The man is Richard Stark (also sometimes known as Donald E. Westlake) and his newest Parker novel, Ask the Parrot took me all of two days to finish. It had been a long time since I was able to burn through a book like that, but if anybody can push me, it’s Stark.
The novel is only 240+ pages. It follows on Stark’s previous novel, Nobody Runs Forever, which left us faithful readers with a cliff-hanger. The arch-criminal Parker running up a steep, wet, muddy hill with dogs on his heels. The robbery in NRF went bad–worse than most of Parker’s heists–and he had to make a run for it. No gun, no car, no usable ID and only $4,000 in his pocket. Dogs on his heels. So what happens? He runs into a man with a gun. A gun and a rot in his guts for revenge.
What the man sees in Parker is a chance to get that revenge. Laid off from his job at the horse track for doing the right thing, the little cowardly man has been planning the perfect robbery for four years. All he lacked was the courage to pull it off.
But now, he has Parker. A professional thief who can make it all work. Of course, those of us familiar with the Parker novels know that nothing ever goes as planned. Parker knows this. The little man does not. But he’ll learn.
As with most Parker novels, NRF is divided into four chapters–emulating the classic “four act play” model. Act 1 sets up the drama, setting up the job Parker will be working for the rest of the book. Act 2 is the job itself, where everything goes wrong–usually because one of Parker’s accomplices gets too smart for his own good. Act 3 is never told from Parker’s point of view, but focuses on the secondary characters of the book, giving the reader a look at the inside thoughts of those who surround the main character. Then, Act 4 has Parker return, ready to fix all that went wrong in Act 3. This is the classic Parker model, and Westlake has used it to build some of the best criminal noir novels on the shelf. But Westlake has been playing with it a bit in his most recent novels, fiddling with an alchemical mixture that already produces gold. And in doing so, he’s written some of the best Parker novels of his career.
And Parker himself is still the same brutal bastard he always is. No honor among thieves. Just a practical man who understands the bloody business he’s in. At one point, when forced to pull a gun, he’d rather tie up his victim and leave them be. When asked why, he replies simply, “Because killing makes the law work harder.”
Not because he puts any value on human life or because killing is any kind of moral issue. It’s a practical issue. It makes his job harder. That’s Parker. A man I’d never want to meet, but damn, if it ain’t fun to watch him work.