone who stands in his way, on the other hand…well, I don’t think Stark wants us to admire Parker too much.

Without Stark’s permission, Jean-Luc Godard adapted The Jugger to the screen as Made in U.S.A. in 1966 with Anna Karina playing Parker. Notoriously unfaithful, it’s actually somewhat close for Godard standards (remember his version of King Lear?). Still, those looking for a recognizable Parker had better look elsewhere. Godard’s film is more of an abstract meditation on genre and aesthetics than a hardboiled crime story. I elaborated more on the adaptation in a piece I wrote for The L Magazine on remembering Donald Westlake.

Always one for great first lines, I’ll have to start the list of favorite quotes with the opening sentence.

“When the knock came at the door, Parker was just turning to the obituary page.”

“The room stank of flowers and death. Orange light bulbs shaped like wrinkled mosques shone dimly in wall fixtures on the left, gleaming on the tangled pattern of the wallpaper, muting and deadening in the thick maroon rug and the heavy dark draperies around the doorways. To the right, rotting flowers in green wicker baskets stood around a coffinless bier; a few white rose petals had fallen onto the flat table-top of the bier and were slowly browning and curling into tiny fists.”

“A man who won’t give up comfort for success is a bad partner.”

“The voice was a centipede, a long twisty bug with needle-sharp feet, running back and forth on the left side of his face, driving its needle feet into the bone beside his eye and into his cheekbone and into the bone above his ear. His face hurt like fury…”

“His clothes fit him like an impatient compromise…”

“There was nothing to say. Younger was a moron with a title, that’s all; give a moron authority and after a while he forgets he’s a moron.”

“The local law was three dough-faced farm hands in rumpled blue uniforms, standing around the room looking for traffic to direct.”

“Joe Sheer was just an old jugger now, turned shaky and rusty – he’d said it himself – shaky and rusty and scared, an old jugger ready to trade every man he’d ever worked with for a nice soft mattress and a nice warm radiator and a little peace of mind.”

Hungry for more Parker? Head on over to Hard Case Crime and read an excerpt of Richard Stark’s Lemons Never Lie, yet another excellent book in the series.

Remembering Donald Westlake

Here's a link to an article I wrote for The L Magazine about Donald Westlake that discusses several film adaptations of his work.

R.I.P., Donald...

http://www.thelmagazine.com/lmag_blog/blog/post__01080906.cfm