Glenn Russell's Reviews > The Hunter

“When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”

The above is the first line of the first chapter of The Hunter, the first Parker novel by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark.

Mr. Westlake told an interviewer: "All fiction starts with language, what kind of language do you use - starts with the language, then goes to the story, then goes to the people." And regarding his Parker novels specifically: "I want the language to be very stripped down and bleak and no adverbs; I want it stark. So, the name will be Stark just to remind me what we're doing here."

As they say, the rest is history. Under the pen name of Richard Stark, grand master of crime fiction Donald E. Westlake went on to write 24 Parker novels - number 1-16 from 1962 to 1974 then number 17-24 from 1997 to 2008.

The Hunter introduces readers to Parker, one of the most memorable characters in all of fiction. That's right - not just crime fiction but all fiction.

Physically, Parker is "big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders ... 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 hair was brown and dry and dead,..His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless."

Parker is always Parker, he's never called by his first name, if he has one at all, but you can bet a mil if he did it wouldn't be Clarence or Alister or Yale.

Parker has been working heists for eighteen years, roughly one a year, where he joins other heisters on a job - hit an armored car, rob a bank, steal jewelry, that kind of thing, usually going for cash since it's the cleanest.

On the job, Parker is always the true professional - all business, focused, keenly perceptive, constantly thinking through the possibilities. Parker is also the ultimate heister - solid, steady, calm, cold, calculating, keen on self-survival and, last but hardly least, willing to kill whenever necessary.

Mr. Westlake recounts his dealings with publishers: "When Bucklin Moon of Pocket Books said he wanted to publish The Hunter, if I’d help Parker escape the law at the end so I could write more books about him, I was at first very surprised. He was the bad guy in the book."

Oh, yea, bad to the bone. Here's what Dennis Lehane, contemporary crime writer and lifelong fan of Richard Stark, has to say: "Parker is as bad as he seems. If a baby carriage rolled in front of him during a heist, he'd kick it out of his way. If an innocent woman were caught helplessly in gangster crossfire, Parker would slip past her, happy she was drawing the bullets away from him... If you stole from him, he'd burn your house - or corporation - to the ground to get his money back."

And that hardness remains consistent in all 24 Parker novels. As per Mr. Westlake, "I’d done nothing to make him easy for the reader; no small talk, no quirks, no pets. I told myself the only way I could do it is if I held onto what Buck seemed to like, the very fact that he was a compendium of what your lead character should not be. I must never soften him, never make him user-friendly, and I’ve tried to hold to that."

Turning to The Hunter, recall Parker tells that driver of the Chevy to go to hell. Parker's walking across the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan. Parker's going for a very specific reason: to find wife Lynn and a guy by the name of Mal Resnick since both wife and Mal pulled a double-cross on him back in California during a heist.

As he takes long strides across the bridge, Parker can feel his large hands around Mal's neck, squeezing, demanding Mal tell him how he can get his $45,000, his fair split from that California job. Then when Mal spills, Parker tightens his squeeze until Mal's cowardly eyes bulge and he breaths no more.

As to how it all plays out, you'll have to read for yourself. And I dare you to stop reading after you're done with chapter one. Shifting to philosophy, two of the many reasons why Richard Stark will appeal to a much wider audience than simply crime fiction buffs:

Number One:
On the Parker novels, the great Irish author/critic John Banville tells us: "This is existential man at his furthest extremity, confronting a world that is even more wicked and treacherous than he is." Since I'm a huge fan of existential literature with its themes of alienation, absurdity, freedom, authenticity explored by such French authors as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Georges Simenon and Pascal Garnier, I'm especially taken by Richard Stark.

Number Two:
Anthropologists cite prior to the advent of agriculture six thousand years ago, we humans were hunters for nearly one hundred thousand years. In many ways, Parker embodies this hunting spirit (The Hunter, so appropriate a title). Thus, on some level, we can feel a kinship with Parker.

Also, according to one of Westlake/Stark's leading critics, Parker is a wolf in human form. Now, of course, wolves hunt in packs. Parker is a heister and heisters, like wolves, work in packs. But here's the rub: the other men and women (mostly men) Parker must work with are human, all too human, with their bloody human emotions and human personalities that always seem to get in the damn way. And herein lies the great drama of the Parker novels - to see how Parker the wolf responds to all the many challenges and double-crosses he must inevitably deal with. So gripping.


American author Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008