Books: The Outfit by Richard Stark (1963)

"With his old scores now settled, Parker's living the good life... until a snitch rats him out to The Outfit for the bounty on his head. Now, he's no longer living in swank hotels and enjoying the finer things, and someone has to pay for that. The Outfit's about to learn, if you push Parker, it better be all the way into the grave. Still, these guys are organized crime with a capital O. They are big. They are bad. They were brutal. And no crook ever crossed them and lived to enjoy it. Except Parker. So they wanted Parked dead, and a hitman proved they meant business. Too bad for The Outfit he missed. Because Parker planned to get even -dead even. Ripping off the Outfit was the easy part of Parker's game. Going one-on-one with Bronson, The Outfit's Big Boss, was the hard part. Hard for anyone but Parker -because the entire underworld knew it was written in blood: whatever Parker did, he did deadly”

The Outfit is set three months after the events of The Man with the Getaway Face and action gets going from page one. And much like the previous two, Stark/Westlake delivers the goods with fast-paced action, minimum words, and pace that makes you speed through the adventure –no words seem wasted here. By far the best part of the book is the meticulously crafting that went into the various robberies that occur –somehow each is fresh and different (something Westlake excels at and continued on with his Dortmunder tales). Again, even those these books are short and never to be considered high literature, there is an elegance to them and really offer some fine entertainment.

This is the best of three so far, and seemly concludes an arc. There are 21 more books to go in this series, so we’ll see if Parker has more run-ins with The Outfit.

There was a 1973 film version of this book that starred Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, and Joanna Cassidy. It was released on DVD about a decade ago, via WarnerBros.com's manufacture-on-demand site -however it's no longer listed there.

Books: The Man with the Getaway Face By Richard Stark (1963)

“In New York there is a contract on his life. In Nebraska, there is an unscrupulous plastic surgeon. After the events of The Hunter, Parker ends up in the Midwest getting a new face to hide himself from The Outfit. But he is now faced (no pun intended) with dwindling funds, so he gets involved with a sketchy armored car robbery in New Jersey with two former acquaintances, Skimm and Handy McKay. While he scores hid biggest haul, there is a catch (well, two). The first is the original planner of the heist, a dangerous woman named Alma (and Skimm’s girlfriend). Both Parker and McKay figure out that Alma is going to betray them. The second involves the murder of the Doctor Adler, the surgeon who altered Parker’s face (along with others). Stubbs, Adler’s chauffer, believes it to be one of three men who could’ve killed the doctor, and sets off to New Jersey in hopes of finding out if Parker was the one, because if he can’t, he’s willing to rat out Parker to The Outfit”

Parker is a no nonsense character that always does what is necessary and never deals from a position of weakness. Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, has created an amoral character who you sort of root for. He is a killer, he is a thief, he plans out his hits with a laser focus, but finds that something always upsets the apple cart. Unlike Westlake’s other recurring character, John Dortmunder, the Parker tales are more brutal, less humorous, but still entertaining. The Man with the Getaway Face is well written, tightly plotted, with some twists and surprises.

This second book is not as thrilling as The Hunter (which had a more beginning, middle, and an end aspect) as Stark/Westlake takes up a lot of time describing the minutiae of the heist and is clearly laying the ground work for the third book. However, having read the Dortmunder books first, I can almost see the divulging point here from the serious world of Parker and John Dortmunder’s comic bad luck (though that was nearly a decade away when this book was released) world during the planning stage of the heist. There is a fine the line here between Parker and Dortmunder and it amuses me to see that (unconsciously, obviously) Westlake was starting to lay the ground work for his other popular series.

Books: The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson (2019)

“In the humdrum town of Moormouth, Walter Mortinson’s unusual inventions cause nothing but trouble. After one of his contraptions throws the town into chaos, Walter’s mother demands he cut the nonsense and join the family mortuary business. Far off on Flaster Isle, famed inventor Horace Flasterborn plans to take Walter under his wing, just as he did Walter’s genius father decades ago. When a letter arrives by unusual means offering Walter an apprenticeship, it isn’t long before Walter decides to flee Moormouth to achieve his destiny. Walter runs away in the family hearse along with Cordelia, the moody girl next door with one eye and plenty of secrets. Together they journey through a strange landscape of fish-people, giantess miners, and hypnotized honeybees in an adventure that will not only reveal the truth about Walter’s past, but direct his future.”

The Remarkable Inventions of Walter Mortinson by Quinn Sosna-Spear is a strange and unique, but also very disjointed middle school novel. I felt the themes were a bit adult-ish, with grief and sorrow playing a major subject matter here. We have a Walter’s mother who is in need of psychiatrist to get over the death of her husband, but instead takes out her sorrow on Walter. It makes some sense, but then again, I felt Sosna-Spear bit off more than she can chew. The book as well seems marketed as story of fun times, adventure and friendship (which was what interested me in the first place). And while we have some adventure none of it is fun and Walter’s relationship with Cordelia is antagonistic from the start (though we get an explanation of that in last fifty pages of the book). There are a lot of good ideas here, but they all come off as half-baked and some are just forgotten. And Horace Flasterborn, the villain of the piece, reminds me a lot of Charles F. Muntz, the explorer that Carl Fredricksen adored in the Pixar film UP. Muntz, of course, was more interesting.