Under Siege

“You're a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you'll never even be indicted. But if you don't pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

—Littlefield, The Score

It was a crazy idea, and Parker knew it from the start. At first, he didn’t even want to get involved, but the guy who came up with the plan was persuasive. Edgars had apparently planned for every eventuality: all the bases were covered, and all he needed was manpower. Anything that could go wrong was accounted for, and the payoff was so high that Parker finally gave in against his better judgement. And the plan? Parker and his cronies are going to rob an entire town.

Yes, you read that right, and if you’re scratching your head, please remember that the book in question, Richard Stark’s The Score, was written in 1963. The plan would probably be impossible to pull off in this day and age of cellular communications. But even in the 60s, the plan is a difficult one to swallow. In order to make this fantastic setup plausible, Richard Stark (a pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake) has to explain the plan, the contingencies, the risks, and the potential payoff to you at length. The heist itself does not begin until the second half of the book, and the first half is largely devoted to these explanations and preparations. The plan has to be adjusted several times. If this sounds boring, don’t be fooled – this is a very short book; the sparse, crisp, to-the-point writing style helps this section whizz by as you marvel at Parker’s strategic genius.

The name's Parker. Just Parker.

Anyone who follows my blog regularly knows that I am a very big fan of the late, great Donald E. Westlake. I enjoy his work when he is writing a comic crime caper, and I equally enjoy it when he writes a dark, gritty tale. Parker is one of his most famous characters. Writing under the name “Richard Stark”, Westlake created an utterly amoral thief named Parker, who doesn’t kill people not out of any moral notions, but because it makes for a nastier legal mess. Casual murder is not his style, but if he has to do it, he will kill anyone to get his way. His actions are dictated purely by logic, not by emotions of any sort. And somehow, Donald E. Westlake took this utterly amoral figure and made him into a fascinating anti-hero.

We’ve seen Parker on screen several times. Point Blank is still perhaps the greatest adaptation of a Parker novel ever filmed, starring Lee Marvin as “Walker”. Payback starring Mel Gibson as “Porter” was also pretty good, although the (shorter) director’s cut is far better than the original theatrical version. One thing has been common in every adaptation – nobody has been allowed to use the name “Parker”. And so when I found out about the new film Parker, I got excited. Someone was finally allowed to use Parker’s name??? What sort of sorcery was this? And then I found out the movie was due to be released in October before being pushed back to January, which isn’t always a good sign. So what is this movie? A gem to be embraced, or a crappy movie that’s being flushed out with the rest of the trash this time of year?

God Bless Donald E. Westlake

Fred Fitch has got a problem. Actually, he’s got several – you see, Fred Fitch is a conman’s dream: a born mark. Fred simply is so naïve that any convincing person can come up to him and walk away with Fred’s money, and only after the fact does Fred tumble to the whole trick. Here, let him explain for himself:

“I suppose it all began twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they’d been traded to some classmate, but I couldn’t remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn’t already belonged to me when I’d left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the identity of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found.”

I remember...

Donald E. Westlake’s Memory was published posthumously by Hard Case Crime. It was written by the author way back in his early days of writing, but it was never published. I first heard of this book when reading an article on Donald E. Westlake by Lawrence Block, collected in Mystery & Suspense Writers, Volume 2. Block described the novel and praised it in glowing terms. According to the article, 30 years later, Westlake decided not to publish the novel because he considered it too much a creature of its time.

I’m a big Donald E. Westlake fan, though admittedly I’m a newcomer. And Memory is a challenge to describe. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever reviewed for this blog. It isn’t a mystery in any proper sense of the word, and yet… Okay, here’s the plot: Paul Cole, an actor, is assaulted by the husband of his current lover, and he lands in the hospital. But on waking up, he finds that his memory is bad—it is like a sieve, full of holes and gaps that he simply cannot fill. Memories are constantly draining from his head, though he remembers who he is, how to dance, and (presumably) how to tie his shoes. I know what you’re thinking: this sounds a lot like Memento! But it isn’t anything like the brilliant Christopher Nolan movie – which I highly recommend. Memory is very much a creature of its own…

Never fight a Scotsman!

It was supposed to be an easy score. After all, Dortmunder had an inside man: the owner of the painting wanted him to steal it. The client, a rich guy named Arnold Chauncey, needed the insurance money badly… but he had already pulled off such a trick once before, so this time the burglary needed to be authentic. But at the same time he wanted to keep the painting. And so when Dortmunder is caught stealing televisions, a high-profile attorney, J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, suddenly shows up to save the day, reinterpreting the case completely and getting the judge to clear Dortmunder’s name. Turns out Stonewiler wasn’t sent by God but by Chauncey, and the price of this favour is Dortmunder’s compliance on the art theft.

And for once the theft goes well! That is, until Dortmunder gets trapped by the elevator… and the security guards turn out to be patrolling areas that were supposed to be left unguarded… and a large mass of Scotsmen are next door at the theatre… Oh, and just to be on the safe side, Chauncey has hired an assassin to kill Dortmunder should he fail to deliver the painting on time. So it’s no wonder that Dortmunder spends some very uncomfortable time when the painting gets lost following a scuffle with the Scotsmen!

Judgment Day

The last time we saw Parker was in The Outfit, where he hit The Outfit where it hurts most: in their wallets. This seemed to conclude the plot thread that started in The Hunter and The Man With the Getaway Face… but I forgot something about The Outfit. You see, Parker shot a man in that book and the woman he was with, Bett Harrow, still has the gun. Parker can get the gun back, but there are conditions…

And as the book opens, Parker and Handy Mackay are working together to find “the Mourner”. You have no idea what this Mourner is at first, but eventually you find out what it is and why Parker and Handy are trying to get their hands on it… but the plan goes wrong. Handy gets picked up by some nasty folks who seem to be after something themselves, and they don’t appreciate the fact that Parker is messing around their plans. Parker must race against time to find Handy before he gets bumped off… and thus he encounters Auguste Menlo.

Die Hard with a Vengeance

“Richard Stark writes a harsh and frightening story of criminal warfare and vengeance with economy, understatement and a deadly amoral objectivity—a remarkable addition to the list of the shockers that the French call romans noirs.”

—Anthony Boucher, New York Times Book Review

The Outfit now knows that Parker has a new face. They don’t have a very pleasant relationship of late – for details see The Hunter and The Man with the Getaway Face. And so, when The Outfit begins, a hired assassin is sent to kill Parker, interrupting him in bed. Furious, Parker extracts information from the killer, and from that moment on, he declares war on The Outfit. First, he goes after the guy who fingered him and sent for the assassin. Next, he’ll hit The Outfit where it hurts most: in the wallet.

This is how he’s going to do it: he spends time writing letters and visiting old colleagues in the business. He lets them know what the score is. Historically, professional thieves leave The Outfit’s operations alone. They don’t bother The Outfit, and vice versa. But now, The Outfit is overreaching itself, making trouble for Parker. And Parker’s friends don’t necessarily have a huge loyalty to Parker, but they know just how easy it would be to pull off Outfit heists. Many of them have been walking around with plans in their head for years. Now they have an excuse to pull the trigger and hit The Outfit for all they’re worth.

Jiminy Cricket!

It was supposed to be a regular, run-of-the-mill burglary. All John Dortmunder had to do was pry his way into the place and walk out with a bunch of furs. And then… Andy Kelp shows up. After the events of The Hot Rock and Bank Shot, Dortmunder is somewhat understandably horrified. He doesn’t want to subscribe his way into another Andy Kelp special. So instead he starts shouting at Kelp to get away. Before he knows it, he’s woken up the entire neighbourhood and everyone is yelling at each other, with the police on their way to deal with the outburst.

Andy Kelp is hurt that Dormunder would react in such a way, but he immediately sets about proposing a brand-new plan—one that’ll definitely work this time! See, Kelp was recently in jail for a few days before being released due to an illegal search. But behind bars, he came across some books by a some guy named Richard Stark. He discovered Stark’s novels about master thief Parker (“He'll remind you of Dortmunder,” he tells Stan Murch) and he particularly loves the book Child Heist—particularly how the crooks get away with it in the end!

Reservoir Dogs

The last time we saw Parker in The Hunter, he was out to kill a man named Mal Resnick, who had betrayed him and left him for dead. Mal did this in order to pay a debt he owed to an organization known as The Outfit—after paying back what he owed, the organization was only too glad to welcome him back into their ranks, and before you knew it, Mal was part of their management in New York. When Parker went after Mal, he went after The Outfit as well. They didn’t like that.

So as this next book, The Man With the Getaway Face, opens, Parker has just gotten himself a new face. This is thanks to the skill of one Dr. Adler, a man who has been publicly disgraced due to his support of the Communist Party as a young man… but he has not been delisted. Still, America is paranoid about those pinko commies, and so the only way Adler can really get profitable work is to give his services to less-than-reputable clients like Parker.

Capitalism: A Crime Story

John Dortmunder is a serious crook—he doesn’t go after small fry. No purse-snatching or anything of the sort for him. But times are tough and he’s forced to run the encyclopaedia racket, going door to door pretending to represent an encyclopaedia company and getting people to pay a $10 down-payment on the whole set. So it’s understandably humiliating when his newest target turns out to be wise to the whole game and calls the cops on him. He runs out of the place while she’s on the phone and manages to run smack into Andy Kelp, who sits in the car blabbering at him, nearly allowing the duo to get caught by the police car headed their way, siren wailing…

But if the duo was caught in the opening chapters, we’d have no book, right? So they do manage to get away in one piece, but Dortmunder might just wish he’d gone back to brave the fuzz. Because Andy Kelp has got another brilliant scheme—to be more precise, it’s his nephew Victor who came up with this one. See, the Capitalists’ & Immigrants’ Trust is a bank undergoing renovations, and so for the construction period, their temporary location is in a trailer—a mobile home, to be more exact. On Thursday nights, there’s little time between closing time and opening time the next morning, so the bank leaves the money in the vault and seven security guards keep watch over the place. The idea is to rob the bank. And the robbers really mean it—when they set out to rob the bank, they intend to take the whole thing, trailer and all!

Mr. Dortmunder Goes to Washington

At the start of Donald E. Westlake’s What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, professional burglar John Dortmunder answers the door for a FedEx person, having no idea what he’s about to launch himself into. As a result of his opening the door and signing for a package, his lady friend May Bellamy gets her late Uncle Gid’s lucky ring. She wisely decides that John had better take the ring, because he could use a little luck. So, wearing the ring, off goes John on his next job.

See, a multimillionaire named Max Fairbanks has filed for bankruptcy—though he isn’t really bankrupt. It’s just a fancy way for him to get away with robbing people blind. But in any case, he has a house in the town of Carrport which is supposed to be vacated as part of the legal agreement. Which means the house ought to be empty. That means it’s a perfect target for Dortmunder!

Predator

I hope you people have fun with your words. But I don't care if you call yourselves the Red Cross, you owe me forty-five thousand dollars and you'll pay me back whether you like it or not.

—Parker; The Hunter

I’m not entirely sure how to kick off this review. I tend to follow a formula: first introduce the plot; then talk about the book as a whole: setting, characters, the plot’s quality, etc.; and finally sum everything up in a paragraph containing the word “overall” somewhere. But today’s book, The Hunter by Richard Stark (really Donald E. Westlake in disguise) is very different from the kind of book that I usually review—it isn’t really a mystery in the proper sense of the word, unless you’re working in a bookstore. So how to begin? Well, in the blog’s time-honoured tradition, I’ll take the cleverly-lazy way out and let someone else do the talking for me. The following text has been unashamedly stolen from William L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (an invaluable reference tool for the mystery fan):

“One night in the early 1960s, car trouble forced author [Donald E.] Westlake to walk across the George Washington Bridge between New Jersey and New York on a winter evening. The wind and the cold and the cars zooming by made him feel very alone and very alienated. He began to wonder what sort of person would belong in that sort of environment.

The result was Parker, a professional thief shot and left for dead by his associates and his wife. When he is introduced, at the beginning of The Hunter (1962; British title Point Blank), he’s walking across the George Washington Bridge, planning his revenge.”

"Welcome back to the world, Mr. Dortmunder."

Patti Abbott is the mastermind responsible for the Friday’s Forgotten Books meme, and this past Friday was devoted to Donald E. Westlake. I was first tipped off about it by Barry Ergang, who wrote a fabulous review of God Save the Mark, and then others turned in reviews, including John at Pretty Sinister Books and Sergio from Tipping My Fedora. I had no idea about the event beforehand or I might have tried to participate myself—but after seeing so many fantastic reviews, I knew I had to join in the fun and discover Donald E. Westlake for myself. I initially planned to read and review God Save the Mark, but in a mix-up worthy of a Westlake novel itself, iTunes decided it wasn’t going to make things so simple. To make a long story short, I ended up getting a copy of Westlake’s The Hot Rock, and I had plenty of time to read it today. I ended up having so much time, in fact, that I finished the book!

The Hot Rock (1970) is the first book in the John Dortmunder series and was also turned into a movie in 1972. The main character is John Dortmunder, a criminal mastermind whose specialty is planning heists. He gets out of prison to start the book off, and due to a mishap he couldn’t possibly have foreseen, he misses out on a chance to make an easy $300. Perhaps this was an omen he chose to ignore; perhaps it was coincidence. Whatever it was, John’s friend Kelp nearly runs him over in a Cadillac and then asks him to help out on a job. And that’s just the first four pages.