Scott's Reviews > The Hunter

3.5 stars

"The funny pages call it 'the syndicate.' The goons and hustlers call it 'the Outfit.' You call it 'the Organization.' 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, not mincing words when confronting an adjutant crime boss, on page 158

I've plowed through a number of the early books in the long-running 'Parker' series this year - thank you, Starr Books (two locations!) of southeastern Pennsylvania - and found them all to be uniformly excellent hardboiled crime tales. Finally and recently obtaining a copy of the debut story, The Hunter, presents an interesting if not outright blasphemous sort of dilemma for a fan. The two distinct film adaptations of both the character and plot - somewhat memorably with Mel Gibson as 'Porter' in the gritty Payback (1999), but legendarily with Lee Marvin as 'Walker' in the ultra-stylish noir Point Blank (1967) - do much to improve on and/or just overshadow this novel and make it seem almost ordinary in comparison. Still, it was much worth the read as the starting point for a series comprised of 24 books over four decades (!), and it was entertaining to read about the terse professional thief coldly exacting revenge on both a turncoat confederate who left him for dead AND a criminal consortium that is outright refusing to pay him his owed share of the loot. It's just that . . . as I was reading it I'd continually think of the late actor Lee Marvin, in one of his trademark hard-as-nails performances, and a wonderful line-up of character actors bringing this crisp story to life in groovy and glorious Metrocolor via the 1967 film. A rare case of the movie being better than the book? Unusually, yes.