Books: The Hunter By Richard Stark (1962)

“You probably haven’t ever noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice everything. That’s their job, sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers’ work habits, the positions of the security guards; lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds; surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They’re thieves. Heisters. They’re pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you’re planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t want to cross him, and you don’t want to get in his way, because he’ll stop at nothing to get what he’s after. In The Hunter, the first volume in the series, Parker roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption.”

Ever the prolific writer, Donald E. Westlake used the pen name Richard Stark for 28 novels published over some 46 years. Of the twenty-eight, twenty-four featured Parker, the unapologetic and ruthless antihero. However, when he wrote The Hunter, Westlake was not seeing a series of novels. When he turned it in, his editor told him that if he would rewrite the ending so that Parker escaped, he would be willing to publish up to three books a year about Parker. Even though Westlake was prolific, he knew he could not do that. Still, he produced sixteen Parker novels under the Richard Stark name between 1962 and 1974 before letting Parker take an extensive hiatus, finally returning to the character in 1997. He would write eight more between then and his death in 2008. The structure he used for the novels did not vary during its run, making them somewhat formulaic in nature, however, Westlake’s razor-sharp prose-style always won fans over. In some ways, it has been odd no film studio has successfully brought the character to the big screen. I mean beyond the inherent violence, the stories are not that complex and follow a straightforward plotting. However, there was several adaptations of the Stark books, including two versions of The Hunter, one called Point Blank (1967, starring Lee Marvin) and the 1997 Mel Gibson version, Payback (none of the films versions were able to use the Parker name, though). Still, the character does have a somewhat merciless and lopsided moral code: he had a streak of professionalism and efficiency in him that most people would not expect and he only took his fair share of the capers money –but crossing him meant death.

Even though it was written nearly 60 years ago, The Hunter is taunt, well-paced thriller. It’s a rare novel written at a certain time in history that can still work today –and that is a talent few writers had.