Stark World
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
D H Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
On his way to dinner in a Palm Beach restaurant, the crime writer Donald Westlake dropped down dead. As abruptly as in one of the plot twists in his books, Westlake's death halted one of the most fertile careers in American literature. For over half a century Westlake had pumped out - under his own name and a wide variety of pseudonyms - over ninety books (no-one, including Westlake, seemed sure of the exact total): mysteries, comedy thrillers, spy stories, screenplays, science fiction, pornography, even a children's book.
Most striking and original of all his works are the twenty-four novels Westlake penned under the name of Richard Stark, whose protagonist Parker (in good thriller tradition we are never told his first name) is a violent cold-blooded thief always ready to pull the trigger if someone is dumb enough to try to cross him. Parker – later memorably brought to the screen by Lee Marvin in the film Point Blank2 - first marched on to the page in Westlake's novel The Hunter in 1960:
His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins ... his face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless ...
Parker, shot and left for dead by his partner and unfaithful wife, returns like an avenging revenant, relentlessly working his way up the chain of command of the 'Outfit', a Mafia-like organization, to retrieve his share of the original loot. He is the ultimate stripped down loner, driven solely by self interest and cool criminal professionalism. A heister who lives between jobs in expensive resort hotels under a series of aliases, Parker has no past to speak of, no interests and no interior life. Food and drink are simply fuel to him. He has no small talk, no sense of humour. When not involved in a heist he spends his time, lounging on beaches or in hotel bedrooms, idly watching whatever comes to hand.
From the outset Westlake's novels brought a large and admiring post bag from men in prisons and ghettoes. It is easy to see their attraction for such readers, but over time they have also become the object of a much broader cult. Deservedly so, for they are a gripping read. From their first sentences they grab you by the throat:
'When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.'
Firebreak (2001)
'When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness of the cinder block corridor beneath the stage.'
Comeback (1997)
Land on planet Stark, and you breathe an air that is dangerously addictive. With their violent action set against the bleak backdrops of empty lots, cheap hotels and disused buildings, they ignite a high compression mix of psychological tension and explosive energy. Told in taut, spare prose, they fuse dialogue as sharp as a knife with sly, black humour and non-stop action. They are irresistibly kinetic. I defy anyone to read the climax of The Seventh/The Split (1966) without a quickening pulse as Parker chases his opponent through forests and finally corners him in an unfinished building, pursuing him floor to floor as his antagonist showers down cement bags from above.
Westake is a master of the sudden narrative electric shock. There is always an unexpected reversal lurking round the next corner. Complex, overlapping time sequences are often deployed, as in the movies of Quentin Tarentino (who, it should be noted, is very much in the tradition of Westlake).Vividly visual, it is no accident that several of the Parker novels have been made into movies. Westlake himself drew a distinction between fictional and cinematic techniques:
A movie has got to be about one person in motion. A novel can run off in a lot of different directions but a movie's got to watch one guy keep going, and that's what these books all are – just one guy keeping going.3
In fact, though, his novels successfully combine both intricate plots and irresistible narrative drive. His plots have all the intricacy of Chandler's but none of their incomprehensibility. A key image in the Parker novels is a man in motion - on the run or on the hunt. The very first Parker novel, The Hunter (1960), opens with him marching into New York across the George Washington Bridge on his way to get even with the Outfit. Most end with him heading off into the unknown in search of a new identity, a new job, a new life. As the police dogs close in, Breakout (2002) ends with the statement, 'He kept on climbing'.
Stark's world might be criticized for being flat and cartoonish and his characters as superficial. But this misses the point. Westlake presents a distorted image of the world but one that is nevertheless sharply illuminating. The effect of his characters (as Eliot once remarked of Ben Jonson's) comes not from how they act upon one another but how they fit in with each other4. Together, they create a coherent world - one that is at an angle to our world but nevertheless reflects it.
Superficially, there appears to be no conventional moral accounting in Stark's world. It is often described as 'amoral'. Their hero is 'bad', there are few 'good' characters, and they often come to grief while the criminals go unpunished. Actually, though, Parker does have a moral code – albeit a highly idiosyncratic and subversive one – and, in the course of the novels develops deep loyalty to one particular woman. But the 'morality' of the novels goes even deeper than this. Taken overall, they present a series of ironic morality tales, black comedies of self deception, leading inevitably by to disappointment and ultimate defeat.
Tight Places
All Stark's characters are in a box of some kind: trapped, under the gun, caught in a psychological or situational bind. Reflecting the novels' obsessive sense of psychological constriction, the novels are crammed with tight places. A recurrent feature is the stand-off – a verbal duel with a cop or a rival where a single careless concession or admission could spell disaster. Entrapment repeatedly takes physical form. 'There was no way out' is the key sentence opening Slayground (1969), a novel whose entire action takes place in an out-of-season funfair, where local mobsters try to hunt down Parker and the loot he has with him. Of course, in novels dealing with break-ins, hideouts and stashes, you would expect a fair number of 'tight places' but the claustrophobia of Parker novels goes far beyond this and represents a profound personal and social horror of powerlessness and entrapment.
Unlit, maze-like buildings are often the backdrop for the climaxes of the Stark novels, deadly shoot-outs in which Parker is forced to crawl and grope around, in a cat-and-mouse struggle against opponents whose positions he can only guess at. Parker finds himself in this situation in Deadly Edge (1971), battling the psychopath Jessup and his sidekick, the hallucinating retard Mannie, in an empty lakeside residence, lit only by a single candle. The situation reappears in extended form in Comeback (1997), the Parker novel Westlake wrote following his twenty-three year lay-off from the series. This time Parker is confronting a treacherous associate Liss and his partner, Quindero, in an abandoned Frank Lloyd Wright-type house. Locked in closet in a converted lift-shaft, Parker rips away a shelf bracket and uses it to prise and delve his way out, finally dispatching them in a gripping climax that resembles a game of three-dimensional chess played out in complete darkness.
Coffins apart, the ultimate box is of course a prison cell, and that is where Parker ends up in Breakout (2002), on remand after a botched job, flanked by interrogators and potential snitches:
This was the place before the decisions were made, so this was the place of hope ... But because it was a place of hope, of possibilities, of decisions not yet made, it was also a place of paranoia ... These are the people you live among, these are the rules you live within. This is your world now, and it's the other world that isn't real anymore.
Parker manages to escape but only to find himself trapped in yet another kind of prison. Breaking into a jewelry store in a converted armory with the local gang that sprung him from gaol, he finds the tunnel they entered by has collapsed behind them. Frustration and tension mount to fever pitch as each wall they break through seems only to lead to a further wall. Even when they get out they find themselves caught up in a tense net of subterfuge and surveillance. At the very end of the novel the old rig driver (himself an ex-con) who gives Parker a ride out of this labyrinth of walls and lies re-emphases the underlying theme – horror of entrapment:
'I know there's fellows belong in there ... but after being in there myself I could never put a man in cage, personally. Never.'
Straights and Crooks
Stark's world revolves around the clash between deviance and conformity. Against the repressed and repressive mass Westlake pits the alienated outsider, the hungry loner. Parker and the strings of partners with whom he regularly but only temporarily teams up with (the 'mechanics') have chosen to operate on the edge, to live in the wild, to take their chances in a brutal and uncertain environment where no-one can be fully trusted and even the strong and self-controlled may not survive, and where, when things go awry, there is no-one to turn to.
Sandra Loscalzo, the tough-talking bounty hunter with whom Parker teams up in Dirty Money (2008) sums up the ethos:
"I figured out when I was a little girl, what my idea of the world is."
"What's that?"
"A frozen lake," she said. "Bigger than you can see the end of. Every day I get up, I gotta move along the lake. I gotta be very careful and very wary, because I don't know where the ice is too thin I gotta listen and watch ... You go see a war movie, the guy gets hurt, he yells, 'Medic!', they come take him away. Out here you get hurt, you yell 'Medic!' you know what happens?"
"Yeah I do."
"There's no sides," she said. "No street. We just do what we've got to do to get across the lake."
Westlake maintained he was initially spurred into writing the novels by the stifling conformity of 1950s America:
I guess it all came out of growing up in the Fifties when that all monolithic America thought its society was now perfect, and therefore nobody could be different. Conformity and togetherness, and all that idealised stuff, and it seemed to me at the time like a society of ants. Everything was given; there didn't seem to be anything to argue about. Being anti-social was a lonely business then. I just had this feeling, in my twenties, that if you had your own personality, you were like a cockroach living in a wall.5
A small but telling image of ant-like social conformity occurs in Nobody Runs Forever (2004) as Parker watches the traffic snaking past on a freeway:
This part of the road was always busy, the big rigs and the tourists and the commuters streaming along together, everybody at eighty, holding inside their own little bubble of space in the flow or there'd be hell to pay. (My italics)
While no social realist and a novelist whose typical techniques are those of reduction, abstraction and exaggeration, Westlake shows a sharp eye for the absurdities and hollow conventions of different American milieux – brilliantly capturing in Flashfire (2000) the snobberies and pretensions of the 'plump and comfortable herd' of Palm Beach rich with their carefully toned and tended elderly bodies, their ceaseless round of celebrity fundraisers and their armies of gigolos, bankers, realtors and social secretaries. Other targets in the novels include mercenary tele-evangelists (Comeback, 1997), mindless fundamentalist survivalist paramilitaries (also in Flashfire), posturing state politicians (Backflash, 1998), free-spending dot.com millionaires and the cynical manipulators of the contemporary art market (Plunder Squad, 1972, and Firebreak, 2001.
But Westlake does not simply pit the criminal world against the straight. Indeed he often shows the straight world to be criminal and the criminal world bizarrely straight. This criminal conformity is embodied in the Outfit, a bloated, over-bureaucratic organization that is an inverted version of mega-corporations like General Motors or IBM. Inside the Outfit everything has been reduced to precedent and hierarchy, and all competitive edge has been lost. Threatened by Parker and his partners, its members simply fold. One of the Outfit's 'executives' explains to his 'CEO' that the cause is galloping social conformity:
'You mean the Outfit's getting soft?'
... 'I mean the Outfit is being civilized, is being absorbed into the culture. The organization is getting too highly organized.'
... 'What do we do about it? You got any ideas?'
'I don't think anything can be done about it. If you managed to convince the employees of the Club Cockatoo that they are crooks after all, nine out of ten of them would quit on the spot and go get jobs some place else. They don't want to be divorced from society ... a result of prosperity, I suppose. During the Depression there was no such problem.'
The Outfit (1963)
Repeatedly, Parker outwits and out-manoeuvres this lumbering behemoth, extracting from it his share of the loot in The Hunter (1960), intimidating it into dropping its pursuit of him in The Outfit; accepting its commission to take a casino in The Handle (1966) but pocketing the proceeds for himself and his partners; escaping a highjack by its members in Plunder Squad (1972); rolling up and then rubbing out the whole of one of its city operations in Butcher's Moon (1974); foiling a further assassination attempt by it on him in Firebreak (2001) and, in Westlake's final novel, Dirty Money (2008), audaciously talking it into a currency swap advantageous to him.
As regards straight society, Parker is both a reaction against it and its ironic reverse image. He is often characterised as a kind of innovative entrepreneur, like 'a businessman in a tough business' or a specialist professional:
In his dark windbreaker and black chinos and heavy black shoes he looked like some kind of skilled workman, freelancing, brought in by a contractor to do one specific job. Which he was.
Backflash (1998)
Significantly, dislocated professionals recur throughout the novels. Several of Parker's associates are craftsmen or skilled specialists who can no longer find a place in mainstream straight society, like the actor Grofield who uses his criminal profits to prop up his ailing theatrical enterprises or the carpenter Pete Rudd in The Seventh/The Split (1966) the market for whose hand-built furniture has been undercut by mass-produced schlock. We are left in no doubt that under its straight surface capitalist society with its sudden sidelining shifts can be just as brutal as the underworld.
However it is in one of Westlake's non-Parker novels, The Ax (1997), set in the downsizing world of contemporary America, that this theme receives its sharpest, bleakest expression. Burke Devore, its narrator, tells how, having been 'let go' as a production manager from 'Halcyon Mills', he at first tries all the usual ways to find another job:
I did it their way for eleven months ... This entire charade as though we were all, the company and its representatives and the specialists and the counsellors and yours truly, as though we were all working together on some difficult but worthy task, the end result of which was supposed to be my personal contentment. Sense of fulfillment. Happiness ... Don't go away mad; just go away.
But there are just too many other Burke Devores out there also hunting for jobs. With money running low and cracks beginning to fissure his marriage, Devore hits on a uniquely and lethal strategy: to reduce the competition by rubbing out his rivals. Advertising as a company looking for executives, he amasses CVs and proceeds to bump off their owners. And it works. He not only gets away with it and looks set to land a new job at the end of the book but has the wry satisfaction of having the police pin the blame for the murders on one of his own victims!
What makes this fantastic tale credible is its matter-of-fact narration and steady accumulation of circumstantial detail coupled with the scalding sense of indignation driving Devore on. Devore concludes that:
Every era, and every nation, has its own characteristic morality, its own code of ethics, depending on what the people think is important ... Today, our moral code is based on the idea that the end justifies the means ... There was a time when that was considered improper, the end justifying the means, but that time is over. We not only believe it, we say it. Our government leaders always defend their actions on the basis of their goals. And every single CEO who has commented in public on the blizzard of downsizings sweeping America has explained himself with some variant on the same idea: the end justifies the means ... The end of what I'm doing, the purpose, the goal is good, clearly good. Want to take care of my family; I want to be a productive part of society; I want to put my skills to use; I want to work and pay my own way and not be a burden to the taxpayers. The means to that end has been difficult, but I've kept my eye on the goal, the purpose. The end justifies the means. Like the CEOs I have nothing to feel sorry for.
Vowing never to 'simply allow myself to fall back into the herd of steer mindlessly lurching toward the big dark barn where the mooing stops', Devore resolves 'to protect myself now. I will not be made a victim, never again. Anyone who tries to make trouble for me, from now on, with what I now know, anyone at all, corporate or personal, is in for a surprise.'
The message of the book, Westlake said, is that 'in truth, all bets are off. What I say in the book is that the moral code of our times is that the end justifies the means. I think that is true. That is what every issue of every newspaper is telling us.'6 Comparing it to the 1930s, he saw the main difference that we are now all isolated and forced to become self-interested loners – Parkers, in a word. If relevant in the 1990s, Westlake's novel has even greater resonance in today.
Significantly, it was in the same year, 1997, that The Ax was published that the character of Parker re-materialised in Comeback after a twenty-three year disappearance from Westlake's pages. Westlake has described this involuntary phenomenon:
Richard Stark proved to me he had a life of his own by simply disappearing ... he was gone ... refused to answer the phone. I tried for years. I would write fifty pages and discover it was awful ... a ghastly parody, a cheap imitation. And then suddenly he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor.7
What lay behind Parker's sudden vanishing and equally sudden return? It might have had something to do with the author's own hunger and rage. He came from a background where respectability was stretched tight:
'All the time I was growing up, he [Westlake's father] was marginal and white-collar, a bookkeeper, a clerk with New York State. Growing up in Albany, we knew people who were frankly poor. If you are frankly poor, then, well, that's it. If you are poor white-collar, it is pretending. It is putting on a good front and there is stress all the time.'8
Westlake created Parker at a time when he was a struggling young writer working within a society that he felt was fundamentally repressive. By the mid-1970s when Parker took his leave, Westlake had become much more established and successful. However, disappointment set in during the 1990s. Having won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for the film The Grifters9, Westlake was annoyed to be then turned down for two scriptwriting jobs in succession on account of his age. 'Parker came back,' according to Westlake, 'to say, "I'm older than you but I'm smarter than you. I'm better than you, faster than you and I'm still prettier than you."'10
On the Wild Frontier
As a creation Parker is an original but not entirely without forebears. There is a dash of alienated existential hero (Westlake, incidentally, is something of a cult in French intellectual circles, and Godard's 1966 film, Made in USA11, is based on Starks' The Jugger, although it failed to acknowledge its source and consequently banned in the US). Parker, though, is fundamentally in the American grain. His most immediate antecedents are the freelancing private eyes of Hammett and Chandler – but with this twist: while they may walk down the mean streets of the American underworld he is fully their resident.
In turn, those private eyes looked back – via the dime novels that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - to the lone gunmen of the American frontier – whom D H Lawrence's described as 'the myth of the essential white America'12. Parker for all his cars, bars and Miami hotels is in the tradition of this fatal frontier individualism.
Hemingway is another obvious influence, not just in Stark's taut, tight-mouthed style but the unflinching core of hard solitariness at the heart of the novels. Lawrence's encapsulation of the ethos of Hemingway's early short stories, In Our Time, could well apply to Parker:
Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away ...13
Throughout, Parker's disconnectedness, his lack of commitment to anyone or anything apart from his own self interest is emphasised. When he learns in The Jugger (1965) that a former associate, the retired cracksman, Joe Sheer, is in trouble he goes to investigate – but only to shield himself from possible disclosure:
As far as he was concerned, Joe could drop dead right now and that would be fine with Parker ... He was going [to find out about Joe] because in Joe's letter he saw a danger to himself much more obvious and lethal than any danger Joe had ever been trying to describe ... Joe was going senile. At seventy he'd lost every trace of the code of ethics he'd lived by all his life ... a man never apologised for what cards he'd been dealt ... a man was what the world decided he would be, and where the world decided he would be, and in the condition the world had chosen for him.
But this statement comes in one of the early novels and is not totally representative. In fact Parker often goes to great lengths to help out his fellow 'mechanics', staying behind after a failed heist in Breakout to help spring the girlfriend of his partner Ed Mackey from police custody and saving badly wounded associates three times (Handy McKay in The Mourner, 1963, and Grofield in both Butcher's Moon, 1974, and The Handle, 1966).
The flipside of Parker's loyalty to associates is his unremitting pursuit of double-crossers. The plots of twelve of the twenty-four Parker novels involve double-crosses of some kind or another followed by the tracking down and dispatching of their perpetrators. Scores have to be settled and accounts squared because they have broken the code of underworld professional ethics. As Parker says of the double-crossers he pursues in Flashfire (2000): 'these three are mechanics, we had an understanding, they broke it. They don't do that.'
For, in the tradition of western and private eye heroes, Parker is a man who lives by a personal code, albeit a perverse one. Whatever you may think of his crimes they are never petty or mean. He never deals in frauds, drugs or muggings but instead pulls off impersonal cash heists of corporations, banks, casinos, and stadiums. He always shares the proceeds meticulously with his partners, even saving their shares if they have been caught. While he is prepared to use violence to further his crimes he does so within strict limits, even going so far as to find out and use first names of 'civilians' in order to keep them calm and pliant.
And Parker is no sadist. Although in The Hunter (1960) he is driven by fantasies of revenge on Lynne, the wife who betrayed him, when they come face-to-face he finds himself unable to harm her, and her death comes about by suicide. It is true that Parker on one occasion uses force to extract information but it is emphasised that he 'hated this kind of thing, hurting people to make them talk. It was messy and time-consuming and there ought to be a better way. But there wasn't.' While he is prepared to kill to tie up dangerous loose ends, Parker never engages in gratuitous violence. He rejects Bet Harrow, the society beauty 'with a liking for self cruelty' who pursues him in The Mourner (1963) with the blunt comment: 'You can't be trusted. You like to watch violence too much.' Just as Parker is untouched by people and emotions generally, the pleasures of cruelty also leave him cold.
Satyrs and Safe Houses
The early Parker novels made great play of his irresistible sexual potency. Seeing him, all women, we were told, shivered spontaneously 'above their nylons' (it was the early 1960s!):
The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.
The Hunter (1960)
In these early novels Parker's sexual and criminal impulses follow a bizarre linked cycle. A stew of sexual restlessness is the first sign of a crime coming on ('He couldn't stop thinking about women, but he knew what that meant; it was just his nerves wanting him to work again', The Rare Coin Score, 1967). Then Parker loses all interest in sex until the job is over, at which point his libido surges back overwhelmingly ('It was always like this after a job. A satyr, inexhaustible and insatiable. He was twelve feet tall.' - The Mourner, 1963).
Westlake may have been trying to make some dubious Freudian point about the connection between sex and criminality. Whatever that might have been, there is no doubt that Parker is emotionally dead and has been since his wife's suicide:
There had never been a woman anywhere in the world to trouble him, till Lynn. There never would be again.
The Hunter (1960)
However in a later novel, The Rare Coin Score (1967) Parker gets involved with a woman called Claire, the widow of a pilot, who has got embroiled by her brother-in-law in the planned robbery of the rare coin convention to which Parker has also been recruited. Due to one of the double-crosses that are the hallmark of Parker crimes the job goes sour – violently so. Claire, badly shaken by the violence and unmoored from her old life, offers a tentative commitment to Parker, which he - equally provisionally - accepts:
'Oh,' she said. 'You mean I can't go back at all.'
'That's right,' he said, watching her.
She thought about it, looking at the dashboard and then looked back at Parker, saying, 'Will you take me with you?'
'For how long?'
She managed a wan smile. 'Until one of us gets bored, I suppose.'
The Rare Coin Score (1967)
They settle into a strange kind of semi-permanent relationship, shacked up between jobs in resort hotels until Claire gets a place of her own, a well-appointed lakeside house, where they embark on a strange, outwardly respectable double life – insulated within their exurban bubble and only connected by a long telephone line to the outer world by a retired associate who acts simultaneously as go-between and cut-out. From this house Parker, like a criminal parody of a businessman, periodically ventures into the larger world of danger and uncertainty, 'commuting' out into threat in order to support their lifestyle.
In marked contrast to all the buildings and rooms in the outer world that are perilous places of constriction and entrapment, Claire's house is a symbol of security, warmth and life-giving emotional release. When Parker comes home in Backflash (1998), we are told he 'stopped in the doorway to kiss her, and in that move opened himself to all the warmth he'd shut out since he'd gone away. The homecomings were always good, because they were a kind of coming back to life.'
While Claire remains repelled by the violence of Parker's world and holds herself aloof from it, she plays an increasingly active role, in Comeback (1997) investigating possible partners and cover roles, providing Parker with essential contacts when imprisoned in Breakout) and helping him reconnoitre a stash in Westlake's final novel, Dirty Money (2008). Significantly, several other strong female characters appear in the later group of novels including the hard-boiled detective Gwen Reversa, the bounty hunter, Sandra Lozcalzo, in Dirty Money and the Palm Beach real estate agent on the make, Leslie Mackenzie, in Flashfire (2000), who rumbles Parker early on in the novel but decides to throw in her lot with him in order to escape the constricting frustrations of her family life in West Beach.
Mackenzie, who is frigid and not physically attracted to Parker, nevertheless finds herself deeply drawn to him and not in a yielding way:
This time, she wasn't surprised by him, she was surprised by herself. She felt suddenly very strong. Her emotion towards Daniel Parmitt [Parker's alias] wasn't love or sex, but it was tender. It was almost, oddly, maternal. Now she was the strong one, she was the one who could help.
But to Mackenzie's chagrin Parker rebuffs her, deploying the house imagery that forms such an important symbolic strand in the novels:
'Claire is the only house I want to be in,' he said. 'All her doors and windows are open, but only for me.'
A blush climbed Leslie's cheeks, and she stepped back, looking confused, as though a door had just slammed in her face.
However Parker's two worlds – the savage world of his heists and the secure world of Claire – can never be totally insulated from one another. Repeatedly the first reaches out its fingers to the second. Their safety and the relationship on which it is based cannot be guaranteed for ever. It is always fragile and provisional. One day Parker, may not – probably one day will not – come back. The terse poignancy of their leave-takings is a repeated refrain running through the novels:
'I go away and I come back.'
She looked at him. 'Every time?'
'Except the last time,' he said.
Backflash (1998)
Islands of Self Delusion
Typically, a Parker novel kicks off in the middle of the action with a zinger of an opening, then gives the back story before again running on with the plot. As the action progresses, it spins off other loops, twisting and snaking around the main plot. Meanwhile, other loops - loose ends from the past – attach themselves, spider's thread-like, to the main plot. Then come the central action scenes of the action, invariably told from the viewpoints of a sequence of different characters. In Nobody Runs Forever (2004), for example, the climactic bank raid is related from the viewpoints of a dozen characters, switching between them more than thirty times.
The Man with the Getaway Face (1963) had pushed this technique to its extreme. The novel follows the parallel hunt for a plastic surgeon's murderer, Wells, whom Parker needs to track down in order to clear himself. However, unknown to Parker, another of the doctor's ex-associates, an ex-union organiser called Stubbs, is also on the trail. Stubbs is sub-normal, his brains having been scrambled in old pickaxe battles with strike-breakers. The novel brilliantly tells the hunt from Stubbs's angle, picking his way mired in a mist of partial comprehension, through a tangle of city streets and twisted neurones, as he closes in on his quarry.
Westlake's switches of narrative viewpoint are not merely devices to heighten tension and surprise – although they certainly do that – but are integral to the world of the novels, in which the limited awarenesses, the self deluding 'islands' of the characters' aspirations and expectations are set ironically against a much larger ocean of randomness and unpredictability. Just when everything seems to be going smoothly, Westlake unsnaps a trap door under his characters – and his readers.
Most of the bit part players in the novels are small-time chiselers, over-reachers, who bring disaster on their own heads through weakness, incompetence or neuroticism. As Parker comments, 'There is such a thing as loser mentality, and losing is both its cause and its symptom.' Typical is Hazen, the wretched river rat in Backflash (1998), recruited as help in Parker's heist of a riverboat casino but who then finds himself caught between Parker and some old biker associates who, sniffing easy gain, pressure Hazen into helping lay a trap for Parker. Ruefully, Hazen reflects:
Now there were all these different bunches of people, and him in the middle like a grain of wheat in a goddam mill ...You can't escape your goddam fate, that's all.
Inevitably the ambush misfires. The bikers all get shot, Hazen is unmasked, and, as part of the post-heist clean-up, almost as an after-thought, clinically despatched by Parker.
Always a blank dominant presence, Parker increasingly acts vis-a-vis the other characters as an impersonal nemesis, a sinister mentor malignly combining the roles of tempter, liberator and destroyer. The twist is that Parker too is as much victim as agent. Keeping control, staying on top of the unpredictable is an obsession with him. In Backflash (1998) there is an illuminating interchange in which Parker is asked whether he likes gambling:
Parker'd never thought about it, he just knew it was pointless and uninteresting. He said, 'Turn myself over to random events? Why? The point is to control events, and they'll still get away from you anyway. Why make things worse?
The novels repeatedly show that total control is illusory, even for so powerful a force as Parker. In half of them Parker ends up largely or totally unsuccessful, either empty-handed or on the run. These reversals run right back to The Hunter (1960) in which he finally wrested his money from the Outfit, only to lose it in a stupid mix-up over suitcases. In Stark's last novel, Dirty Money (2008), Parker tells a partner, 'There's no such thing as a deal ... There never was anywhere. A deal is what people say is gonna happen. It isn't always what happens.' In that novel, after the various share-outs and pay-offs (if you work it all out), Parker is barely left with just enough dollars out of the many millions from the heist to buy himself a new identity.
In the final group of novels Parker comes across as a character against whom the odds – social and technological - are increasingly stacked. He seems - I believe at least semi-deliberately on Westlake's part - like a stranded and beleaguered time traveller transported from the more forgiving noir-ish shadows of the 1940s and 1950s into the bright pin-sharp age of electronic transactions and surveillance. In Nobody Runs Forever (2004) his gang pulls off a successful heist of bank security vans only to find itself immediately pinned down in the empty church that is their hideout by circling police helicopters. As they ponder what to do, they blame the heightened security of the post-9/11 world for their predicament. 'Computer speaks to computer,' muses Parker, adding: 'It starts with technology, but it still ends with tracker dogs.' As the title indicates, even Parker's race may soon have its end and there be no more returns to the security of Claire's lakeside retreat.
Post-American Hero?
Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature identified two parallel developments in American fiction: the sloughing-off of the dead old European cultural epidermis alongside the emergence of a new and more whole-skinned 'integrative' form of hero. Paradoxically he detected its early lineaments among the lone killers of the fictional frontier:
Of course, the soul often breaks down into disintegration ... What true myth concerns itself with is not the disintegration product. True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white ... This is the very intrinsic—most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.14
Personally I doubt whether American literature will ever throw up the holistic hero of Lawrence's prediction. Indeed if it ever does, it may well be a sign that the American story itself is actually nearing its end. America is far too fractured and fraught for that, far too rich and bloated, various and riven. And for that reason, America will continue to need its anti-heroes like Parker - and probably always will to undercut its rich hypocrisies and stark contrasts.
Popular culture often captures cultural concerns more effectively – certainly more concisely and entertainingly - than works of heavier intellectual heft. Simenon's romans durs, for instance, act as a more accessible bypass round the denser centres of Sartre and Camus. The same could be said of writers like Westlake in relation to mainstream American literature. Parker is the existential anti-hero of crime writing. Maybe nobody runs forever, but – and despite Westlake's death – Parker will keep on climbing, now and into the future, a mythic underworld Sisyphus for our times.
Peter Snow, Oxford, May 2009
Notes
1 There are several bibliographies of Westlake's output, some of them available online (see, for instance, http://www.donaldwestlake.com/wks_biblio.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Westlake and www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/donald-e-westlake/ ).
2 Point Blank, directed by John Boorman (MGM, 1967).
3 Donald Westlake, quoted in an interview with Tom Dewe Mathews in The Guardian, 2 June 1999.
4 T. S. Eliot, 'Ben Jonson', in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 3rd enlarged ed., 1951), page 153.
5 Donald Westlake, quoted in an interview with Scott Bradfield in The Independent, 14 July 1990.
6 Donald Westlake, quoted in a review of The Ax by Blaine Harden in The Washington Post, 31 July 1997.
7 Donald Westlake, from his obituary by Jack Adrian in The Independent, 5 January 2009.
8 Donald Westlake, quoted in the review in The Washington Post, 31 July 1997.
9 The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears; screenplay by Donald Westlake based on the novel by Jim Harrison (Cineplex-Odeon Films, 1990).
10 Donald Westlake, from his obituary in The Independent, 5 January 2009.
11 Made in USA, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Anouchka Films, 1966).
12 D H Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels', in his Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Heinemann, 1924).
13 D H Lawrence's review of Ernest Hemingway's, In Our Time (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1st ed., 1925; 2nd rev. ed., 1930). For details and text of the review see Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pages 72-74.
14 D H Lawrence, 'Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels', in his Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Heinemann, 1924).
