Stark World: Donald Westlake’s Bleak Anti-Hero
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. (D H Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature)
In 2008, on his way to dinner in a Palm Beach restaurant, the crime writer Donald Westlake dropped down dead with a heart attack. As abruptly as in one of the plot twists in his books, Westlake’s death drew a line under one of the most fertile careers in American literature. For over half a century Westlake had pumped out – under his own name and a wide variety of pseudonyms – over ninety books (no-one, including Westlake, seemed sure of the exact total): mysteries, comedy thrillers, spy stories, screenplays, science fiction, pornography, even a children’s book.
Most striking and original of all his works are the twenty-four novels Westlake penned under the name of Richard Stark, whose protagonist Parker (in good thriller tradition we are never told his first name) is a violent cold-blooded criminal always ready to react with ruthless violence if someone is dumb enough to try to cross him. Parker – later memorably brought to the screen by Lee Marvin in the film Point Blank – first marched on to the page in Westlake’s novel The Hunter in1960:
‘His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins … his face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless …’
Parker, shot and left for dead by his partner and unfaithful wife, returns like an avenging revenant, relentlessly working his way up the chain of command of ‘The Outfit’, a Mafia-like organization, to retrieve his share of the original loot. He is the ultimate stripped down loner, driven solely by self-interest and cool criminal professionalism. A heister who lives between jobs in expensive resort hotels under a series of aliases, Parker has no past to speak of, no interests and no interior life. Food and drink are simply fuel to him. He has no small talk, no sense of humour. When not involved in a heist he spends his time, lounging on beaches or in hotel bedrooms, idly watching whatever comes to hand.
Throughout, Parker’s disconnectedness, his lack of commitment to anyone or anything apart from his own self-interest is emphasized. But in fact Parker often goes to great lengths to help out his fellow ‘mechanics’. The flipside of Parker’s loyalty to associates is his unremitting pursuit of double-crossers. Half the plots of the Parker novels involve double-crosses of some kind or another followed by the tracking down and dispatching of their perpetrators. Scores have to be settled and accounts squared because they have broken the code of underworld professional ethics. As Parker says of the double-crossers he pursues in Flashfire (2000): ‘these three are mechanics, we had an understanding, they broke it. They don’t do that.’
For Parker lives by a code, albeit a perverse one. Whatever you may think of his crimes they are never petty or mean. He never deals in frauds, drugs or muggings but instead pulls off impersonal cash heists of corporations, banks, casinos, and stadiums. He always shares the proceeds meticulously with his partners, even saving their shares if they have been caught. While he is prepared to use violence to further his crimes he does so within strict limits.
For Parker is no sadist. In one early novel, The Mourner (1963), he has recourse to force to extract information but it is emphasized that he ‘hated this kind of thing, hurting people to make them talk. It was messy and time-consuming and there ought to be a better way. But there wasn’t.’1 While he is always ready to kill to tie up dangerous loose ends, Parker never engages in gratuitous violence. In the same novel he rejects Bet Harrow, the society beauty ‘with a liking for self cruelty’ who pursues him with the comment: ‘You can’t be trusted. You like to watch violence too much.’ Just as Parker is untouched by people and emotions generally, the pleasures of cruelty also leave him cold.
From the outset Westlake’s novels brought him a large and admiring post bag from men in prisons and ghettoes. It is easy to see their attraction for such readers, but over time they have become the object of a much broader cult. Deservedly so, for they are a gripping read. From their first sentences they grab you by the throat:
‘When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.’1
Land on Planet Stark, and you breathe an air that is dangerously addictive. With their violent action set against the bleak backdrops of empty lots, cheap hotels and disused buildings, they ignite a high compression mix of tension and explosive energy. Told in taut, spare prose, they fuse dialogue as sharp as a knife with sly, black humour and non-stop action. They are irresistibly kinetic. I defy anyone to read the climax of The Seventh/The Split (1966) without a quickening pulse as Parker chases his opponent through forests and finally corners him in an unfinished building, pursuing him floor to floor as his antagonist showers down cement bags from above.
Westlake is a master of the sudden narrative electric shock. There is always an unexpected reversal lurking round the next corner. Complex, overlapping time sequences are often deployed, as in the movies of Quentin Tarentino (who, it should be noted, is very much in the tradition of Westlake).Vividly visual, it is no accident that several of the Parker novels have been made into movies. Westlake himself drew a distinction between fictional and cinematic techniques:
‘A movie has got to be about one person in motion. A novel can run off in a lot of different directions but a movie’s got to watch one guy keep going, and that’s what these books all are – just one guy keeping going.2‘
In fact, though, his novels successfully combine both intricate plots and irresistible narrative drive. His plots have all the intricacy of Chandler’s but none of their incomprehensibility. A key image in the Parker novels is a man in motion – on the run or on the hunt. The very first Parker novel, The Hunter (1960), opens with him marching into New York across the George Washington Bridge on his way to get even with the Outfit. Most end with him heading off into the unknown in search of a new identity, a new job and a new life. As the police dogs close in, Breakout (2002) ends with the statement, ‘He kept on climbing’.
Stark’s world could be criticized for being flatly two-dimensional. But this misses the point. Westlake presents a distorted image of the world but one that is nevertheless sharply illuminating. The effect of his characters (as Eliot once remarked of Ben Jonson’s) comes not from how they act upon one another but how they fit in with each other4. Together, they create a coherent world – one that is at an angle to our world but nevertheless reflects it.
It is a world that revolves around the clash between deviance and conformity. Against the repressed and repressive mass Westlake pits the alienated outsider, the hungry loner. Parker and the strings of partners with whom he regularly but only temporarily teams up with (the ‘mechanics’) have chosen to operate on the edge, to live in the wild, to take their chances in a brutal and uncertain environment where no-one can be fully trusted and even the strong and self-controlled may not survive, and where, when things go awry, there is no-one to turn to.
Westlake maintained he was initially spurred into writing the novels by the stifling conformity of 1950s America:
I guess it all came out of growing up in the Fifties when that all monolithic America thought its society was now perfect, and therefore nobody could be different. Conformity and togetherness, and all that idealised stuff, and it seemed to me at the time like a society of ants. Everything was given; there didn’t seem to be anything to argue about. Being anti-social was a lonely business then. I just had this feeling, in my twenties, that if you had your own personality, you were like a cockroach living in a wall.3
.But Westlake does not simply pit the criminal world against the straight. Instead, he often shows the straight world as criminal and the criminal world as bizarrely straight. This criminal conformity is embodied in Parker’s opponent The Outfit, a bloated, over-bureaucratic organization that is an inverted version of mega-corporations like General Motors or IBM. Inside The Outfit everything has been reduced to precedent and hierarchy, and all competitive edge has been lost. Threatened by Parker and his partners, its members simply fold. One of The Outfit’s ‘executives’ explains to his ‘CEO’ that the cause is galloping social conformity:
‘You mean the Outfit’s getting soft?
… ‘I mean the Outfit is being civilized, is being absorbed into the culture. The organization is getting too highly organized.’
… ‘What do we do about it? You got any ideas?’
‘I don’t think anything can be done about it. If you managed to convince the employees of the Club Cockatoo that they are crooks after all, nine out of ten of them would quit on the spot and go get jobs some place else. They don’t want to be divorced from society … a result of prosperity, I suppose. During the Depression there was no such problem.’4
Repeatedly, Parker outwits and out-manoeuvers this lumbering behemoth.
Parker is both a reaction against the straight world and its ironic reverse image. He is often characterized as a kind of entrepreneur, like ‘a businessman in a tough business’ or a specialist professional:
‘In his dark windbreaker and black chinos and heavy black shoes he looked like some kind of skilled workman, freelancing, brought in by a contractor to do one specific job. Which he was.5‘
Dislocated professionals recur throughout the novels, craftsmen or skilled specialists who can no longer find a place in mainstream straight society. We are left with the distinct impression that under its straight surface capitalist society with its sudden sidelining shifts can be just as brutal as the underworld.
While, superficially, there appears to be no conventional moral accounting in Stark’s world, taken overall, the Parker novels present a series of ironic morality tales, black comedies of self-deception, leading inevitably to disappointment and ultimate defeat.
As described, a Parker novel typically kicks off in the middle of the action with a zinger of an opening, then gives the back story before again running on with the plot. As the action progresses, it spins off other loops, twisting and snaking around the main plot. Meanwhile, other loops – loose ends from the past – attach themselves, spider’s thread-like, to the main plot. Then come the central action scenes of the action, invariably told from the viewpoints of a sequence of different characters. In Nobody Runs Forever (2004), for example, the climactic bank raid is related from the viewpoints of a dozen characters, switching between them more than thirty times.
Westlake’s switches of narrative viewpoint are not merely devices to heighten tension and surprise but convey the limited awareness, the self-deluding ‘islands’ of the characters’ aspirations and expectations which are set ironically against the much larger ocean of randomness and unpredictability. Just when everything seems to be going smoothly, Westlake unsnaps a trap door under his characters – and his readers.
Most of the bit part players in the novels are small-time chiselers, over-reachers, who bring disaster on their own heads through weakness, incompetence or neuroticism. As Parker comments, ‘There is such a thing as loser mentality, and losing is both its cause and its symptom.’1
Always a blank dominant presence, Parker increasingly acts vis-a-vis the other characters as an impersonal nemesis, a sinister mentor malignly combining the roles of tempter, liberator and destroyer. The twist is that Parker too is as much victim as agent. Keeping control, staying on top of the unpredictable is an obsession with him. In Backflash (1998) there is an illuminating interchange in which Parker is asked whether he likes gambling:
‘Parker’d never thought about it, he just knew it was pointless and uninteresting. He said, ‘Turn myself over to random events? Why? The point is to control events, and they’ll still get away from you anyway. Why make things worse?’
All Stark’s characters are trapped in a box of some kind. The novels are crammed with tight places. Unlit, maze-like buildings are often the backdrop for the climaxes of the Stark novels, deadly shoot-outs in which Parker is forced to crawl and grope around, in a cat-and-mouse struggle against opponents whose positions he can only guess at. ‘There was no way out’ is the opening sentence of Slayground (1969), whose entire action takes place in an out-of-season funfair, where local mobsters try to hunt down Parker and the loot he has with him. Of course, in novels dealing with break-ins, hideouts and stashes, you would expect a fair number of ‘tight places’ but the claustrophobia of Parker novels goes far beyond this and represents a profound horror of powerlessness and entrapment.
The ultimate box is of course a prison cell, and that is where Parker ends up in Breakout (2002), on remand after a botched job, flanked by interrogators and potential snitches:
‘This was the place before the decisions were made, so this was the place of hope … But because it was a place of hope, of possibilities, of decisions not yet made, it was also a place of paranoia … These are the people you live among, these are the rules you live within. This is your world now, and it’s the other world that isn’t real anymore.’
Parker manages to escape but only to find himself trapped in yet another kind of prison. Breaking into a jewelry store in a converted armory with the local gang that sprung him from jail, he finds the tunnel they entered by has collapsed behind them. Frustration and tension mount to fever pitch as each wall they break through seems only to lead to a further wall. Even when they get out they find themselves caught up in a tense net of subterfuge and surveillance.
The novels show that even for so powerful a force as Parker total control is illusory. In half of them Parker ends up largely or totally unsuccessful, either empty-handed or on the run. These reversals run right back to The Hunter (1960) in which he finally wrested his money from The Outfit, only to lose it in a stupid mix-up over suitcases. In Stark’s last novel, Dirty Money (2008), Parker tells a partner, ‘There’s no such thing as a deal … There never was anywhere. A deal is what people say is gonna happen. It isn’t always what happens.’ In that novel, after the various share-outs and pay-offs (if you work it all out), Parker is barely left with just enough dollars out of the many millions from the heist to buy himself a new identity.
The early Parker novels make great play of his irresistible sexual potency. Seeing him, all women, we were told, shivered spontaneously ‘above their nylons’ (it was the early 1960s!):
‘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, they 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.’6
In these early novels Parker’s sexual and criminal impulses follow a bizarre linked cycle. A stew of sexual restlessness is the first sign of a crime coming on: ‘He couldn’t stop thinking about women, but he knew what that meant; it was just his nerves wanting him to work again’ 8. Then Parker loses all interest in sex until the job is over, at which point his libido surges back overwhelmingly (‘It was always like this after a job. A satyr, inexhaustible and insatiable. He was twelve feet tall.’ 7
However, things start to change. Parker gets involved with a woman called Claire, who has got embroiled by her brother-in-law in the planned robbery of a rare coin convention to which Parker has also been recruited. Due to one of the double-crosses that are the hallmark of Parker crimes the job goes sour – violently so. Claire, badly shaken by the violence and unmoored from her old life, offers a tentative commitment to Parker, which he – equally provisionally – accepts:
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You mean I can’t go back at all.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, watching her.
She thought about it, looking at the dashboard and then looked back at Parker, saying, ‘Will you take me with you?’
‘For how long?’
She managed a wan smile. ‘Until one of us gets bored, I suppose.’ 8
They settle into a strange kind of semi-permanent relationship, living between jobs in resort hotels until Claire gets a place of her own, a well-appointed lakeside house, where they embark on a strange, outwardly respectable life, insulated within their exurban bubble and only connected by a long telephone line to a retired associate in the outer world. From there Parker operates like a criminal parody of a businessman, periodically ‘commuting’ into the larger world of danger and uncertainty in order to support their lifestyle.
In marked contrast to all the buildings and rooms in the outer world that are perilous places of constriction and entrapment, Claire’s house is a symbol of security, warmth and life-giving emotional release. When Parker comes home in Backflash (1998), we are told he ‘stopped in the doorway to kiss her, and in that move opened himself to all the warmth he’d shut out since he’d gone away. The homecomings were always good, because they were a kind of coming back to life.’
However Parker’s two worlds – the savage world of his heists and the secure world represented by Claire – can never be totally insulated from one another. Repeatedly the first stretches out its claws to the second. Its safety and the relationship on which it is based cannot be guaranteed for ever. One day Parker, may not – probably one day will not – come back. The terse poignancy of their leave-takings is a repeated refrain:
‘I go away and I come back.’
She looked at him. ‘Every time?’
‘Except the last time,’ he said. 5
In the final Parker novels he comes across as a character against whom the social and technological odds are increasingly stacked. He seems a stranded time traveller transported from the more forgiving noir-ish shadows of the 1940s and 1950s into the bright pin-sharp age of electronic transactions and surveillance. In Nobody Runs Forever published in 2004 his gang pulls off a successful heist of bank security vans only to find itself immediately pinned down in the empty church that is their hideout by circling police helicopters. As they ponder what to do, they blame the heightened security of the post-9/11 world for their predicament. ‘Computer speaks to computer,’ muses Parker, adding: ‘It starts with technology, but it still ends with tracker dogs.’ As the title indicates, even Parker’s race may soon have its end and there be no more returns to the security of Claire’s lakeside retreat.
As a creation Parker is an original but has parallels and forebears. His antecedents are the freelancing private eyes of Hammett and Chandler – but with this twist: while they may walk down the mean street of the American underworld he is fully part of the street.
Hemingway is a key influence, not just in Stark’s taut, tight-mouthed style but the unflinching core of hard solitariness at the heart of the novels. Lawrence’s encapsulation of the ethos of Hemingway’s early short stories, In Our Time, could well apply to Parker:
‘Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held. Break it, and get away. Don’t get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away …9‘
Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature identified two parallel developments in American fiction: the sloughing-off of the dead old European cultural epidermis alongside the emergence of a new and more whole-skinned ‘integrative’ form of hero. Paradoxically he detected its early lineaments among the lone killers of the fictional frontier:
‘Of course, the soul often breaks down into disintegration … What true myth concerns itself with is not the disintegration product. True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul. And this, for America, is Deerslayer. A man who turns his back on white society. A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white … This is the very intrinsic–most American. He is at the core of all the other flux and fluff. And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.’10
Parker is the existential anti-hero of crime writing. Maybe nobody runs forever, but – and despite Westlake’s death – Parker will keep on climbing, now and into the future, a mythic underworld Sisyphus for our times.
Notes
1 Firebreak (2001).
2 Quoted in an interview with Tom Dewe Mathews in The Guardian, 2 June 1999.
3 Quoted in an interview with Scott Bradfield in The Independent, 14 July 1990.
4 The Outfit (1963).
5 Backflash (1998).
6 The Hunter (1960).
7 The Mourner (1963).
8 Rare Coin Score (1967).
9 D H Lawrence’s review of Ernest Hemingway’s, In Our Time (New York: Boni & Liveright, 2nd rev. ed., 1930).
10 D H Lawrence, ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels’, in his Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Heinemann, 1924).