The Hunter

Parker, no first name, no last name. Shot five times by his wife and his friend Mal and left for dead with the house burning down around him, Parker has somehow crawled through the wreckage, pilfered a wallet or two, opened a checking account in someone else's name, and kited the checks into a grubstake. Parker is not to be trifled with. He's out for revenge, retribution, and his $45,000 share of the loot that his wife and Mal absconded with.

Parker is a raging dynamo and a moody, hulk of a man who doesn't need any weapons to kill, just his bare hands. Even toughs hired by the Outfit stand no chance on his warpath. It's as if Conan the Cimmerian was reborn as a twentieth century bank robber. There's no soft inner core to Parker. But then show more again, after being shot five times and set on fire, who would really be willing to listen to reason. He's told the Outfit is like the Postal Service, coast to coast, so what. Parker wants his money and no one is going to stand in his way.

This is a full-on action story from beginning to end with no breaks. In sparse language, Westlake (aka Richard Stark) has created some really great characters. show less

Nope, didn't care much for this. Not denying that Westlake knows his way around a typewriter, there are some great turns of phrase here and "hard-boiled" feels like a lazy way to telegraph just how hard this goes. But honestly, Parker just annoys me. A completely amoral killer with no other redeeming quality than getting revenge on someone who's just as awful as he is except more of a coward, and so ludicrously good at what he does that it ends up reading like wish fulfillment even without all the fairly skeevy "all women want him because they think he'll kill them" stuff. There's no tension here, no reason to believe Parker won't do exactly what he sets out to do. No humour, no self-awareness. I didn't like Ramsay Bolton either.

Allegedly, Westlake, when writing under the name Stark purposely adjusted the writing style to be “stark.” In other words, its spare and direct just like all the hardboiled noir readers crave.

This is a revenge novel, but we do not get the backstory until chapter six. That makes it interesting writing because for the first five chapters the reader is wide-eyed witness to violence and savagery for no clear reason. The violence in this novel feels ratcheted up from the noir/hardboiled we met in Red Harvest and The Big Sleep.

The offspring, clearly, of Chandler and Hammett and delightfully satisfying for fans of noir and crime fiction. Really not something you hand your sweet Aunt in a book swap, but definitely one you keep in the Gun show more Club Library, the Ship’s Library, and maybe, if you’re witty, the public defender’s office. I will definitely read onward in the series and share that I totally enjoyed this rippin’ tale of gangsters and hustlers. show less

This book introduces Parker, a criminal whose combination of street smarts and brute force has enabled him to live comfortably on the proceeds from his thefts. But his life is fundamentally disrupted when a job goes awry and one of his partners double-crosses him. Now Parker is consumed with thoughts of revenge, and he'll do anything to catch up with Mal Resnick, the man who stole both his money and his wife. Parker uses a variety of tactics, including intimidation and murder, to track Mal down; meanwhile, Mal learns that Parker is on his trail and tries desperately to escape his clutches. Parker's task is made more complicated by the fact that Mal is a memeber of an extremely influential crime syndicate called the Outfit, and the show more Outfit isn't inclined to let Parker have his way. In order to exact his revenge, Parker must eventually go up against the whole organization; but will killing Mal sign his own death warrant?

While I enjoy the occasional film noir or con movie, I don't tend to like the noir genre in book form. I tend to prefer my mysteries a little less violent, with a more clearly defined moral code (i.e., the killer is the bad guy). This book has a very cynical tone and a protagonist with few, if any, redeeming qualities. Frankly, I found Parker horrifying, especially in his violent treatment of women and his casual approach to killing anyone who gets in his way. Yet I actually ended up enjoying this book! I liked the writing style, which doesn't waste any words and gets straight to the point. I also really enjoyed watching the story unfold: the book alternates from Parker's story in the present to the story of the job that went wrong. Additionally, it was fascinating to see how Parker's situation changes throughout the novel, as his quest for vengeance against one man turns into a war against the entire Outfit. If I'm ever in the mood for a darker mystery, I may even continue with this series! show less

Started it last night and just finished it this morning. A great reminder of what it’s like when your eyes move too fast and you start looking ahead at the bottom of a page because you can't wait the ten seconds to see what happens. There are things Parker says that will make you laugh out loud and times when it reads like a parody of crime novels. It's crass, vulgar, and rated R.

And holy cow, if that wasn’t written for Lee Marvin, nothing was.

Also noteworthy in that it obeys the Seinfeld rule of “no learning / no hugging.” Parker isn’t redeemed, we never learn that his puppy was taken away as a child, we never get any sense of his inner life, he is wholly amoral, etc. He sets out to get even and does. (This is not a spoiler, show more as the reader knows this will happen by the end of page 2.) The suspense is never a matter of if--the suspense is all about how. show less

Richard Stark, a pseudonym for acclaimed crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, created a character named Parker in this novel, and Parker is as stark a creation as the author's nom de plume. The basis of at least two films, including the classic Point Blank of John Boorman and Lee Marvin, the book is gritty, hardboiled in the extreme, and wonderfully paced. To create a character as unappealing as Parker who is, however, fascinating and, in fact, appealing, is a rare achievement. Stark took Parker through a number of books. This one makes me want to read the others. Parker is a hard case, seeking revenge on the man and woman who double-crossed him. That the woman is his wife makes things just that much more intriguing. This is one tough show more book, and a great read. show less

The best compliment I can give the "Parker" novels by Donald E. Westlake is to admit that they've completely hijacked my usual schedule of reading and reviewing contemporary novels for the CCLaP website; originally planned to be a fun airplane diversion when I flew from Chicago to New Orleans and back about three weeks ago, I ended up reading the first book in the series, 1962's The Hunter, from start to finish in just half a day, and have since been greedily devouring the rest at a rate of a book or two every week, blowing off all my other reading commitments no matter how much I realize I shouldn't. (Sorry, all you authors who are patiently waiting for your book to be reviewed at CCLaP.)

That's high praise indeed from someone who show more usually doesn't like crime novels that much, with the key being that the main character is just so utterly fascinating, who like Ayn Rand's Howard Roark is less a real human being and more an example of the "theoretically perfect" version of the philosophy the author is trying to espouse (Stoicism here in the case of Westlake, versus Objectivism in the case of Rand). A professional thief who only pulls off one heist a year (netting him in today's terms somewhere between a quarter-million and a half-million dollars each time), so that he can spend the other 51 weeks lounging poolside at resort hotels and having rough sex with trust-fund blue-bloods with a taste for danger, Parker doesn't give even the tiniest little fuck about anything or anyone that falls outside of this monomaniacal routine, never negotiates nor compromises when it comes to his take or who he'll work with, doesn't have even the slightest hesitation about torturing or killing people who get in his way (yet avoids doing it anyway, simply because physical abuse is the "lazy" way to get what one wants, and being lazy is the first step towards getting caught), and possesses a psychotic distaste for such banal activities like "talking" and "having friends" or "acknowledging the inherent worth of the human race." (A true misanthrope, these pre-PC novels are not for the linguistically faint at heart, filled on every page with dismissive contempt for women, homosexuals, and people of color; although in Parker's "defense," such as it is, he also displays such contempt for most of the straight white males he meets too.)

There are 24 novels in the Parker series (which Westlake published under the pen-name "Richard Stark"), most from the '60s and early '70s, the series then activated again in the late '90s and up until Westlake's death in 2008; but the first three form a trilogy of sorts, in that they all concern one overarching storyline that spans from one book to the next, and so make a tidy reading experience for those who are curious about the series but don't want to make a 24-book commitment. (Most of the others are franchise-style standalone stories that each follow a similar blueprint -- Parker decides on his heist for that year, Parker obsessively plans out his heist for that year, then everything goes to hell when Parker actually tries pulling off his heist for that year.) The first, The Hunter, will seem familiar to many because it's been made into a movie so many times (including 1967's Point Blank with Lee Marvin, 1999's Payback with Mel Gibson, and 2013's Parker with Jason Statham); in it, we pick up a year after a heist that went bad because of a duplicitous partner, who needed both his share and Parker's in order to pay back the Mafia for an old job gone bad, the novel itself consisting of Parker basically crisscrossing the country and getting his revenge on every person who had been involved, eventually provoking the ire of the Mafia when he insists that they pay him back the money that had been stolen from him, even though they had nothing to do with the actual theft. The second book, then, 1963's The Man With the Getaway Face, sees Parker get plastic surgery in order to stay out of the glare of the Mafia's nationwide murder contract they now have out on him, just to have his new face divulged to the Mafia at the very end; so then in the third novel, The Outfit from later that same year, Parker decides to get the Mafia off his tail once and for all, enlisting his buddies-in-crime to pull off Mafia-victim heists across the country to the modern tune of ten million dollars in a single month, while he tracks down and kills the head of the entire organization by breaking into a mansion that's been weaponized like a fortress, after affecting a promise from the number-two in charge that he'll end the persecution if Parker does him this "favor."

Like Parker himself, these novels are quick and lean, part of what makes them so obsessively readable; Westlake had a real talent for stripping narratives down to just their bare essentials, then cleverly invented a character for whom this fast-paced minimalism works perfectly, a true human monster but one you can't help but root for anyway, if for no other reason than because he has zero tolerance for the chatty bullshit and regards for acquaintances' feelings that you as a non-psychotic are forced to deal with in your own schmucky non-bank-robbing life. (Stupid schmucky non-bank-robbing life!) Unfortunately my obsessive focus on these books must come to an end soon -- I simply have to get back to the novels I'm "supposed" to be reading, plus I can already tell by the fifth book that this series gets a lot more formulaic as it continues, which I bet will dampen my enthusiasm on its own -- but I couldn't let the opportunity pass by to mention how unexpectedly thrilled I was by at least the first few books in the lineup, picked up on a whim completely randomly but that have turned out to be some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire last year. They come strongly recommended whenever you have some downtime soon, especially to those like me who aren't natural fans of this genre to begin with. show less