“It was an impossible crime: knock off a huge plant
payroll, all the banks, and all the stores in one entire city in one night. But
there was one thief good enough to try — Parker. All he needed was the right
men, the right plan, and the right kind of help from Lady Luck. The men and the
plan were easy; Lady Luck was another story. She turned out to be a
good-looking blonde with a taste for booze and eyes for Parker. And Parker knew
this chilling caper could either be the perfect crime… or a set-up that would
land him in jail — for life.”
With this
book, I began to ponder a few things. Parker is seemly going through more money
than he should –after all, he’s made some big heists and with those heists has
come a lot of cash. So why he gets involved here in this scheme is pretty
baffling to me. Parker, it seems, can’t live without
working, which for him can only mean heisting, so he spends the money faster
than he has to, so he’ll have an excuse to work again. In The Hunter, we were told that he worked once a year on
average, but that was when he had Lynn. Without her, he seems more restless,
thus needs to work more. He reminds himself a lot that he’ll need to do
something about this, but for the moment he’s going to lie to himself and
ignore the fact that he managed to blow through almost a hundred thousand
dollars in a only a few months.
So –out “boredom”, as Stark writes-
Parker allows himself to become involved in this (from my perspective) very
dubious job that Joe Sheer, his old contact in Nebraska who is Parker’s
go-between, tells him about. Two things early on struck me as out of
place - at least out of character based on four previous novels. One is Parker
never likes to work with a huge crew, no more than five people. But here the
job will take a dozen men –and that’s a recipe for disaster for a man like
Parker who wants things done neat and quick, with him getting as much as the
cut as possible. And two, is this Edgars guy, the man who wanted to do the job.
We know this is personal vendetta, another thing that Parker hates, as personal
things, revenge and whatnot, have a tendency to get in way of the simple job
five-man job, let alone one as complicated as this theft became. So we get
Parker’s cruel professionalism throughout The Score, but his resistance to ignoring all
the signs this was a bad robbery (which appears to be Stark/Westlake’s dark
take on Ocean’s 11) from the start –because he knows Edgars was going to be a
problem- makes him a bit less a bad-ass. Of course, even he can make mistakes.
With this book, we get two new recurring characters, as Handy
McKay has retired after being shot in The Mourner. One is Dan Wycza, a fitness-obsessed strong-arm man and part-time wrestler. The other is Alan Grofield, who is a
charming womanizer, yet also a career criminal, and his main passion in life is
the theatre. He has a profound disrespect for film acting and television, and
despite the fact that these can be lucrative, Grofield would rather pursue
other career opportunities –stealing money- than getting featured in a movie or
television. He’ll make an appearance again in the eighth Parker novel, The
Handle, before getting his own four-book Richard Stark spin-off series.
The Score was adapted as film made in French, with
the title Mise à sac, by director Alain Cavlier in 1967. An English-dubbed
version, titled Midnight Raid, was distributed by United Artists to some
territories in 1969. The film did not have a theatrical release in the U.S.
until 2013, when it was screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).
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