Books: Plunder Squad By Richard Stark (1972)

 

"Parker, as his readers will know, specializes in planning and executing elaborate heists and this inevitably involves working with others (no more than five, with four being the key number). Sadly, not all criminals are as talented and trustworthy as Parker and this means that his first task in planning any job is ensuring that those around him are dependable and up to the task. But George Uhl (last seen in The Sour Lemon Score, and a reminder that sometimes Parker makes mistakes) louses up a job and tries to kill him. The next possible job is amateur hour, and Parker walks away. Needing money, he signs on to a high-risk art theft. A top-notch team is assembled, including Ed Mackey and Stan Devers (from The Green Eagle Score). Everything looks like it should come up roses, but that wouldn’t be very much fun, now would it?"

For the last few books, Parker has found himself on a losing streak (we get a mention of few of them, including the cash left at the amusement park in the last book, Slayground) and this continues in what was thought to be the penultimate book in the Parker series back in the early 1970s. If I remember right, one of the reasons Westlake decided to end the series with 1974’s Butcher’s Moon was due to the fact that the public now knew Donald E. Westlake, writer of “bubbly frothy comic mysteries” as Lawrence Block noted in the Forward to University Chicago Press edition to Butcher’s Moon, was hardboiled noir writer Richard Stark. This seemed to surprise readers of Westlake, who had been putting out a collection of funny, goofy heist novels since 1965’s Fugitive Pigeon (with six Parker books already released by then). Much like the Sam Holt pseudonym used later, Westlake seemly lost interest in continuing on with these characters once the world knew he was Stark.

For the most part, Westlake is continuing to tinker with the structure of the Parker series, which maybe one of the reasons Plunder Squad and Butcher’s Moon became hard books for collectors to get. While print runs, changing times, and other factors may have caused these last two titles in the Parker series (at the time) never to be reprinted, the formula Westlake had used for the last few years kept evolving, which reflects, I think, why Westlake was such a successful, if undervalued writer. While he always seemly had a cult following, he never seemed to reach the apex most writers enjoyed then and today. Perhaps it was his prolific nature that caused this (though James Patterson is not effected too much by this), or the reality that despite the nature of his comic novels, there was always an undercurrent of complexity to them –they had something to say. Not to say he was good at social commentary –he used the F word judiciously when describing gays (though they were never portrayed too much as a stereotype)- but through those comic novels, he could comment on modern life.

The other wrinkle in the formula of Plunder Squad is Parker’s cohorts are professional, often sympathetic, and even likable. It turns out the people who hire them are the weak links. I found the return of George Uhl and interesting subplot. Parker chose not to kill Uhl way back when, mostly because he felt there was no point in doing so. It’s been well established that Parker does not kill people at random or for pleasure. The reason some survive is simple: he is a thief and wants to avoid prison, so the death of others is the consequences of the way he lives his life. Yes, on rare instances, he’s killed, but it’s more about balancing the scales of his skewed version of honor. Still, one got a sense that Westlake had already decided to tie-up all the loose ends with this fifteenth book in the series, that meant before Butcher's Moon's grand finale, he needed to deal with Uhl first.

Plunder Squad also contains a scene featuring skip tracer named Daniel Kearny, a character created by fellow noir writer Joe Gores. The scene between Parker and Kearny, that happens early in the book, is also featured in Gores book, Dead Skip –just for Kearny’s point of view. Westlake also sort of retcons this scene by having Parker and Kearny meet “off stage”. In the first Parker novel, The Hunter, when Parker broke out of a prison farm and was on the lam. According to Kearny, Parker shacked up with a woman in Fresco, and that woman was Kearny’s sister, with whom Kearny stayed one night, and Kearny helped Parker to kill a bottle (though, in the Stark/Westlake version, Kearny finished off most of that bottle as Parker would never allow himself to get this way).