Customer Reviews

THE HUNTER

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Hunter (also known by it's movie names of Point Blank or Payback) is the beginning of the "Parker" series written by Donald E. Westlake under the penname of Richard Stark. These were paperback originals in a noir crime vein with Parker as the master thief and organizer of major robberies. Written from the early 60's through the mid-70's, the first 12 or so novels became cult classics especially popular with prisoners! DEW resumed the series due to popular demand in the 90's and has completed about 4 more with 1 more just being released. The writing style is stripped-down for fast action and none of the characters seems to have any conscience, least of all Parker. About half of the jobs Parker is involved in go bad due to unforseen problems like greed and betrayal, so murder (but only out of necessity) and revenge are common themes. This series has been reprinted over and over as new readers discover Parker and his single-minded focus on robbery to maintain his quietly luxurious but anonymous lifestyle. Serious literature? NO! Great fun for the crime novel fan? YES!

The Hunter

This is the book where Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark introduces us to Parker in 1962. After re-reading the book after thitysomething years I realize that Lee Marvin was probably cast as a truer version of Parker. Danny DeVito would have been a good messenger and James Gandolfini would have made a better Mal Resnick. The ending was changed for the movie, but what the hey, that's Hollywood. I think I'll reread them all as my next project. They're that good.

I think Sam Elliott would make a great Parker. He could make a whole career out of this series.

As far as I can tell the other Parker books are:

1) The Hunter (1962; AKA Point Blank, Payback; Parker, by Richard Stark).
2) The Man With the Getaway Face (1963; AKA The Steel Hit; Parker,
3) The Outfit (1963; Parker, by Richard Stark)
4) The Mourner (1963; Parker, by Richard Stark)
5) The Score (1964; AKA Killtown; Parker, by Richard Stark)
6) The Jugger (1965; Parker, by Richard Stark)
7) The Seventh (1966; AKA The Split; Parker, by Richard Stark)
8) The Handle (1966; AKA Run Lethal; Parker, by Richard Stark)
9) The Rare Coin Score (1967; Parker, by Richard Stark)
10) The Green Eagle Score (1967; Parker, by Richard Stark)
11) The Black Ice Score (1968; Parker, by Richard Stark)
12) The Sour Lemon Score (1969; Parker, by Richard Stark)
13) Slayground (1971; Parker, by Richard Stark)
14) Deadly Edge (1971; Parker, by Richard Stark)
15) Plunder Squad (1972; Parker, by Richard Stark)
16) Butcher's Moon (1974; Parker, by Richard Stark)
17) Comeback (1997;
18) Backflash (1998; Parker)..
19) Flashfire (2000; Parker, by Richard Stark)..
20) Firebreak (2001; Parker, by Richard Stark) ..
21) Nobody Runs Forever (2004) Parker, by Richard Stark

Highly recommended for Parker fans and fans of action adventure stories.


Gunner December, 2007

Several friends have suggested that I read the "Parker" stories. The Hunter is the first in the Parker series and the first Richard Stark novel I have read.

Donald Westlake, under the pen name Richard Stark, writes an atypical style of mystery. The Hunter is a story of conniving, betrayal and violence. The main character, Parker, is a ruthless violent man, that despite his unsavory qualities is a hero for whom the reader cheers. The primary characters are clearly described and realistic. The story if believable and interesting.

In many ways Parker reminds me of John Wayne in western movies, he is a strong, tough man who means what he says and says little. Parker was betrayed by his wife, Lynn, and his friend Mal Resnick. He was shot, assumed dead and left in a burning building. As a result he has two missions: revenge against those who wronged him, and gathering a significant financial stake to begin a new life.

In the beginning of the story, Parker is alone, afoot, with tattered unkempt clothing and holes in his shoes and socks. Parker needs a new start, so he forges a drivers licence and cashes checks for an invented alias, Edward Johnson. It takes four banks before one will accept his tale of woe that he lost his checkbook and account number. The fourth bank actually has an account for an Ed Johnson, accepts Parkers forged ID and provides him with blank checks. In a matter of a few hours Parker has new clothing and several hundred dollars in his wallet.

Parker is an excellent detective. He quickly finds his ex-wife and gains information about his betrayer. Parker's plans and actions are clever and imaginative as he accomplishes his goals. Without divulging "spoiler" information, I can say that Parker's plans outwit his adversaries. I can also say that Parker can be an exciting and violent man.

The Hunter is an excellent mystery novel. The action is fast paced and exciting. The plot is believable and interesting. I recommend "The Hunter".

From looking at the other Amazon reviews on this book, it looks like people really like it, or they really don't like it. I fall into the later category.

I read this story as part of a book club I attend with some friends. While they though the story was great, but I didn't care for the protagonist, his treatment of women, or the plot.

On the plus side, this is a fast read, and the story moves along well enough to keep you turning the pages.

On the negative side, I just felt the overall plot was unrealistic in regards to Parker's attempted murder, and his plan to get his money back from the Mob. Maybe the Mob in this story wasn't as tough as I'm used to from reading other books or watching TV and movies, but I'm thinking the Mob would send an army of people after Parker for what he did. Regardless of the cost, I think Parker would have been sleeping with the fishes by the end of the story.

"The Hunter" is a noir-type genre novel evocative of this writing style circa 1960. The plot line, the character development (or, more accurately, the lack thereof), the spare writing style, predictable violence and hard core accoutrements are perfectly standard fare. However, and despite myself, I couldn't help but enjoy Stark's book.

Stark writes in a style derived from the 1930 "pulps": for a representative biopsy of the style, see the resurrected and now defunct series brilliantly re-issued by "Creative Arts/Black Lizard" series. Unfortunately, most of the books in that series are, once again, out-of-print. The best currently available reference anthology was issued by Vintage/Black Lizard in the "Big Book of Pulps" edited by Otto Penzler.

In the tradition of Paul Cain, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich and, naturally, Jim Thompson, sentences have been stripped of all but the necessary wording, adjectives don't hang heavily on nouns, metaphors are mostly gone, character development essentially non-existant. Instead, the emphasis is on swift, brutal action, a tight plot, accompanied by a few twists-and-turns and (at least in this series), a "teaser" hint of the next installment to follow in the series. There have been legions of imitators, ranging from the well-known Chandler and Hammett types to the more recent James Ellroy.

Stark/Westlake seems to occupy a unique niche between the more eloquent traditionalists (Chandler, Hammett) and the brutally spare style of the Jim Thompson school. The taught writing, evocative but still not stale, the "made for the movies" tension and the cleverly constructed stories evidently warranted re-issue of the series by the august University of Chicago Press.

The books read very quickly (average reading time about 3 hours) and seem overpriced for their length. Of the first 3 Chicago re-issues, "The Man With the Getaway Face" was the least formulaic, but still adheres to the clever criminal beats the system" method; hardly original, but highly addicting.

In summary, a worthwhile re-issue of an historically important series, well worth the time invested in reading.

The Hunter, first published in 1962, is the first book in Richard Stark's series featuring professional thief and sometime killer Parker. When we first meet him, Parker is just arriving in New York fresh from a jail break, broke and looking for revenge against a former accomplice. Mal Resnick double-crossed Parker after a heist, stole his share of a $90,000 payoff, and left him for dead in a burning building. We follow Parker as he hunts the guy down and looks to replenish his stores of cash.
Richard Stark--a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake--published more than twenty Stark novels before he died in 2008. I've read two of the later books in the series--Ask the Parrot and Nobody Runs Forever--and was curious to learn how Parker's adventures began. Judging from this book only, it seems that the Parker who emerged in the 1960's was a coarser figure than in later books, less cerebral, an all-around nastier fellow, more likely to kill than in later books. And the writing in this first outing seems to have a darker edge to it. Here Stark is introducing Parker:

"The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree."

Hmm. It will be interesting to see how the character of Parker develops across the series. So far I prefer the Parker I met in the later books, but it's hardly a surprise that the books and Parker himself should have changed a bit in character after nearly fifty years.

-- Debra Hamel

A Very Violent Man

Richard Stark's Parker Would Just as Soon Kill You

By John Hood

It's not every weekend that I read nine books. Then again, it's not every week when I receive nine books so damn worth reading either. Not all at once anyway. And good thing too, 'cause if I did, I might never leave the house.

Talk about dynamite. This box was so explosive, I'm surprised it didn't blow-up in the UPS man's hands. But of course when you're talking about the writer Richard Stark, well, incendiary is a given.

Or it was a given, before last New Year's Eve, when Donald Westlake went the way of the angels. See Stark was one of Westlake's noms de plume; so when he died, they both died. Thankfully, neither of them left us in any kinda lurch, pulp-wise.

Westlake, among many other things, created a series of comic crime capers which featured the ruefully inept (and accidentally heroic) John Dortmunder. Deeply light-hearted and keen to a crisp, they're a dashing way to look at the underside of life - and incredibly enjoyable to boot.

Stark, in contrast, was the scribe behind a cold-blooded, cut-throat thief named Parker, a very violent man who was anything but funny. If you've seen Mel Gibson in Ransom (Special Edition)then you saw one version of Parker in film. If you caught Lee Marvin in Point Blank," you saw him better - and a whole lot closer to the merciless soul he really is.

Both of those films were based on The Hunter: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels) (University of Chicago Press, $14), the first in what would eventually be a run of 24 titles featuring the peripatetic heist man. A consummate professional linked in with a shady network of specialists, Parker would pull one big heist in a different part of the country just about every year, and then fly off to live the lush life, usually to Miami, where he never knocked anyone off.

For the most part, Parker and his pals would prey on banks, armored cars and other well-endowed representatives of the institutional state. But at the beginning of his run he'd been double-crossed and left for dead by a mobbed-up member of The Outfit, and he was forced to force their hand. Mobsters don't like to be forced to do anything, of course, especially organized mobsters, and they put a price on Parker's head. So he slips off to Nebraska for a makeover ("The Man with the Getaway Face"), and when that still doesn't get them off his back, he puts out the word among his pals that it's open season on gangsters, and starts a spree they won't soon recover from ("The Outfit").

Prior to that time Parker and his ilk have always assumed a sorta steal-and-let-steal attitude with organized crime. After all, both are on the same side of the law. So after a series of seemingly well-orchestrated rip-offs, he finally forces The Outfit to call a truce, and Parker gets back to what he does best: knocking off legitimate targets.

Well, supposedly legitimate targets. As everybody knows, even the most aboveboard bank usually has something nefarious going on somewhere, so it's really all relative. But whatever the target, the job's never without hubris. In fact at one point Parker assembles a team in order to rob an entire town ("The Score"), which is about as bold a move as a badass can get.

And Parker is indeed a badass. Adherent of a code that seems to have gone the way of the desperado, he's a man of few words, distinct objectives, unflinching loyalty and murderous resolve. Yes, Parker would just as soon kill you, but only for damn good cause.

The nine titles I so swiftly flew through represent the pinnacle of American pulp, and the University of Chicago Press indeed needs to be applauded for so coolly repackaging the series for all the world to read. If you're looking for purposeful violence and crafty exposition, it doesn't get any better than Stark. And if you, like me, are a sucker for the time when men were men and unafraid to shoot, then Parker's your kinda man.

This, my friends, is reading in black-and-blue. And it's worth every bruise it delivers. I just can't wait for the next batch to hit print so I can steal away for another knockout weekend.

For more information on Parker and the series from University of Chicago Press visit violentworldofparker.com and [...]

The above review is from the column Hard Print, in The Lead Miami Beach
[...]

I first read this novel in the late `60s after seeing Lee Marvin play the lead character Parker in the John Boorman directed movie "Point Blank", which was based on the original book titled "The Hunter". I read it again over the years and have now revisited it again after the recent death of its author Donald Westlake (Richard Stark being his pen name) and also viewing the recent Mel Gison film "Payback", again largely based on the original story.

Westlake in 1984 described writing the Parker series of books as: "I would turn into a coldly emotionless novelist named Richard Stark who wrote about a sumbitch named Parker" (from his "Introduction" to the "Levine" collection of stories ) but this I believe understates the sharpness and uniqueness of this series, which subsequently had run to 22 books by the time of Westlake's death.

"The Hunter" itself was written in late 1961 but not printed till early 1963 and inevitably given the passage of over 40 years since may have aged on certain of the details. The creating of a false driving license using a pencil smudged form against 21st century identity theft shows how times have changed! However the reason the book stands re-reading is that this is the creation of the original template - Parker as an unemotional tough guy (not a "wise guy") with zero moralizing given his criminal mindset; the clear ditching of any prior "good guys at heart" private detective type personas of Sam Spade and Mike Hammer; the depiction of freelance criminals operating outside organized crime; and, the demi-monde of informal networks and groupings established solely for the duration of any job, proved to be a winning formula.

This original story sets up many of the elements that would repeat themselves across the subsequent series and make it so enduring when depicted in so many different scenarios - betrayal by colleagues or double crosses by associates on the job; heists for cash (or something close to) being the key jobs done; and, operating without either law enforcement or crime syndicates knowledge.

However the key element and pleasure for the reader is the describing of what is often a very ordinary even tedious lifestyle, albeit one with an illegal edge. Parker in this first book is after money owed him from a heist to finance plastic surgery and a period of non-criminal leisure before his next job calls. However the reading enjoyment is in the mundane day to day details of following what has to be done as he pursues his objective and the reactions needed to changed facts and circumstances.

While there are periods of action, this is not a Hollywood "high body count" action story line, since the last thing Parker ever needs is a major shoot out with the police arriving in force. Understatement is the forte on show here. Ultimately Parker may not be a very likeable person and to use the words "hero" or even "anti-hero" is probably a misnomer. As Westlake himself admitted he very much enjoyed the alternating schizophrenia and challenges of writing about the hard edges as Stark and the comedic personas he conjured up as Westlake with such commercial success.

Richard (aka Donald) we will miss you but you have left us a great legacy to enjoy and revisit!

I got this book after watching 'Payback' and 'Payback, Straight Up: The Director's Cut'. It was said that the director's cut was a little closer to the Parker in Stark's novels, and as I liked that version, I decided to try the books out.

'The Hunter' is several decades older, and this is exemplified throughout the text in little phrases or mundane details (prices, vehicle models, etc.). Rather than detract from the story as 'Payback' viewers will have seen it, these differences actually made the book a materially different, though familiar experience.

The writing is very plain -- stark, even -- and its protagonist a true anti-hero. Still, Stark's writing leaves the reader reluctant to put the book down, and his deceptively simple style fills the imagination with vivid images to accompany the words on the page.

I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to reading more in the series. It's short and is fairly 'light' reading, so if you liked 'Payback' or are looking for some entertaining crime fiction, give 'The Hunter' a shot!

"The Hunter" is the first of a series of novels written by Donald Westlake under the pseudonym of Richard Stark in the 1960s. This University of Chicago Press reprint has a very stylish cover, but I'm not sure that "The Hunter" is worth the price at $14.00. That's a lot for a paperback with only 182 pages that actually have words on them. Good story, though.

"The Hunter" introduces a part-time criminal by the name of "Parker," who is out for revenge. The reader is immediately given the picture of a man who is out to raise some quick cash and in a very short time commits a murder. Then the reader is slowly filled in on the background as to why this man is so driven.

Parker had gotten used to a routine where he pulled a few heists a year and spent the rest of his time basking in the sun at luxury hotels with his wife. But something went horribly wrong in Parker's last job and the people responsible and anybody who gets in Parker's way are going to get payback. To say much more would spoil the story.

This book is a character study of a brutal man who is so driven that he sees nothing but what can help him achieve his revenge. Despite the tremendous violence and the fact that Parker is mostly unlikeable, I found myself enjoying this book.

I particularly liked the spare descriptions of the characters that tell the reader all they need to know and I liked the way the story was put together with a series of flashbacks. I believe fans of James Ellroy's stories would probably get a kick out of the Parker novels (if they haven't already discovered them).