Books: Butcher's Moon By Richard Stark (1974)

“Parker’s run of bad luck (the four novels spanning from The Sour Lemon Score to Plunder Squad) persists as the story Butcher’s Moon opens. A botched jewelry store job leaves him out of pocket and in dire need of cash, so he calls up Alan Grofield, his long-time associate and actor-turned-thief, with whom he worked on the heist at the start of Slayground—a heist that resulted in Grofield being hospitalized and Parker abandoning a stashed bag of dough in an amusement park in the Midwest city of Tyler, Indiana. After 2 years and a few adventures, Grofield is similarly on his uppers, his summer stock theater in Mead Grove, Indiana continuing to drain his resources and leaving him without a pot to piss in. So when Parker suggests they head to Tyler to retrieve their loot, Grofield readily accepts. Not surprisingly, once they arrive in Tyler and search Fun Island, there’s no trace of the money, so he and Grofield make a nuisance of themselves with the local Outfit (i.e. Mob) operation in an effort to track down the boodle. Adolf Lozini, the Mafia boss who led the hunt for Parker through Fun Island in Slayground, is still in charge—but only just. There’s a coup d’état brewing, and the last thing the usurpers need is Parker and Grofield making things more difficult. But successfully and violently muddy the waters they do, until Grofield is shot and then held hostage and Parker has to resort to calling in help his list of other past associates, among them Handy McKay from, Stan Devers, and Ed Mackey, to carry out a series of jobs on Outfit enterprises in and around Tyler before hitting the Outfit men themselves.”

A lot of Butcher’s Moon reads like a finale, that after sixteen novels and a dozen year, Parker was going out in style. But according to Donald E. Westlake, this was not intended to be the last book; it just ended being that way. Over the twenty-three year gap between this novel and Parker’s Comeback return in 1997, Westlake said many things, including the idea that even by 1974, stealing large amounts of cash from banks, entertainment venues, local stores and other places was drying up due to few things, the credit card boom, and money being transferred electronically –so no need to have large amounts of loose cash on hand. He did tell the New York Times back in 1997 that by “1974, Richard Stark just up and disappeared. He did a fade. Periodically, in the ensuing years, I tried to summon that persona, to write like him, to be him for just a while, but every single time I failed. What appeared on the paper was stiff, full of lumps, a poor imitation, a pastiche. Though successful, though well liked and well paid, Richard Stark had simply downed tools. For, I thought, ever.”

But for some diehard Richard Stark/Donald Westlake fans, this seemed not so realistic take, as website The Westlake Review pointed out in 2015: “Westlake had established Dortmunder as a series character, and we can speculate that Westlake didn’t want to be spending most of his time working out variations on what he’d done before, which is what franchise fiction tends to be, no matter how well written and original.” Butcher’s Moon was also “the twenty-first and final book Westlake published at Random House (and the first Parker novel released in hardcover), ending what has to be considered his most seminal and productive stint at any one publisher–all of his 60’s novels under his own name, plus a short story collection, all five of the Mitchell Tobin mysteries of Tucker Coe, and finally the last four Parker novels. It was at Random House that Westlake had truly matured as a writer, had made his reputation as a crime novelist (alternately dark and comical), and had benefited greatly from the editing savvy of Lee Wright, one of the most influential figures in the mystery field at that time. Did Westlake stop working with his first major publisher because he wanted to stop writing Parker novels for a while, or did he stop writing Parker novels for a while because Random House didn’t want any more?  Was it a four book deal that expired and was not renewed?  Is that why this book feels like a planned conclusion to the entire saga to date?  Because that is precisely what it does feel like.  A saga drawing to a close, with a vengeance.”

Butcher’s Moon also reintroduces characters from most its previous fifteen books in a tale that is (a first for Westlake/Stark) a direct sequel to a previous novel. But also gives the long-time reader an Easter Egg of sorts or just someone who understood continuity, by also completing a subplot introduced in the very first book in the series, The Hunter back in 1962. “So Parker cheerfully—or, more accurately, dourly—murders his way through Butcher’s Moon, gunning down one man on a sidewalk just to send a message and visiting an apocalyptic vengeance on the hapless mobsters at the close of the book,” noted the Westlake Review.

Even though this would be the last Parker book for twenty-three years, it also comes across like a refreshing new take for our favorite anti-hero, as Stark/Westlake smartly changes up the format. First off, it runs 55 chapters, over three hundred pages, fully twice the length of many of the earlier books (more on this later). He also abandons the usual four part structure in favor of a continuous linear narrative. He also makes Parker less anonymous, as he tells Lozini to contact certain people who will tell him what Parker is capable of when someone gets in the way of his money.

These changes may have upset some long-time readers, but it’s clear that Westlake would not be put off by their complaining. There is also a great meta moment, as well, when Parker has assembled a large team to take on the Mob and get Grofield back. It could be Westlake himself talking to his long-time faithful readers that Parker can evolve. So it comes to Handy McKay, who knows how Parker works, who is a bit ambivalent about his latest plan, to ponder why go through this for one man. These guys, they know the risk, they know this could be their last job; they know they’ll be left behind if their shot or caught by the police. “What happens to him is up to him,” Handy says bluntly.

“I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I’m going round in circles, I’m not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? I’d like to burn this city to the ground, I’d like to empty it right down to the basements. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore, I want to do it. You’re in, Handy, or you’re out. I told you the setup, I told you what I want, I told you what you’ll get for it. Give me a yes or a no.”

The question now is will I read more of these books? Between 1997 and his death on New Years Eve 2008, Westlake wrote eight more Parker novels (the last one was published posthumously in 2009). Most diehard Westlake readers would, but there is a caveat. As the 70’s became the 80’s, most of his books started appearing in hardcover first –he reached the pinnacle a lot of writers of the paperback era always wanted. But to meet the costs of this format, it meant that the page count needed to increase. What made the early paperback Parker’s great, and even the early Dortmunder’s, along with his multiple stand-alone titles, was by keeping them short and to the point, the books were slim, with a lot of superfluous material excised during rewrites (see my take on Forever and a Death). But to justify the hardcover costs, it forced Westlake to write much longer books, with tales often going off in tangents that slowed the pace down, especially in the later Dortmunder tales. They were no longer lean, mean machines. They’re still great tales, but they often suffered because he had develop more characters, more subplots, more action (or comedic) set pieces.

I may read Comeback, but for now, my tour with Parker might be finished.

Books: The Bright Lands By John Fram (2020)

 

“The town of Bentley holds two things dear: its football, and its secrets. But when star quarterback Dylan Whitley goes missing, an unremitting fear grips this remote corner of Texas. Joel Whitley was shamed out of conservative Bentley ten years ago, and while he’s finally made a life for himself as a gay man in New York, his younger brother’s disappearance soon brings him back to a place he thought he’d escaped for good. Meanwhile, Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark stayed in Bentley; Joel’s return brings back painful memories—not to mention questions—about her own missing brother. And in the high school hallways, Dylan’s friends begin to suspect that their classmates know far more than they’re telling the police. Together, these unlikely allies will stir up secrets their town has long tried to ignore, drawing the attention of dangerous men who will stop at nothing to see that their crimes stay buried. But no one is quite prepared to face the darkness that’s begun to haunt their nightmares, whispering about a place long thought to be nothing but an urban legend: an empty night, a flicker of light on the horizon.”

While I enjoyed the book, it never becomes clear which genre author John Fram was trying emulate. It’s a mix of Stephen King’s IT, with Gothic tropes of Twin Peaks, and Friday Night Lights. But it adds a murder mystery as well and these mixtures create some weird juxtapositions. It also relies on stereotypes these small town thrillers seemly always have: gun happy southerners, mean girls, and a sense that everyone living in under a veil of ether and ignorance of what it’s men folk are doing. The book also uses closeted and promiscuous gay men to point where you wonder, just as the deputy Clark does several time, how many gay men live in Pettis County, Texas (though some appear at least bisexual or just straight dudes who get-off on having other men –some underage- get them off). Still, while the age of consent in Texas may be 17, no one calls out the pedophilia and that could leave a bad taste with the reader.

The ending is a bit muddled and along with some excessive detail, a grab bag of too many characters, the paranormal subplot sort of gets lost in the detail. So was it a murder mystery or was it about an area just outside an obscure small town in middle of nowhere Texas, haunted by some monster who seemly only existed to taste the blood and fear of teenage boys shamed by their sexuality?

As murder mystery, the book works until it doesn’t. As supernatural tale, well, I had hopes for a better explanation. Still, in some ways, it’s a fairly well-written tale for a debut novel. It was overlong and could’ve used a better editor, but I also kind of liked the idea. It’s provocative and bound to cause some discussions on whether Fram went  a bit too far never calling out the more questionable antics of town that uses teenage boys as sexual batteries to keep whatever lives underground happy.

Still, nice having a gay hero.

 

Books: Star Trek: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack (2021)

 

"At the end of Moments Asunder, author James Swallow’s middle chapter of the Coda trilogy, our reneged Starfleet folks have taken shelter in the Mirror Universe to escape Admiral William Riker, who is being influenced by some kind of temporal personality disorder, and the Devidians’ attack across all of time. Here we meet new versions of our familiar characters, including Luc Picard, the captain of the CSS Enterprise and Director Savvik of Memory Omega, a scientific facility that houses all kinds of advanced technology. It is also here that the team of Data, Spock, and Wesley, using the Bajoran Orb of Time, learn a horrible truth about their existence and what they’ll have to sacrifice if they’re going to stop the end of the universe."

 

While Oblivion‘s Gate hits the ground running, once I got some fifty pages into it and learned that entire two decade run of Star Trek novels since Nemesis (well, really since First Contact) has actually been set in an alternate branch of the Prime Timeline seen in TNG, DS9, and VGR –called First Splinter- and this revelation left me cold. I mean, I’ve not read a lot of those Star Trek books that have been published in the last 20 years, but then I began to think about those long time readers who have. So then comes the Coda trilogy, and watch out, because this series is now saying that every single event these readers have read in those books, every character moment they have loved, every emotional loss and success that the crews of various series has encountered, has now been explicitly erased –they never happened. So all those relationships the readers have invested in, the ongoing Picard and Crusher relationship, or Janeway and Chakotay one, all the journeys these characters have been on in the last two decades are lost, leaving no mark in the extended Lit universe of Star Trek.

 

While the notion of First Splinter tangent was created during the events of Star Trek: First Contact film is an intriguing idea, as I read, I began to realize the cause to effect of this revelation and then it makes me feel there should’ve been a better way to close out this portion of the Trek-Lit line. Sure, the writers of this trilogy remind us what Star Trek has always stood for: self-sacrifice, the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, that giving up their lives in the service of stopping the Devidians is a noble cause, but it comes with the idea that nobody will know what they did.

 

This theme has also been done many times before on the Star Trek live-action series, especially on Voyager, in the two-part Year of Hell, Timeless, and series finale, Endgame. It’s a shame that this was the only way three talented writers could end this two decade period.

 

Sure, Disney labeling their Star Wars EU novels as “Legacy” tales not connected to the franchise relaunch back in 2015 angered long-time readers, but they have (for good or bad, depending on your view) cherry picked some of the best characters and situations from them, especially for both the animated series and Disney+ live-action series. So repeating this error with the Star Trek books was not going to work.

 

For good or bad, for me, the Coda trilogy does not end on a hopeful or optimistic note. In addition, while as I've said, I’ve not devoted a lot of time to these various novels over the last twenty years, I can see where some that have will not be pleased with what has been done here. Then again, there may be an equal number who loved all of it.

 

But for me, the series (and this book) has too much going on, too much jumping around, too many characters to keep track of, so it became an effort to keep things in some cohesive structure. Had I read the seventeen novels and other short stories that comprise this conclusive series, I may have felt more connected. Try as they might, I do feel anyone reading this series will need to have read those previous books to really get a better perspective from them.

 

But again, this was all designed to retcon Star Trek Picard into the literary Star Trek universe. My end thought is maybe they just should’ve just slapped “Legend” on the old books and been done with it.