Review: The Green Eagle Score

The Green Eagle Score by Richard Stark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Along with The Score, when Parker robs an entire town, this 10th in the series is one of my favorites. Parker plans out the seemingly ridiculous heist of the payroll at an Air Force base. (This is 1967 and the bi-weekly payroll was paid in cash.) Early focus is the casing of the base with the help of the inside guy who works in the finance office. The major complication is that the girlfriend of the finance guy is also the ex-wife of another member of the crew. So early on we know this heist is going to go wrong. A further complication is that the girlfriend is describing the heist planning to her psychologist in thrice weekly sessions, and we know this will muck things up but not how. Saying much more will spoil the read, but suffice to say that the last third of the book is non-stop action with an exciting heist and its surprising and wild aftermath. Stark/Westlake nails the ending in this one.

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Review: The Rare Coin Score

The Rare Coin Score by Richard Stark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The tension builds relentlessly as Parker, more out of boredom than the need to increase his stake, breaks a few of his rules and joins a scheme for a big heist at a coin collector's convention. It's not a question of if this heist is going to go wrong, but how and when, and that kept me turning pages as fast as I could read. Parker is at his dominating best throughout, using equal parts humiliation and intimidation, but he makes a few mistakes, and despite all the rigorous planning, it is chaos down the home stretch. Plenty of excitement and Parker is the baddest of bad asses, but the ending—the last four pages specifically—felt dubious and a bit disappointing.

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Review: The Seventh

The Seventh by Richard Stark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This seventh Parker novel is a beaut. One of the things I'm really enjoying as I reread all these Parker novels is the way that Stark (Donald Westlake) varies the formula from book to book. The style has the same forceful elegance. And Parker is the perfect mix of amorality and practicality. There are heists and complications from within the crew and antagonists from without. There's the four part structure, with the third part in the POV of the antagonist. These are the staples of a Parker novel. But StarkLake always mixes up the emphasis. Sometimes it's the heist planning, sometimes it's the heist itself, sometimes it's the aftermath, and sometimes it's all about complications with the crew or with the antagonists getting the upper hand. In The Seventh, which begins with Parker kicking in an apartment door, it starts right off with the antagonist having the upper hand along with the loot from the heist. The heist itself already in the rear view mirror from page 1. Although we do get a nice backstory recap in summary form later in the novel. (Starklake was so confident in this story that he felt he could skip a cool heist about a stadium robbery!) So the progression here is Parker trying to figure out and find who stole the loot Parker was safeguarding for the crew. First he has to determine if someone among the crew is freelancing. The Seventh is probably my favorite so far of the first seven books in the series. A bit shorter, a bit faster paced, and Parker is equally in danger and kicking ass. Has some really nice set-piece scenes.

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Review: The Damsel

The Damsel by Richard Stark
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the first of four books in the Grofield series that Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, spun off from his Parker series. At the end of The Handle - the eighth book in the Parker series - Parker leaves Grofield in a Mexico hotel room with a bullet wound in his back and a suitcase containing his share of the loot from their just completed heist. That's where The Damsel picks up Grofield's story. The implied plot is how does Grofield make it back home to midwest USA with his money. The book starts, however, with a woman climbing through his hotel window. She's escaping from guys Grofield recognizes as gangsters and his complications have escalated. What follows from there is a complicated but ultimately non-sensical plot that takes Grofield and the damsel of the title across Mexico to Acapulco to save the life of a totally undeserving dictator. It does have some excellent action scenes as Grofield is particularly resourceful in dispatching the gangsters. For the most part, though, this is a mix of Mexican travelogue (some of Westlake's best writing) and banter between Grofield and the damsel, which is reputed by many reviewers to be witty, but that I found mostly boring and imminently skippable. As with the Parker series, about halfway through we switch from Grofield's POV and spend several chapters with various antagonists. While these are all well-written character portrayals and serve the plot by showing what everyone else is up to, they are also essentially character assassinations designed to reveal how despicable these characters are. It's hard to care about any of these characters. I'll avoid any spoilers and stop here by saying that the ending was completely disappointing and not worth the journey. Westlake's writing in this first Grofield novel is silky smooth but entirely without the edge of the Parker novels. Probably better than I'm giving credit for but that is not a recommendation.

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Review: The Handle

The Handle by Richard Stark
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a real let down after The Seventh, which had always been one of my favorites in the Parker series by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake). The setup is actually quite good as The Outfit has hired Parker to take out a competitor who's operating a casino on a private island (owned by Cuba) 45 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas. They want Parker to rob the casino and its operator of everything and then burn the place down. Parker does recon and hires a crew and buys weapons. Unbeknownst to both The Outfit and Parker, the casino operator, Wolfgang Baron, is also under surveillance by the Feds because he's a nazi war criminal. The feds make a deal with Parker: we leave you alone and let you do your robbery, but we want you to deliver Baron to us. And that's the kicker as the story shifts gears from setup to heist. From this point on the novel seemed rushed and more expository as the narrative disappointingly shifts away from Parker's POV into first Grofield's (a character from The Score who is the lead in another four book series by Stark) and then Baron's POV, and we experience the heist and its aftermath from those two POVs and don't come back to Parker until the final twenty pages of the novel. And that wrap-up is somewhat perfunctory and extremely anti-climactic. So I'm not a real fan of this one.

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Review: The Score

The Score by Richard Stark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Did anybody write better heist novels than Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)? Well, maybe Dan J. Marlowe - One Endless Hour and Four for the Money are good examples. Seriously, though, it's hard to top these Parker novels for their depiction of heists. And this one is all about the extreme caper - to rob an entire town in rural North Dakota. In the previous Parker novels he'd been trying to clear himself from the Outfit or dispensing with unfinished business. In this one he is free and clear and all about the job. The first half of the book is all setup: describing the job, finding the crew, procuring the guns and the vehicles. Need a movie reference? Think Ocean's Eleven. Second half? They do the heist. Expect some monkey wrenches, but this one is all about the crew pulling off the take down of an entire town. Grofield also makes his appearance in this novel, so that is kind of cool, as he will get his own four book series later: The Damsel, The Dame, The Blackbird, and Lemons Never Lie, which was reprinted by Hard Case Crime.

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Review: The Violent Vixen

The Violent Vixen by Alan Marshall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Alan Marshall was one of the pseudos used by Donald Westlake, but he frequently subbed out his contracts to writer friends in need of cash, so there is some dispute among collectors about which Marshalls are Westlake's and which aren't. The character development in this one has the Westlake feel to it and the quality of the writing is a couple of notches above most pulps, so whomever wrote this one took more care than was typical of the genre, but I doubt this is a Westlake. The title makes no sense as there is no violence in this one. The lead character, Judy Stanton, is an actress making her career in beach party movies. (Character seems modeled on Annette Funicello - so think Beach Blanket Bingo.) She's in a long-term contract and wants out, wants to make other types of movies. So there are scenes with her business managers and attorneys where they plot ways out of the contract and there are the inevitable scenes where she is in conflict with the director and producer of the current movie she is making. All that takes up about 50% of the book. The other 50% is sex scenes. Ah ha, the real purpose of the book! Originally this was published under the Greenleaf imprint Sundown Reader, but there's a knock-off eBook version.

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Review: Sin Hellcat

Sin Hellcat by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a collaboration between Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake and they alternated chapters and did a remarkable job matching styles so that it reads seamlessly. So it is interesting from that perspective. But not much of a novel. It is mostly a lot of tongue-in-cheek writerly pyrotechnics, a lot of spinning of wheels to fill pages in between the sex scenes, of which there are plenty, described in censorship era figures of speech.

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Review: The Hunter

The Hunter by Richard Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow, Parker is such an amoral bad ass! His entrance into the city, walking across the George Washington bridge, and then his little crime spree to raise cash, is one of the best character introductions, in any genre, that I can remember reading. As anti-heroes go, you have to love the way Parker just gives The Outfit the middle finger "you're going to pay me whether you like it or not." I'd say he takes them out a bit too easy in the last third of the book, but this is entertainment reading, so, just like when watching an action movie, willing suspension of disbelief is what you have to do. The ending was a nice surprise, and I'm guessing not there to begin with, but changed when the publisher wanted more Parker books. Great start to the series. In case you didn't know, this is Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark. Also made into a brilliant and brutal movie - Point Blank - which was one of the first neo-noir films. Lee Marvin played Parker to the hilt.

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Review: Campus Doll

Campus Doll by Edwin West
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Early Donald Westlake written under the Edwin West byline that reads like an Orrie Hitt novel. What's a co-ed to do when she can't pay her tuition? Become a hooker, of course. "They'll get an hour," she said, "for ten dollars." "Only ten bucks? You could get a hell of a lot more than that, Jackie." She had shaken her head. "The guys in school don't have a lot of money. Ten dollars is just about as much as they'll want to spend." Soon, supply and demand being what it was, Jackie had to move from her apartment to a five-bedroom house and had four other girls working for her. And so it goes. This was the censorship era so no explicit sex and things will have to end badly for Jackie. The prose is simple, without nuance, but does read smoothly. Easy speed reading. All plot focused exposition, including the dialog. Achieves the purpose intended, but unlike some of Westlake's other early pulp fiction forays, does not have anything to elevate it or to make it more interesting.

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