Customer Reviews

Deadly Edge; A Novel of Violence

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Deadly Edge, by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) is more action packed than previous Parker novels. Deadly Edge begins with Parker and his team of thieves stealing the receipts of a rock concert. As usual with Parker, it is a masterful plan where they sneak into the accounting room undetected, and escape before authorities become aware that a crime has occurred. The team makes it to their pre-arranged hideout, divides the loot, and after a few days each goes his separate way.

As in all Parker novels, something goes wrong. The first hint is when they get to their hideout, they discover the dead body of a man who had been on the team but was unable to participate due to problems of his advanced age. Nobody has a clue who killed him, but they assumed they would be safe once they split and disappeared from the scene.

Parker has rules designed to prevent a caper from failing. He works only with professionals, discusses the job only with members of the robbery team, and will not allow a person to quit who is knowledgeable about the job. In this story Parker makes the mistake of letting someone know the plan's details who was not in on the job.

Deadly edge turns ugly as two men track each team member separately and kill them. Who could do this? How could they obtain secret information concerning where each member of the team resides? Parker conducts a hunt to find and eliminate this threat as he must protect his money, his woman, and his pride.

Deadly edge is a more violent novel than those earlier in the series. It has constant action and suspense. We read about intricate planning and use of tactics by Parker in this attempt to win his cat and mouse game.

Deadly Edge is one of the better Parker stories. It includes the details of the well executed robbery of the concert and entertains us with precise details of the struggle with his new enemies.

I highly recommend this book to all mystery crime lovers.

Some of the other reviews here reamrk the series is getting old by the end (this one comes near the end). That's true but for someone new to the series that does not matter. Of the 60s and 70s Parker books I liked this one the best. No silly stuff about The Outfit or ex-Nazis. Just a dark hard edged unsentimental story swiftly told, with good insight into the people swept up in Parker's path. Stark's strength is that while he shows little violence he shows the effects of violence, and that is a strong theme here.

The thirteenth novel in Donald E Westlake's (a.k.a. Richard Stark) sensational Parker series suffers a little bit from being a bit wordy. I guess Westlake and importantly the Richard Stark brand had become so big by 1971 (when this was first published), that editors didn't even touch these novels anymore. This results in Deadly Edge being about twice as thick as most other Parker novels. Whilst more Parker seems like a great concept, it isn't really with Deadly Edge. At the beginning we have to endure a lengthy account of Parker and other criminal colleagues swinging an axe into the roof and old stadium they are planning on robbing. This axe chopping just goes on, and on, with Westlake telling us about each chop, moving the feet and so on. Honestly if this was my first Parker novel or exposure to Westlake's work I would have stopped reading and moved onto something else. When the actual heist of the stadium's concert takings (remember this is set in the days before credit cards and any major alternative to cash) gets underway, the normal Parker standard returns, but as a reader we had to wait a fair while to get to this. Amongst the rest of the novel there's a lot of padding as well, with real estate selling descriptions of every room in Claire's brand new house, and we even have a complete retelling of the exact same phone conversation between Claire and Parker spaced out in the novel like both were supposed to be tried, and one later chosen. It wasn't even an important conversation to the plot with a much more important later phone call we don't even experience Parker's point of view. Claire also recounts the whole plot from the Rare Coin Score, so make sure you've read that one first!

Basic plot of Deadly Edge is Parker and a few others rob a stadium where a rock concert is playing and escape with a considerable amount of cash. However when they get to the getaway house they find the body of a crim who was previously in on the heist but had decided he was too old to join in one last time. Parker returns to his away from crime life and to Claire at a new home she has just bought for the two of them. No more staying in hotels for the two of them but it's not long before Parker's go between warns Parker one of the men on his last caper is trying to track him down. When Parker catches up with him he's been nailed to a wall. Parker doesn't know what's going on but is determined to find out. He wants Claire to go on holiday for a while but she stubbornly refuses to leave their new house. Parker has to catch up with this new threat before it arrives on his doorstep.

Deadly Edge is an okay read but if you're not a fan of the whole series and aren't reading every single novel, you'll probably want to give this a miss. The next novel after Deadly Edge in this series is Slayground.

A Half Dozen More Heist Books from Richard Stark

SunPost Weekly August 5, 2010 | John Hood
[...]

Gotta luv the folks at University of Chicago Press. Not only have they decided to bring back Richard Stark¡¯s belovedly badass Parker novels, but they¡¯ve been doing so in sequence, with a niftily packed series that smacks back to the ¡¯60s beginning and ¡ª Zeus-willing ¡ª won¡¯t let up till its 21st century end.

The beginning, for those few who don¡¯t know, was The Hunter (1962), which was reissued two years ago alongside the next eight in the long and lauded run. It was no happy accident that the initial nine reprints coincided with the author¡¯s death. (Stark, nee Donald E. Westlake, died on New Year¡¯s Eve 2008). What was a happy accident though, as John McNally so helpfully pointed out in a Summer ¡¯09 Virginia Quarterly Review piece on Parker called ¡°A Stark World¡±, is the series itself, which simply began as a way for Westlake to publish more books.

As Westlake told Charles L. P. Silet in a 1996 interview:

¡°[T]here¡¯s always been a belief in publishing that [a publisher] can¡¯t publish more than one book a year from any one author. So I thought it would be interesting to have a pen name¡­ to aim for a paperback original this time. So I did this book with the assumption that the bad guy has to get caught at the end . . . I sent [The Hunter] to Bucklin Moon at Pocket Books, who said, ¡®I like this book and I like this character. Is there any way you could change the book so that he would escape at the end and then you could give me three books a year about him.¡¯ And I said, ¡®I think so.¡¯¡±

Within two years Westlake, writing as Stark, would have three Parker novels in the pulp paperback racks. And by the time he was finished there¡¯d be a total of twenty three. And while 23 books in 46 years might not sound like a whole helluva lot, remember Westlake was writing Parker as a sideline, and in addition to his Dortmunder series of capers (14 novels, beginning with 1970¡äs The Hot Rock), he left behind over 100 novels.

But we¡¯re here to talk about Parker, the stoic, merciless, heist man. And it is Parker to whom pulpdom owes its love of bad guy heroes.

Or anti-heroes. Okay, so Jim Thompson did that bad-guy-as-hero thing before Westlake (or Stark) or anyone else. But as McNally also points out, though Thompson¡±took darkness to new depths, [he] used humor to offset the bleakness surrounding his characters¡¯ lives.¡±

Not so Parker. In fact if there¡¯s one instance where the man even smiles, I don¡¯t remember it. And laugh? Forget about it. Though some of the hurdles he and his ¡°string¡± have to heave over during the course of their various heists would be incredibly comic if they weren¡¯t so damn absurd.

Then again when the heists are as daring as those Parker and his crew undertake, absurdity is pretty much a given.

Take The Seventh (1966) and its robbing of a college football game¡¯s game day take. Or take The Handle (¡¯66) and its knocking off of an entire island casino. Or take The Score (¡¯64), where he and his endeavor to rob an entire town. Each begins as a brilliant plan. And each descends into a whirlwind of violence and vengeance. And through them all, Parker remains, resolute and ever ready to do whatever is required, without a hint of hesitation.

The six-pack of kickass that most recently racked consists of The Green Eagle Score (¡¯67), The Black Ice Score (¡¯68) and The Sour Lemon Score (¡¯69), as well as Deadly Edge (¡¯71), Slayground (¡¯71) and Plunder Squad (¡¯72). As you might suspect from their titles, the first three are pretty much straightforwardly crooked heist stories (the targets are, respectively, an Air Force base, an African nation¡¯s treasures, and a bank). But not one heist goes off the way they were intended, and Parker is left to pick up ¡ª and often eliminate ¡ª the pieces.

Deadly Edge, too, is a heist story, and the rock concert Parker and company knock off gives it a decidedly different beat. In Plunder Squad Parker goes head-to-head with a former accomplice who soured things in The Sour Lemon Score and it¡¯s got the giddy undercurrent of payback written right through it. Slayground, in contrast, finds Parker caught in an amusement park after knocking off an armored car, and the mobsters and cops who want what he¡¯s got never get know what hits them, even as it ¡ª and him ¡ª stares them down in the face.

Any one of the above is a worthy romp through a remarkably different America, when crime was crime and criminals took some pride in its commission. And any one of the above will leave you itchy for more. Best though would be to begin at the beginning with The Hunter, so you can see just how circumstances created the man Parker would come to be. But whether you decide to hop on at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, you¡¯re gonnawanna hold on. Because the Parker series doesn¡¯t come with seat belts or safety nets, and it¡¯s very easy to be thrown from this kinda wild ride.

BTW: If you dig this series ¡ª and you will, trust me ¡ª Hard Case Crime also has a buncha Stark/Westlake titles to choose from, including Lemons Never Lie (with Parker¡¯s occasional sidekick, Alan Grofield) and The Cutie (Westlake¡¯s debut, which was originally published as The Mercenaries).

Wonderful to see the Parker series being republished-- these really are classic American lit, of the pulp variety. Nobody did it better than Richard Stark when he wasn't being Donald Westlake. I've read all the Parkers two or three times over the years, and they always satisfy. That said, some are better than others, and this suffers (only slightly) from my "Uh oh, Parker is behaving like a human" complaint. Parker is a criminal psychopath. He has but one goal: get the money. He works with others because he has to, and many of the novels deal with the ways these partners in crime mess up his life. Parker himself seldom makes a mistake-- others do and drag him down. Then it's time for an escape, an implacable search for the missing money, and sometimes a detour for revenge. But the simplicity of these compelling plots is, I believe, damaged by his vulnerability to Claire, his long-term love (?) interest after the first half a dozen novels or so-- once she arrives, Parker is no longer the pure sociopath of old, and I miss him.

In "Deadly Edge," Parker and Claire have begun housekeeping as "Mr. & Mrs. Willis" and have a little home on a lake. Is Parker CRAZY?? Why not paint "sitting duck" on the front door? Ah well, the overly-humanized Parker is often encumbered by these complications in these less-favored volumes-- but I love them still. However: if you want the straight-ahead Parker who's on the job and on the hunt and not bogged down by his obligation to please and protect Claire, there are plenty of those (the first six or seven, and many where she figures only peripherally, such as "Slayground" and "Butcher's Moon").

The Parkers, at their best, represent the highest attainment of pulp crime writing, and that's saying something. Each one is worth reading and rereading.

I've enjoyed many of Westlake's Parker novels, written under the pseudonym Richard Stark. But I had not read this one until just recently, though I think it was written in about 1960.

It has all the features of a Parker novel -- the crime that is well planned but goes wrong because some details can't be controlled, the deadly showdown at the end -- but also an extra complication.

I recommend it highly to fans of this series.

This was a decent book in the series, but even this well-written entry can't save the series from itself. It's starting to get old, and it will take the endurance of a marathon runner for me to get to the end of the series, even though I liked nearly every entry and I enjoy the characters themselves.

J.Ja