Customer Reviews

The Hunter: A Parker Novel (Parker Novels)

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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".

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

"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.

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
[...]

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.

I've made a promise to reread all the early Parker novels by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) this year. The books are short and compact, and the reading will be a pleasure. I can burn through them in a sitting or two. The books are dated, of course, because most of them were written in the 1960s and early 1970s, and cell phones and the internet weren't prevalent. The targets of the professional criminals in these books would be a lot more difficult in present day.

But I can slip back into the time period effortlessly. Some of the younger generation of readers might struggle with that lack of technology unless they're well-versed in period piece stuff - back in the old days when they had to try to trace phone numbers.

Parker is one of those iconic characters in fiction that will forever stand out. He's been played by Lee Marvin (Point Blank), Chow Yun Fat (Full Contact) and by Mel Gibson (Payback). That's some rarified air there, folks. He's a big, gnarly brute of a man in the novels, a cold-heated professional when on the job, able to cut losses and throats with a single flick of a knife. As the series progresses, Parker softens a little, but not much. He maintains a bleak outlook on life and I love him for it. Comic writers like Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka probably read Stark, or at least works by other writers who were inspired by the Parker books.

In this first volume, Parker is on a mission of vengeance. He barely survived the last heist after being betrayed by one of his partners and his wife. Now he wants his cut of the profits. The double-cross is more complicated than Parker realizes. When the ex-partner took the money, it wasn't just about the money. The man needed the stake to buy his way back into the Outfit (Mafia) and get back into their good graces after blowing another operation that nearly got him killed.

Watching Parker coolly work his way up the chain of people involved to reach the offices of the Mafia, where he brazenly demands his money, is an absolute treat. In some ways, Parker reminds me of Joe Pike, Robert Crais's hero. Neither one of them will give an inch, no matter what it costs them personally. Giving in to someone one, in their view, is much worse than dying. I like that about those kinds of characters.

This book was an absolute delight to read even though I'd seen both movies and read the book years ago (at least twice). I finished it in a couple nights and am looking forward to the rest of the series.

Comics enthusiasts (and readers that enjoyed this story and might want to follow it into other incarnations) will be happy to know that Darwyn Cooke has written and drawn two of the Parker novels. The Hunter and The Outfit are out as graphic novels as well.

If you haven't read the Parker novels, you don't have to read them in order, but I'd recommend it. The University of Chicago is reprinting them (almost all of them are out now), and there are Kindle versions as well.

If you have never read a thief novel, especially if you loved Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw in The Getaway, you gotta read the Parker books.

You'll thank me for the recommendation.

this book was excellent. it's the grimiest crime story i've ever read. parker is merciless! he was shot and left for dead in a burning building by his wife and a criminal he partnered with for a robbery. he crawled out of there and is walking toward vengeance. the details about who parker is are foggy and beware that this is not the super genius criminal pulling off high dollar heists with a crew of other thieves that you may have heard of. this is the genesis of the character "parker". he is just a man using his knowledge of robbery and the criminal underworld to track down his prey. sometimes he does things that are out of character compared to the parker of later novels because this is a horrible creature crawling up from the dark side of donald westlake's mind and making itself known for the first time. parker is so rough in this book it's kind of hard to read at points, but in a good way. the reason for this is at first this was supposed to be a stand alone novel, originally parker went to jail at the end and that was it. then a publisher liked the character and wanted a series, so parker as we know him was born. the second book, the man with the getaway face, is the first story of parker planning a heist with a crew but is still kind of foreign and a little off. not in a bad way though, that book is great but you can feel it was early in the series and not so defined. the third, the outfit, is when parker is finally parker in the sense that he is a refined character with rules that he lives by and consistency in his actions. after that it just gets better and better and parker's character is consistent and familiar in each unique story.

in this book parker is a man possessed, he is so angry and driven that it skews his focus. while he still maintains the situation, he makes choices that are a little reckless and desperate.

the hunter is a gritty crime drama and the plight of the protagonist... antagonist... well the main character is enthralling i was blown away with the harsh realistic criminal atmosphere of the book. the only thing that dated it was that in order to make a fake license, parker takes a blank license form and fills it out and draws the stamp on it! wow being a criminal in the early sixties must have been a breeze! other than that it feels like you are reading a book written recently. in fact it is very refreshing if you've ever read a book in which the author disgustingly over describes everything; two pages to describe a room, three to describe someones feelings, a chapter to describe a single conversation about some unnessecary story, examples are anne rice (interview with the vampire, queen of the damned, etc.) and robert ludlum (the bourne identity, ultimatum, etc.). good writers, but five hundred pages of fluff make you want a more readable two hundred page story that you may even have the patience to re-read eventually. this is that kind of writing, constantly gripping, no boredom, and no non-sense. not to say that the parker novels are devoid of description but that you don't get bored wondering if the author was just trying to make his book bigger by cramming in more information about what a character was thinking, wearing, feeling, seeing, what he had for dinner the night before, what color hair his mother had, where he went to high school, rather than just what is pertinent to the immediate story. in the jacket of one of the books is a quote by someone that talks about how parker is the non hero. not the anti-hero (criminal with a good heart or something) and certainly not the hero, i thought this was very accurate, parker is just a bad guy. he is out to make money and anyone who gets in his way is so much chaff to be discarded. in this book he's more out for revenge than anything and believe you me, he gets it! a dangerous professional thief out for blood after being double crossed, fantastic. read it, love it!


oh and if you haven't seen payback with mel gibson, watch it first because it's good in it's own right and you can enjoy it and then be pleased with the more in depth and darker book rather than being disappointed in what they left out and changed for the movie;) then watch payback: straight up edition. it's more like the book.

I was working the NY Review of books like always on Sundays. There are good pickings there. So's I'm turning pages. Politics? No, not today. I was not feeling so good and politics has been bothering me lately. I should go to the doctor but I cannot afford the high price of those insurance company salaries, leave alone their bonuses, stock options and grants, if you catch my drift. And them Iceland books have too much an Arctic Chill for fall, get me?

I needed something brisk like an icy shot of Polish Vodka to cut the dust and clear the palate. Truth be known, I was pretty jaded. The next page looked like the usual ad from University of Chicago Press. Oh good, more door stops on Derrida, Lacan and Welty. But hey, not so fast. What are they doing with novels sporting a snub nose .38 (only a fool would wrestle a .357 snub in heavy action) on the cover? Nothing like a little crackling crime novel.

They do not do novels at that hi-brow press, leastways not since "A River Runs Through It", which was a long time ago. Besides Maclean was part of their Syndicate or Outfit or what you want to call the Organization. And he was a long time ago. So naturally I pay attention.

Turns out Stark is a moniker for my favorite New York City mystery or crime novel, Donald Westlake. He kicked the bucket last year, so I figured I was out of luck. But, hello, a whole other series under this alias. Not too good to be true, for once.

Westlake is a real wiseacer, funny like a shiv in the ribs. But as Stark he goes dark and stark, or noir as the hoity-toity say. But good. Real good. Style and story. No extra words like what goils slather on their fakey crazy nails. Stark's guy, Parker, operates in the New York City before yuppies and derivatives. Pastrami on rye with butter for eight-five cents is what Parker calls expensive. It does not get any better.

University of Chicago Press has been putting out a few of these each year. I figure you should know about it. Cheap, and it fits in your back pocket.

Melly Gibson made "Payback" as a rip off this. At least, seven years later, they finally let the director edit it right. So if you want that kind of thing, at least go for the director's cut.

Back to the real thing, next in line is "The Man with the Getaway Face", what name will be obvious when you read The Hunter. This one was great until I need another good slug, and I am not talking fists or bullets either, doll face.