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.

Books: The Word is Murder By Anthony Horowitz (2017)

"One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service. Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home. Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz. Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own."

Even though I read the premise of the book, I was a bit hesitant at first to actually read it. The whole idea of a real-life author inserting himself into the story was and is a risky thing –I remember the criticism Stephen King got when he incorporated himself in the later books of his Dark Tower series. It leaves the author open to being made fun of, other words, as well as being a distracting element within the tale they’re writing. So the big question was how it was going to be handled. For the most part, The Word is Murder is an excellent whodunit, a well constructed mystery with doses of humor, memoir, how TV shows are created, and how to write essays. 

Anthony Horowitz remains a prolific novelist (some 40 plus novels, multiple collections, graphic novels, and even movie scripts). He’s also the creator of the long-running  BBC series Midsomer Murders (adapted from the Caroline Graham Chief Inspector Barnaby book series) and Foyle’s War. He’s also written for other classic British whodunit series such as Agatha Christie’s Poirot, as well as Robin of Sherwood. He’s also well known for his James Bond inspired young adult series Alex Rider (and was also chosen by the Estate of Ian Fleming to continue writing James Bond inspired novels, including 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and A Day). Finally, he’s also penned two Sherlock Holms novels, The House of Silk (2011) and Morairty (2014).

This newest series, called Hawthorne, resembles Sherlock Holmes –the ex-police officer notices a great deal and has the ability to make leaps of random reasoning. Hawthorne, like Holmes, also comes across as dispassionate, cold, and arrogant. He kind of reminded me a bit of Cormoran Strike series, written by J.K. Rowling and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Strike too is a bit offensive at times, even cruel. Another trait Horowitz’s gives Hawthorne that resembles Holmes is his flair for showmanship, often keeping his methods and evidence hidden until the last possible moment so as to impress observers –or in this matter, writer Anthony Horowitz. 

Even if you might consider the book self-indulgent of Horowitz, I admit it was a clever murder mystery. There was no obvious clues dropped that would make the reader guess who the killer was and there are plenty of red herrings to keep you turning the page. 

So it’s a tricky mystery that springs some surprises and one that doesn’t insult the reader with obviousness that befalls a lot of this genre over the last thirty or so years. 

The Books Read in 2019

Forgot to post the entire list of books read in 2019:

01. Night Relics by James P. Blaylock

02. The Fall of Io by Wesley Chu

03. The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

04. Why Me by Donald E. Westlake

05. Dancing Aztecs By Donald E. Westlake

06. Fury from the Tomb by S.A. Sidor

07. The Beast of Nightfall Lodge By S.A. Sidor

08. Forever and a Death By Donald E. Westlake

09. A Night in the Lonesome October By Roger Zelanzy

10. Early Riser By Jasper Fforde

11. Kill The Farm Boy By Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

12. My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

13. They Both Die At the End by Adam Silvera

14. Running With Lions By Julian Winters

15. Star Wars: Master and Apprentice By Claudia Gray

16. A Spy in the Ointment By Donald E. Westlake

17. Tiamat’s Wrath By James S.A. Corey

18. Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles by Thomas Lennon

19. My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley

20. Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

21. The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

22. Social Intercourse By Greg Howard

23. Daemon by Daniel Suarez

24. Rules of Civility By Amore Towles

25. French Exit By Patrick deWitt

26. What Lies Buried By Margaret Kirk

27. Brothers Keepers By Donald E. Westlake

28. Once & Future By Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy

29. Phases of Gravity By Dan Simmons

30. Docking Is Difficult by Gideon Defoe

31. Little By Edward Carey

32. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore By Robin Sloan

33. Groucho Marx, Private Detective By Ron Goulart

34. Red, White & Royal Blue By Casey McQuiston

35. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine By Gail Honeyman

36. A Long Way From Home By Peter Carey

37. Drowned Hopes By Donald E. Westlake

38. The Institute By Stephen King

39. Going Dutch by James Gregor

40. Monster of the Week F.T. Lukens

41. Jimmy The Kid By Donald E. Westlake

42. The Silver Pigs By Lindsey Davis

43. The Forbidden Stars By Tim Pratt

44. Burglars Can’t Be Choosers By Lawrence Block

45. God Save The Mark By Donald E. Westlake

Books: God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake (1968)

“A mark is a noun and defined  in Dictionary of American Slang, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1960 as an easy victim; a ready subject for the practices of a confidence man, thief, beggar, etc.; a sucker. That's the long definition of a mark. But there's a shorter one.

It goes: * mark n. Fred Fitch

What, you ask, is a Fred Fitch? Well, for one thing, Fred Fitch is the man with the most extensive collection of fake receipts, phony bills of sale, and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets in the Western Hemisphere, and possibly in the entire world. For another thing, Fred Fitch may be the only New York City resident in the twentieth century to buy a money machine. When Barnum said, "There's one born every minute, and two to take him," he didn't know about Fred Fitch; when Fred Fitch was born, there were two million to take him. Every itinerant grifter, hypester, bunk artist, short-conner, amuser, shearer, short-changer, green-goods worker, pennyweighter, ring dropper, and yentzer to hit New York City considers his trip incomplete until he's also hit Fred Fitch. He's sort of the con-man's version of Go: Pass Fred Fitch, collect two hundred dollars, and move on. What happens to Fred Fitch when his long-lost Uncle Matt dies and leaves Fred three hundred thousand dollars shouldn't happen to the ball in a pinball machine. Fred Fitch with three hundred thousand dollars is like a mouse with a sack of catnip: He's likely to attract the wrong kind of attention. Add to this the fact that Uncle Matt was murdered, by person or persons unknown, and that someone now seems determined to murder Fred as well, mix in two daffily charming beauties of totally different types, and you have a perfect setup for the busiest fictional hero since the well-known one-armed paperhanger. As Fred Fitch careers across the New York City landscape-and sometimes skyline-in his meetings with cops, con men, beautiful girls, and (maybe) murderers, he takes on some of the loonier aspects of a Dante without a Virgil.”

God Save the Mark enjoys the distinction of being the only novel Donald E. Westlake ever wrote that won an Edgar Award –it beat out in Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. It is also another funny novel by the master of capers and things that go wrong with the capers. I’m unsure if there are people like Fred Fitch in real life, because he seems rather clueless for a thirty-one year-old man (though as I read the book, I sort of felt Fred was way older). It makes you wonder how he’s functioned so far. Still, he is an interesting character and the book is just another delightful romp from the prolific Westlake.

I do enjoy the style, the setting (New York in the 60’s and 70’s) and the observational humor, the drollness of supporting characters. While Westlake wrote under numerous pseudonyms, I need to start reading his Parker novels he wrote under the Richard Stark moniker –as I’ve been told multiple times that voice, that Stark voice is much different than the books written using his real name (and Westlake had maybe close to a dozen different names he wrote under (just like his friend Lawrence Block).

I’ve got plenty to read in 2020, so we’ll see how it goes. I would really like to achieve reading two books a month, but the internet and TV provide numerous distractions. But it’s a plan, a goal, or maybe hopeful thinking.

Anyways…Happy New Year and let’s start new decade off.