You probably haven’t ever noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice everything. That’s their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers’ work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack.
… racetrack.
They’re thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They’re pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you’re planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t want to cross him, and you don’t want to get in his way, because he’ll stop at nothing to get what he’s after.
Parker, the ruthless antihero of Richard Stark’s eponymous mystery novels, is one of the most unforgettable characters in hardboiled noir. Lauded by critics for his taut realism, unapologetic amorality, and razor-sharp prose-style-and adored by fans who turn each intoxicating page with increasing urgency-Stark is a master of crime writing, his books as influential as any in the genre. The University of Chicago Press has embarked on a project to return the early volumes of this series to print for a new generation of readers to discover-and become addicted to.
In The Hunter, the first volume in the series, Parker roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption.
“Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”-Washington Post Book World
“Elmore Leonard wouldn’t write what he does if Stark hadn’t been there before. And Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t write what he does without Leonard. . . . Old master that he is, Stark does all of them one better.”-Los Angeles Times
“Donald Westlake’s Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you’ve been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you’ll want on that desert island.”-Lawrence Block
This book is the epitome of the revenge thriller, the kind of story that has been told over and over again, but it has a certain style that hits home. It’s been been made into a movie a few times, my favourite being the Mel Gibson version, and retitled as PAYBACK. The character of Parker is ruthless in his act of revenge against the wife and his bank robber colleague. He comes back from the edge of near death to get his money back and finding himself up against local thugs and the local mobsters. But it looks like nothing with stop Parker from his ultimate revenge. I love it.
Sparse. Stripped-down. Addictive. A reader turned me on to this series that was quite famous a generation before me. If you enjoy witty, biting crime tales with no frills, this is for you.
This is hard-boiled heist fiction, the first in a series, which was published in 1962. It’s a bit Hemingway meets Goodfellows, with a classic anti-hero. I read it as research, and enjoyed it, particularly the many obvious anachronisms (literary and cultural).
And I recommend the ENTIRE SERIES.
Stark (Donald Westlake) develops his character, Parker, the way a fish tank develops slime. You don’t get the entire picture in The Hunter. And boy was I glad for this. And those fish. They are pretty, pretty, pretty happy fellas, too.
No one stated the case better than John Banville in the introduction to these Chicago reprints, that Stark creates a character with no moral compass, only a drive to get what he feels is his due.
Over the course of time you have to adjust your own knowledge of the world, however full your scope may be, to compensate for his limitations (or yours) and discover how his consciousness (for he does have one, plus genuine emotions) functions from one moment to the next.
This is Stark’s gift as a writer, playing this moral game with the reader through Parker’s character, testing us to see what insight we can gain on humanity in general, and on our own in particular, through Parker’s conception of the world and his behaviors. His ruthless, bloody often murderous behavior.
I’ve loved the movie Payback for years, and finally decided to sit down and read the novel that inspired the film. It did not disappoint. Gritty, grim, and violent, the writing is sparse and the plot moves fast. As an unapologetic anti-hero, Parker is on a quest to get revenge on the man who wronged him and take back what he’s owed. If he has to go up against the most powerful crime syndicate in the country, so be it. This is the first book in a series, and I definitely intend to find out where the story goes.
Richard Stark (Donald Westlake under one of his many pseudonyms) burst onto the scene with The Hunter, a gritty, brutal novel about master criminal Parker.
Parker is often called an anti-hero, and so he is, but usually “antihero” just means a little strange or unusual as heroes go. Not Parker: he’s a vicious, utterly amoral, ruthless thief and killer. Many critics have noted that Parker is properly speaking a sociopath, completely unable to understand the normal moral-ethical principles that guide how the rest of us interact. Which should make Parker someone we love to hate, or maybe an object of fearful fascination, a la Hannibal Lecter or someone like that. Nope!
Parker is weirdly–well, not likable, but we cheer for him. We want him to win. And every time we cheer for Parker, we have to wonder why. He has so little going for him, in the sense that this is most definitely not someone you’d want to meet. He’s a monster. And yet, novel after novel, we want him to win.
Parker novels have a relatively constant structure; as Lawrence Block once pointed out, if you think writing formula novels is easy, you haven’t tried it. They’re written in a clean, spare, hard-edged prose that almost never weakens or slips. With very few exceptions (such as Butcher’s Moon), they’re short and to the point.
All in all, the Parker novels, beginning with this one, The Hunter, are a master-class in noir crime fiction.
This is the classic tale that starts the Parker series
This is a classic hard-boiled novel, the first book in a series that would ultimately run to twenty-four books published between 1962 and 2008. The series featured a brutal, smart, amoral professional criminal known only as Parker who worked with crews of other professional criminals and usually focused on robbing banks, armored cars or other such targets. Parker was not a professional killer, although he never balked at killing anyone who got in the way of the job at hand.
He also never hesitated to kill anyone who double-crossed him, and as the book and the series open, Parker has been double-crossed in the worst possible way, shot by his wife at the end of a job and left for dead. The wife then ran off with one of Parker’s partners from the job, along with Parker’s share of the loot. Needless to say, Parker, who luckily survived the attempt on his life, is not in a good mood when we first meet him, and Stark’s introduction of his protagonist ranks as one of the best in crime fiction.
Pissed at the world and determined to get revenge, Parker is stalking across the George Washington Bridge into New York City, a “big and shaggy” man, with “flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short….His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless.”
“Office women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations above their nylons….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.”
Parker has traced his wife to New York and arrived there virtually penniless. He’s determined to deal with her and, through her, to find the partner who betrayed him and stole the money that was Parker’s share of the job they had pulled.
It won’t be easy, and complications ensue, one after the other. But Parker will not be deterred, even when he learns that the man who betrayed him has used his money to repay a debt to the Outfit and is now protected by them. To get his revenge, Parker will have to take on the Outfit all by himself. But what the hell does he care; he won’t rest until he gets what he’s owed.
Richard Stark is the pen name of Donald Westlake, a prolific writer who is otherwise best known for the comedic Dortmunder crime novels that he wrote under his own name. But the Parker novels are really his crowing achievement. They are taut, spare stories cut close to the bone and without a wasted word. And there’s absolutely nothing funny or redemptive about them. Parker’s is a tough, brutal and dangerous world; there’s no room for any sentimental nonsense and watching him make his way through that world is one of the most enjoyable experiences in the world of crime fiction.
As a side note, this book was ultimately filmed twice, once as “Point Blank,” in 1967, starring Lee Marvin as Parker, and again in 1999, as “The Hunter,” with Mel Gibson in the role. The Lee Marvin Version is much the better of the two, and Marvin captures the character about as well as anyone could.