This week we kick off an occasional new series of reviews of the Parker crime novels by Richard Stark.

If you know Parker, you understand. If you aren’t familiar with him, trust me: You are in for a treat.

In installment two, I’ll explain why he’s worthy of being discussed in this august forum.

But first, let’s chat a bit about the character, his creator, and why he matters.

Between 1962’s The Hunter and 2008’s Dirty Money, the prolific novelist Donald E. Westlake – writing as Stark – crafted 24 novels featuring the master criminal known simply as Parker.

Parker is a big man. His face looks like it was chiseled out of granite. His hands are large and veiny and dangerous. After Parker persuaded one low-level crook to take an action he didn’t want to, the crook later defended his actions by saying, “But he had big hands, Mal! Big hands!!”

Parker is a master planner for heists. Usually, someone brings him a suggestion for a robbery, and he then draws up the logistical arrangements for how to pull it off.

He then puts together a “string” of fellow criminals to do the job with him. A few are almost as competent as him. Most are not, leading to inevitable problems down the line, when one of them flakes out or makes an egregious mistake. Parker then goes into damage-control mode, often followed by “escape the police” mode. Sometimes this is also followed by “track down the other guy and finish him off” mode.

The heist itself can be anything from an armored car to a football game; a rare coin show to an Air Force base. On one occasion, he and his cohorts robbed an entire town, all at once. Westlake demonstrates remarkable creativity in coming up with so many varied places for Parker to rob and ways to rob them.

Parker is a consummate professional. He can be extremely violent, even deadly, if the situation requires it. But he never engages in violence for its own sake. He does as little, or as much, as necessary in any given situation. He may be a scary criminal, but the people he clashes with are almost always much worse. We root for Parker the way we might root for a shark to eat Hitler.

Parker has no “code,” contrary to what some movie producers would have us believe. If he doesn’t kill an enemy, it’s not because he’s morally opposed to it. It’s because he knows of a good reason why killing someone wouldn’t be the best course of action at that moment. (Usually it’s that killing someone will bring more heat from the cops, as opposed to just tying someone up and stuffing them in a closet.)

Perhaps because Parker himself is so mechanical and gray, Westlake surrounds him in each and every novel with a broad cast of very colorful and memorable allies, enemies, passers-by and general weirdos. Great fun is had in watching Parker attempt to interact with each of them. The shark metaphor is apt: It often comes across like trying to have a conversation with Jaws. He’s not interested in discussing sports or politics with you; he’s busy deciding if your business is worth robbing, or perhaps if you should continue to live.

Parker is not a likeable person at all, but he’s an absolutely enthralling character. And he’s at his best when he’s in action. Like Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series, when he’s idle, he’s generally unsuccessful and unhappy. But when he’s in his element, doing what he’s meant to do, he’s in a class by himself; a force of nature. You can’t look away.

Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962)

Even Westlake himself was surprised at the popularity of the character. As he put it in an interview with the University of Chicago Press:

I was at first very surprised. He was the bad guy in the book. More than that, I’d done nothing to make him easy for the reader; no smalltalk, no quirks, no pets. I told myself the only way I could (continue to write about him) is if I held onto what (the editor) seemed to like, the very fact that he was a compendium of what your lead character should not be. I must never soften him, never make him user-friendly, and I’ve tried to hold to that.

Parker is exceptionally good at his job. When a heist is underway, he’s the natural leader. When civilians get hysterical in the face of criminals with guns, Parker knows how to settle them down, allowing him to focus on the job. Once the robbery has been carried out, he knows the best ways to avoid the Law and escape with the money.

“I’ve always said Parker is basically a workman,” Westlake once said, “with the professional workman’s goal of getting the job done ably, efficiently, and without interruption.”

The second Parker novel: The Man With the Getaway Face (Pocket Books, 1963)

Like so many great fictional characters, the result is a man we would never want to encounter in real life, but thrill in following in fiction. We find ourselves rooting for the bad guy to rob innocent – or not-so-innocent – people, and get away from law enforcement with the goods.

“I love the notion of Parker,” said the late writer and artist Darwyn Cooke, who adapted several of the novels into graphic novel format. “This guy who is smart enough to have this life set up in Miami and he just ventures out three or four times a year to do his thing. And then he comes back quietly, to live his life. Outside of all the stuff that everybody else has to deal with.”

It all makes for an inherent contradiction in Parker, obvious to see but difficult to fully understand and harder still to replicate in other media.

Hollywood has never been able to make sense of it.

In Part 3, we’ll look at attempts to bring Parker to other media. But first, in Part 2, we’ll see how similar Parker is to a certain sullen-eyed Cimmerian, in a little piece I like to call, “Parker the Barbarian!”

In the meantime, if you’d like to get caught up on your Parker novel reading – or try the books out for the first time – you are in luck.

For many years, finding some of the volumes in the series was next-to-impossible. Published by several different outfits over the years, many of the books were long out of print.

To the rescue came the University of Chicago Press, who grabbed up the rights in 2008 to the entire series (plus the related Alan Grofield novels) and issued new editions in paperback and on Kindle and Audible.

No longer do we have to plan elaborate heists of antique and rare bookshops to get our fix of Parker.

We now live in a world where you can easily acquire any or every book in the series easily.

And, like an easy score for Parker and his cohorts, that’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

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Van Allen Plexico is a multi-award-winning author, member of the SFWA, and a Pulp Grandmaster. Among his many novels are the Harper & Salsa crime series, set in the Sixties and carrying something of the flavor of the Parker books, beginning with the 2018 Pulp Factory Award-Winning Best Novel of the Year, VEGAS HEIST. See all of his work at www.plexico.net.