RICHARD STARK NOVELS -- A REVIEW

RICHARD STARK NOVELS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 28, 2009

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Call me an intellectual snob, but I wasn’t aware of the Richard Stark novels until I saw an advertisement for them from the University of Chicago Press in The New York Review of Books, a journal of essays on books to which I have subscribed to for many years.

A writer myself, over the years since a boy, I have gone through the American and European classic novels, and then increasingly on to novels of the more superfluous and contemporary class of what I call escape reading, which includes a good number of mystery novels. Joyce Carol Oates is right. Once you read a typical mystery novel, a few days later you can’t remember the story much less the plot line.

In my undergraduate years at the University of Iowa, I was a chemistry major but was opened to a whole new world when taking two required core courses for a degree. They were “Modern Literature” and “Greeks and the Bible.”


Being an Irish Roman Catholic boy, I was familiar with the writings of St. Paul through the gospels, but I had never read the Bible, or, indeed, the Greek classics. The epistles of the gospels provided moral lessons, which the texts of the Letters of St. Paul provided grounding. I found Protestants were much more familiar with the Bible than I was, and so this was a further revelation of my ignorance, while my Jewish friends in college could quote the Old Testament as if it were a family heirloom, which it was to them.

Before such exposure, I felt all the answers were in science and mathematics and I didn’t have to bother my mind about literature, sentence structure, or any of those light weight subjects that went nowhere and ordinary people filled their minds with.

Because of exposure to these two core courses, I was moved to squirrel in electives far from my major in such courses as “Shakespeare,” “The American Novel,” and “Understanding Fiction and Poetry.”

Once I graduated, and now was a chemist in research & development, I returned to only reading science, that is, until I took a job as a chemical sales engineer in the chemical industry to make more money to support my family. It was then that I discovered the importance of those two core courses and the subsequent electives. They became the foundation to my understanding of people and how to deal with them. No surprise, I imagine, my first book was CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970).

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Fast forward to the time of my first retirement in my mid-thirties, now with a passion to be a writer, yes, of novels and short stories, finding instead that I lacked the tools, the cadence, the sense and the connection such writers have with their readers. Curiously, now forty years later, I have written seven other nonfiction books, and only one novel, which was a memoir of my youth (IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE Authorhouse 2003). I am working on a novel of South Africa where I lived during the time of apartheid. I mention this because I find writing good fiction very hard work. So, I have great respect for those that do it well.

It was then that I timidly started to read such writers as Ross McDonald, to reread Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and others. I had worked around the world and had seen pathos first hand, finding that these writers, and others like them, looked into the heart of man with the ability to express what they saw honestly and convincingly. Increasingly, I found myself reading mystery novels, and there I discovered some of the best writing I had experienced, a genre I had always considered inferior to mainstream fiction.

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It was how I came to read Richard Stark’s “The Hunter,” with one of the pen names of the prolific crime fiction writer, Donald Westlake. I have since read “The Man With the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit.” I am reading them in order as they were published, and plan to read all twenty-four of his novels under that pen name. I’ll tell you why.

Stark writes like a movie in your head. You forget that you are reading a book and hear the characters talking, are surprised and shocked by their actions, and wonder why you are not appalled by antics of the main character, “Parker.” He is paradoxically moral in an amoral way, visceral without the claptrap of stereotype, and has a code of conduct that is outside the law but works for him because he never abandons it. Secular and sacred society is irrelevant to him because he has no appetite for the ambivalence of truth or the ambiguity of justice.

Parker, however, is not a one-dimensional “American Adam” as depicted by actor John Wayne and described by Garry Wills as “the archetypal American displaced person who has arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleaning the world of things that need killing, loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscope direction-setter, a traveling norm.”

Parker, alas, would find this pathetically romantic. He has no redeeming features to think of, although he resembles the American Adam but in three-dimensions. He is surviving in a jungle in which the world has become using his wits, which are considerable, to get in and out of danger to embrace the next episode he knows inevitably confronts him. He lives in a godless world where homicide is only an option of the last resort and the killing must be consistent with his godless code. He is a survivor in which the world has gone dead to meaning, where the moment only resonates with the prehensile mind.

Read “The Hunter” and you are introduced to a man who understands why his wife tried and thought she killed him, and why he had to kill his wife, and then why he had no other option than to look for and kill the man who made that her only option.

In “The Man With the Getaway Face,” the economy of style has the bite of a language of clarity and power, and of imagery that compares favorably with Graham Greene’s “This Gun for Hire.” Parker has killed the man who orchestrated his murder using his wife as his instrument. He then feels obliged to kill the man’s boss in “The Outfit,” which is akin to the Mafia. This set of actions has him on the run seeking anonymity in plastic surgeon. But with everything Parker does, it comes up with double crosses that he has to finesse only to again become finessed by them.

In “The Outfit,” his cover blown, and his new face now the object of the Outfit to permanently erase, Parker doesn’t run from contract killers but embraces the challenge against a stacked deck. He is a thinking man without portfolio, a man of the street, hard as nails, as resolute to exterminate his enemies as they are resolved to do him in. So, he hijacks their hijacked trucks, kills their hired guns, and disrupts their businesses, knowing all the time that this war has no end but simply new beginnings.

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard, an artist of the genre in his own right, celebrates the power and economy of Stark’s style. Leonard once advised never to start a novel with the weather. Stark goes one better: he sets the tone of the whole novel in the first sentence. In the three books I’ve read to date, here are the first sentences:

(1) “The Hunter”: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.”

(2) “The Man With the Getaway Face”: “When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.”

(3) “The Outfit”: “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.”

You get a sense in the first novel of an angry guy, in the second surprised at the disconnect between the image in the mirror and himself, and in the third something abrupt and devastating has entered the sanctuary of his uneasy peace.

These are dark or noir novels of the underbelly of society where people live in what William Faulkner called “quiet desperation.” The twenty-four novels were published from 1962 to 2008, the year of the death of their creator, Donald Westlake. You only have to listen to the nightly television news of your city to know that Parker lives, breathes, and is plotting his revenge around the corner from where you live. This gives a sense of urgency, timeliness, and trepidation against the softness and denial in which most of us encounter our daily world, choosing not to see or experience the ugliness that poisons the air we breathe.

These are not detective novels, not police journals, not law and order court dramas, but gnarled, sinewy, scarred, knotted and gripping stories of life that feeds off society but pays it no mind. The women are as hard and as cunning as the men, while love is a word that has never entered either gender’s vocabulary. Why read these novels?

If you are an inveterate reader, read these novels for the prose, style and clarity of the writing. If you are a writer, read them to experience the humbling sense of being in the presence of a master of language and ambience. If you are a student of human behavior, read them to get a sense of the ugliness that hides in us all under the patina of beauty. If you are a philosopher, and who isn’t, read them to get a sense of why the world periodically goes haywire.

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