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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 10: The Jugger

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 10: The Jugger

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The Jugger, by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1965)

What is it?

Volume 6 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels.

A “jugger” is a slang term for a safecracker. Interestingly, my research has shown that this was never a term in common use. It seems as if Westlake might have created the term “jugger” himself, and then used it as the title of this book, as well as the description of what Joe Sheer did, back before he retired.

This is sort of the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service of Parker novels. It’s unlike the rest of the series in a number of ways, and was not well-regarded by fans for a while. But, like that Bond film, it has enjoyed something of a renaissance among afficionados in more recent years. Today it’s considered one of the better entries in Parker’s chronicles.

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Remembering Children of the Dragon, by Frank S. Robinson

Remembering Children of the Dragon, by Frank S. Robinson

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Children of the Dragon by Frank Robinson (Avon Books, January 1978). Cover by Sanjulian

The fact that people are not ruled by any god frees them to rule themselves. The fact that fate is blind frees people to take their fate into their own hands. The fact that the race has no purpose frees its individual members to pursue their own purposes. And so, the fact that bare human life is without intrinsic value does not mean human endeavor is pointless. Just as a worthless chunk of stone can be sculpted into a precious work of art, so too can a raw, common life become great by what its owner makes of it. And that endeavor is the key to life — with no god, no other value to existence — a man’s own endeavor is everything.

— from Children of the Dragon, by Frank Robinson

There are no dragons in this novel, as I first thought when I bought Children of the Dragon back in 1978. There are no wizards or witches, no magic, no strange beasts or monsters. This is alternate-world fiction, without any of the usual fantasy tropes. Probably the first or one of the first novels that later would be labeled Grimdark, for this certainly is a grim and dark novel.

Sadly, Robinson wrote only this one “fantasy” novel. He wrote no sequels, no other fantasy. The cover reads “Frank Robinson,” but inside the book his name is Frank S. Robinson, and that is the name under which the book is copyrighted. He also wrote a few other fiction and non-fiction books under that name, but he was not prolific. (His agent was Virginia Kidd, a high-profile agent in her day, to whom he dedicated this novel. She also represented science fiction writer Avram Davidson.)

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Peter Pan by JM Barrie

Peter Pan by JM Barrie

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Hitherto he had thought it was some fiend fighting him, but darker suspicions assailed him now.
‘Pan, who and what art thou?’ he cried huskily.
‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.’
This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form.
‘To ‘t again,’ he cried despairingly.

from CHAPTER XV ‘HOOK OR ME THIS TIME’

Leaving work yesterday, a friend expressed surprise when he saw my copy of JM Barrie’s 1911 novel, Peter Pan, in my hand. “You’re reading Peter Pan, the kids’ book?” he asked. To which I answered, “Yes. But it’s not a kids’ book, because it’s about a sociopathic twelve-year-old.” An exaggeration, perhaps, but not much of one.

I think most people, if they think of Peter Pan at all, it’s either because of the 1953 Disney movie or the long-running stage productions with first Sandy Duncan and later Cathy Rigby. For them he’s merely the boy who never grows up and spends his time fighting the Captain Hook and his crew of blackguards. Now, those are important elements of the book, but they barely hint at the depths contained between its covers. It is a much weirder, darker book than the Disney version.

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Dark Muse News: Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele

Dark Muse News: Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele

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Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán by Gregory Mele
(Obsidian & Bronze Ltd, August 2026, 280 pages). Cover Art by Mark Smylie.

Mele’s Meso-American Mysteries, Melee & Mayhem Awaits

Gregory Mele brings swordplay, sorcery, and the dark gods of a lost Meso-American world vividly to life in his Heart of Vengeance & Other Tales of Azatlán (Obsidian & Bronze Ltd.); it is a thrilling collection of occult mysteries, brutal battles, and weird adventures where the dead rarely stay dead. Dark Muse News jumped on it when it became public in August 2026 (available in several places; check out the author’s website).

It has 14 stories, 4 original and 10 published previously in various magazines.  Their connection? All share characters, deities, and the land of Tehanuwak (map below).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 9: The Score

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 9: The Score

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The Score by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1964), reprinted as Killtown by Berkley Books in 1973

What is it?

Volume 5 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. This volume arguably features the greatest single heist Parker ever gets involved with. He and an unusually large team of accomplices robs an entire town, all in one night.

It’s also the first time in the series s a heist is not just a side story but the main point of the entire book, from the planning and the execution to the complication and the aftermath. We see a bit of that with the armored car robbery in The Man with the Getaway Face, but that’s the plot of only the first half of that book, and it’s nothing quite like the scale on display here.

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Neverwhens: S.E. Lindberg’s Grave’s Daughters — an Imbalance of Familial Humors may Destroy a World

Neverwhens: S.E. Lindberg’s Grave’s Daughters — an Imbalance of Familial Humors may Destroy a World

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Grave’s Daughters by S.E. Lindberg (Ignis Publishing, June 24, 2026). Cover by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

There is many kinds of world-building. Some create worlds so adjacent to our own, they simply are shadows — a slight change of name, a slight change of history. Others use an Earthly template — Bronze Age, Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Victorian — and then layer their own elements of magic and science atop; while others yet create wholly distinct, carefully articulated “other worlds” that are the characters of the story themselves.

This is not what S.E. Lindberg writes about.

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Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

Who Watches the Watchmen? Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein

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Space Cadet (Ace Books, May 1971). Cover by Davis Meltzer

A book with the title Space Cadet is a little hard to take seriously; not many people can help thinking of the slang meaning. But it wasn’t used that way when Heinlein wrote it in 1948. If some people didn’t take it seriously, it was because science fiction as such wasn’t taken seriously — but Heinlein himself was quite serious about it.

In fact his novel was the first public use of the phrase, though it became better known after the television show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet bought the right to use it from him in 1950 — enough so that in 1953, Porky Pig appeared in Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century as an “eager young space cadet.” The expression might have suggested youth and naiveté, but not being out of touch with reality.

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The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

The Weird Must Flow: The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2, edited by Michael Kelly

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The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 (Undertow Publications, August 18, 2026). Cover by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

Weirdness is often part of horror, so we might call it a sub-genre that editor Michael Kelly has decided to further explore (after an excellent previous anthology) by collecting a number of dark short stories penned by a group of distinguished authors.

As a reviewer I enjoy the privilege of focusing on the stories that I’ve especially enjoyed, especially on the basis of their “weird” character.

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Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

Stop the Madness: Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

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A Canticle for Leibowitz (Bantam Books reprint edition, August 1976). Cover by Lou Feck

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the humor is bleak, and the future worse. First published as a series of three stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1955-57, and then assembled into a fix-up novel in October of 1959, Canticle is a novel pinned like a helpless butterfly to the Cold War terror of nuclear annihilation – a notion that was then fresh and febrile, but has now faded into the background, as Miller predicted, to our sorrow, that it would. The book itself remains a damning, furious read, yet it comes across, mostly, as contained – peaceful, even – as bucolic as any given warhead, up until it’s armed.

Miller’s dismay at humanity’s trajectory spills across every page, but this is no screed. He’s a story-teller, and a thoughtful, crafty one, and so he buries his polemics inside a cautious tri-partite structure, along with enough Latin to make this non-Catholic take to his on-line translator (a trick that Miller, in ‘59, could only dream of).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 8: The Mourner

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 8: The Mourner

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The Mourner by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1963)

What is it?

Volume 4 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. It is also the first book in the series in which Parker goes on an entirely new heist, unrelated to the previous books. There is, however, a connection back to Bett Harrow, one of the supporting characters in the third book.

What that means is, we now have proof of concept. Parker doesn’t only work in one big, multi-part revenge story, as with the first three books. He’s also great in a more episodic sort of format where he finds a job, puts together a team and goes on a mission. This will remain the pattern for most of the succeeding novels.

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