Customer Reviews

The Green Eagle Score (Unabridged)

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"The Green Eagle Score", another adventure staring the antihero Parker. Parker has several rules that he does not normally violate: Do not work with amateurs, be cautious with people who have recently been in prison, avoid involvement with women during a heist, and avoid having a love triangle within the team. Parker violates all four in this story.

Marty Fusco, An acquaintance who was recently paroled, visits Parker and tries to sell him on an aggressive job - rob the payroll at an Air force Base. Marty's ex-wife is living with an Air Force payroll clerk named Stan Devers. The concepts is that with Stan's inside contacts they can rob the Air Force Finance Office, when it has a lot of money, the day before payday.

Parker is a great planner with normally good "common sense". But rob the payroll at an Air Force Base? How does one do that. A Base has built in security - people to check your identification, watch how you walk, ask for your orders, question whether you have authorization to be in the area (especially around Finance or anything valuable). Bases tend to have security fences, gates where police check everyone upon entry and exit. Air Force Bases tend to take matters seriously. So how can you steal the payroll?

This novel is suspenseful and intriguing as a plan slowly comes into focus. Parker is known to be a bit dystopian, always having the misfortune of an unexpected problem during the execution of his plan. What will it be this time? Will the Air Force change procedures? Will someone talk about the plan to outsiders? Will one of the amateurs become nervous and botch the plan? Will fighting break out among the members of the team? With a Parker story, the intervening problem could be anything.

I recommend this book. It is a fun read.

Parker, a classic hard-guy and professional thief, sets out to rob a U.S. Air Force finance office. Various misfits and ex-cons comprise his crew. The plan goes sour, but Parker prevails. The story gets unbelievable and dumb about midway through, but the characters are interesting enough to keep you hooked. A good airplane or beach read--fun, quick, and inconsequential.

The Green Eagle Score is the 10th novel in the 21 Parker novels series, it's a bit thicker than most so word count wise you're also getting a nice deal. Although this one is a little predictable finding out exactly what Parker does when the event you are expecting happens is still fun. In this adventure Parker is flown up from his vacation to a small town New York town, near an airforce base by the boyfriend of the ex of a former criminal colleague Marty Fusco. The plan is to rob the payload of cash that should be around $400 000 which makes up the wages of the base personnel. Parker's unsure at first as some who suddenly find themselves free from the life behind bars are so keen to impress themselves that they still have it that they end up back there. Also Devers, the airforce base employee who's idea it is is a young guy, whose never done this sort of thing before so who knows how he will act during and after the caper when it all counts. Plus the fact that Devers is sleeping with Fusco's ex and all three seem happy with this deal when normal people wouldn't, and the whole team relationship needed for the caper is a little weird. Throw in the fact the fact that the ex is seeing a psychiatrist and the whole deal gets even more complicated.

A very enjoyable Parker adventure though. if you're reading these in order next in the series is the Black Ice Score.

I am so happy that the Parker stories are being reprinted. I read some of them back in the '60's then went on with my life. Now 40 years later I have taken up with Parker again. No matter what you might think of the morality of Parter you have to admire his expertize. I admit it- I love watching him plot, figure, and execute his capers. I so enjoy watching him deal with his various no-goods in his no nonsense manner. I just would not wnt to join in any of his capers.

Donald Westlake's novels are often very funny, usually quite inventive, and always entertaining. The twenty or so Parker novels that he wrote as Richard Stark may not be the funniest or most clever of his work, but Parker is his best character, beating out the better-known John Dortmunder.

THE GREEN EAGLE SCORE was originally published in 1967. It came right in the middle of Westlake/Stark's first run of Parker novels ("the First Parker Epoch"), from the years 1962 to 1974. He reprised Parker beginning in 1998, and the Second Parker Epoch ("SPE"), consisting of seven more novels, ran from then until Westlake died in 2008.

I have now read 13 of the Parker novels. They may be my favorite series of mindless crime fiction. They are not uniformly excellent. In some, the plot is a little strained. THE GREEN EAGLE SCORE is one of the lesser efforts. (A corrupt psychotherapist and his uncontrollable patient are not promising material for plausible thrillers.)

But what distinguishes Stark's novels from their brethren is Parker. In the superb Foreword to this volume, Dennis Lehane calls Parker "a watershed character in American noir" and "the greatest antihero in American noir". What makes Parker Parker? He is a professional crook, all business, with no heart or emotion. Lehane hits the nail on the head when he writes this about Parker:

"He never cracks a joke, inquires about someone's health or family, feels regret or shame or even rage. And not once in the sixteen novels that comprise the FPE * * * does he wink at the reader. You know the Wink. It's what the `supposedly' amoral character does to let the reader know he's not really as bad as he seems."

Thus, Parker is purer in his heartlessness than any other antihero in noir - more so than James Ellroy's protagonists, Jim Thompson's characters, James M. Cain's "lecherous ids-run-amok" (to quote Lehane), or Hammett's Sam Spade. But Parker is not totally without principle. He does not kill people gratuitously (after all, the police investigate murders much more intensely than robberies) and he does not double-cross any colleague on a job who has not yet double-crossed him (honor among thieves, you know). Parker is the consummate professional. As was Richard Stark.

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).

One of the fundamental problem in understanding the term hard boiled is that the term is often mistaken for: bloody, aggressive, gore. The term actually implies someone who is relentless and focused. At the same time the joy of the hard boiled fiction lies in the phrases. Classical example:

"Gee Parker, I thought you would want to bump the kid as well."
"You would not go for it"

Or

"I walk where the ice is thick"
"You still walk on ice"

And this is just from the first 10 pages. These expressions show a man who is a professional: focused, cautious, alert, always thinking. But at the same time reveal his relationship to the people around him.

At the same time the whole set up is written using minimum of words, there are no long descriptions of buildings, or how is who dressed or what is the scenery. Just focus on the job. If you are interested in how a professional operates. Read this one.

This book marks a resurgence of the series. Entries like "The Handle" really made it seem like Parker had run out of steam, and while "The Green Eagle Score" isn't anything special, there is definitely a hint or two that the series still has some life to it.

J.Ja

This is another of the early books in Richard Stark's Parker series. Parker decides to take a break from a vacation in Puerto Rico to join a gang that intends to rob the payroll of an Air Force base in upstate New York. (The book was written in 1967. There's no such thing as direct deposit, so the Air Force trucks in $400,000 twice a month and pays everyone in cash.)

Parker designs a clever plan to steal the money, but the weak link (and in these books there is almost always a weak link) is the mistress of one of the gang members who knows the plot and confides it to her analyst. The shady analyst develops a plan of his own to let Parker's gang do the heavy lifting and then steal the money from them. Parker would not like such a development and will deal with it in his own inimitable way.