Westlake Score: Killtown (alias The Score, Parker #5) by Richard Stark (alias Donald E. Westlake) (Coronet, 1971)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in Friday's Forgotten Books, 11/9/15.

This Westlake Score may not be quite as exciting a proposition, or indeed acquisition, as the T. V. Boardman edition of Pity Him Afterwards I blogged about last week (for me anyway; who knows – perhaps it will be for you), but like that book it does complete a run of novels in my seemingly ever-expanding Donald E. Westlake collection – in this instance the British paperback first editions of the Parkers.

Published by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett in 1971, Killtown is the fifth of Westlake's written-as-Richard-Stark Parker novels, retitled – presumably by Coronet, said new title also utilised by Berkley in the States for their 1973 paperback edition – from the original title of The Score, i.e. the one where Parker and crew take down an entire town. Now, I do, it almost (almost) goes without saying, already own four other editions of the novel – that aforementioned Berkley paperback, a 1984 Avon paperback, an original 1964 Pocket paperback and a 1985 Allison & Busby hardback – but when I spotted this copy of the Coronet edition on eBay I couldn't resist bidding for it (and winning it, for just over four quid). Reason being, it was the only one of the sixteen Parkers published by Coronet that I didn't own. And now I do, which means that I have a complete set of first printings of the British first editions of the initial run of Parkers.

The urge to buy a book when one already owns four other editions of that same book is the kind of madness that is probably only explicable to other book collectors (and even then...), but in my defence I should like to point out that this is quite a scarce edition, certainly in its first printing (which my copy is): I can only see one other copy listed for sale online at present, offered by an American seller at $35. Admittedly there are a half a dozen or so reprints listed on AbeBooks and Amazon and the like, but who in their right mind wants a reprint of anything? (Ahem.)

In common with the bulk of the Coronet Parkers, the cover of Killtown is a double-cover "bullet hole" affair – a design attributed to the late great Raymond Hawkey – with the shiny black paper inner cover beneath the silver card outer cover bearing the legend "Parker is in" followed by the book's title – which shows through the bullet hole – on the front, and on the back a photo of Westlake/Stark and a brief bio. (I say "the bulk of the Coronet Parkers" because some of them were initially issued by Coronet with illustrated and photographic covers.) And like a good half dozen or so of the other bullet hole cover Parkers, on its first page it sports this character sketch:

Not sure that's an entirely accurate description of Parker, but I do like the bit about how "in his mean, dark world he is almost a god". Anyway, should anyone be remotely interested – or even still reading by this point – here is Killtown nestling in amongst my complete collection of first printings (plus a few reprints) of the Coronet editions:

Darwyn Cooke's Book Cover Design for Donald E. Westlake Non-Fiction Miscellany The Getaway Car: Exclusive First Look

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

Here's a nice exclusive – well, semi-exclusive; I'm cross-posting it at The Violent World of Parker – for my thousand-and-first post:

Darwyn Cooke's handsome cover design for The Getaway Car, the Donald E. Westlake non-fiction anthology put together by Levi Stahl of The University of Chicago Press and due to be published by UCP in September. Levi himself broke the news about Darwyn illustrating and designing the book's cover on his own blog earlier this month, but this is the first time said cover has been seen online (thank you to Levi for allowing me the opportunity to unveil it here and at The Violent World of Parker). It's also, I believe, the first time that Darwyn's work has adorned a Westlake project outside of the Richard Stark/Parker sphere – but not, I fervently hope, the last. Head to the UCP website for more about the book.

Donald E. Westlake Non-Fiction Anthology The Getaway Car (University of Chicago Press, 2014): Table of Contents and More Details Revealed

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

With Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent currently otherwise engaged – literally – it falls to me to provide an update on the Donald E. Westlake non-fiction anthology Trent and I blogged about back in April of last year. Edited by University of Chicago Press' Levi Stahl, and due for publication by UCP in September, the anthology has now gained both a title and a sub-title: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. The full table of contents is available to view on the UCP site, but Levi has kindly agreed for it to be reproduced on VWoP and Existential Ennui:

CONTENTS

Foreword by Lawrence Block
Editor’s Introduction

1 My Second Life: Fragments from an Autobiography

2 Donald E. Westlake, a.k.a. . . .
Hearing Voices in My Head: Tucker Coe, Timothy J. Culver, Richard Stark and Donald E. Westlake
Living with a Mystery Writer, by Abby Adams
Writers on Writing: A Pseudonym Returns From an Alter-Ego Trip, With New Tales to Tell

3 So Tell Me about This Job We’re Gonna Pull: On Genre
The Hardboiled Dicks
Introduction to Murderous Schemes
Introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories, 2000
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

4 Ten Most Wanted: Ten Favorite Mystery Books
5 Returning to the Scene of the Crime: On His Own Work
Introduction to Levine
Tangled Webs for Sale: Best Offer
Introduction to Kahawa
Light
Hooked
Letter to Howard B. Gotlieb, Boston University Libraries

6 Lunch Break: May’s Famous Tuna Casserole

7 The Other Guys in the String: Peers, Favorites, and Influences
Lawrence Block: First Sighting
On Peter Rabe
Playing Politics with a Master of Dialogue: On George V. Higgins
On Rex Stout
Introduction to Jack Ritchie’s A New Leaf and Other Stories
Foreword to Thurber on Crime
Introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now
On Stephen Frears
John D. MacDonald: A Remembrance

8 Coffee Break: Letter to Ray Broekel

9 Anything You Say May Be Used against You: Interviews
An Inside Look at Donald Westlake, by Albert Nussbaum, 81332-132
The Worst Happens: From an Interview by Patrick McGilligan

10 Midnight Snack: Gustatory Notes from All Over

11 Side Jobs: Prison Breaks, Movie Mobsters, and Radio Comedy
Break-Out
Love Stuff, Cops-and-Robbers Style
Send In the Goons

12 Signed Confessions: Letters
To Judy ?
To Peter Gruber
To James Hale
To Stephen and Tabitha King
To Brian Garfield
To David Ramus
To Pam Vesey
To Gary Salt
To Henry Morrison
To Jon L. Breen

13 Jobs Never Pulled: Title Ideas
Crime Titles
Comic Crime Titles

14 Death Row (Or, The Happily Ever Afterlife): Letter to Ralph L. Woods

Acknowledgments
Credits
Name Index

I must say it all looks fascinating: I've read (and written about) Westlake essays like "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You", "Peter Rabe" and "Break-Out" before, but there are plenty more besides I haven't read; I'm especially keen to take a look at the autobiography fragments and the personal letters Levi (and his glamorous assistant Ethan Iverson) dug out of Westlake's files. I'm also intrigued to read Levi's introduction and Lawrence Block's foreword, a single sentence from the latter of which is previewed at the UCP site, along with a quote from Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai and some more info about the book. Go take a gander.

Westlake Score: Nobody's Perfect by Donald E. Westlake (Hodder, 1978); Dortmunder Daze

NB: This post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

This next Westlake Score is again a 1970s British Hodder & Stoughton first edition of a Donald E. Westlake crime caper, again bearing a Mark Wilkinson-designed dust jacket, which I've again added to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page, alongside Wilkinson's wrapper for A New York Dance.

Published by Hodder in 1978 – the year after the Evans first edition, which I blogged about briefly in 2010 – Nobody's Perfect is the fourth novel in Westlake's comedic crime series starring hard luck heister John Dortmunder and his inept crew, and, to my mind, thus far the least successful. In his two-part essay on thrillers the academic and critic John Fraser labels Westlake's capers "terminally unfunny" (Fraser has a lot more time for Westlake's pseudonymous Parker novels), and I must admit four books into the Dortmunder series I'm beginning to have some sympathy for his position. (Mind you, Fraser also called W. Somerset Maugham's sublime Ashenden, or, The British Agent "dreary", so his word certainly shouldn't be taken as gospel.) The only Dortmunder I've found really amusing so far is the second one, Bank Shot; the other three have barely raised a smile.

But while the debut Dortmunder, The Hot Rock, had novelty going for it (it is, after all, the first book in the series) and the third outing, Jimmy the Kid, was divertingly meta (especially for Parker fans – it features a Parker novel-within-the-novel, Child Heist), Nobody's Perfect suffers from over-familiarity. Going in there's the expectation that Dortmunder and co.'s theft of a painting (to aid the owner's insurance scam) will somehow go wrong, and sure enough it does. Which would be fine if the laughs were forthcoming... only they're not, no matter how many comedy Scotsmen Westlake throws at the thing.

Ethan Iverson, in his peerless, indispensable overview of Westlake's oeuvre, "A Storyteller That Got the Details Right", reckons that as of the next book, Why Me?, "the franchise really starts to settle down", and "the team consistently act like experienced pros". I hope Ethan's right, because in the absence of any giggles, for me the Dortmunder books are going to have to stand or fall on those old stalwarts, character and story. And on the evidence of Nobody's Perfect, there's plenty of room for improvement on both counts.

Westlake Score: A New York Dance (alias Dancing Aztecs) by Donald E. Westlake (Hodder, 1979)

NB: a version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

It's been a little quiet over at The Violent World of Parker blog of late, at least half of the blame for which rests with me: I am, after all, supposed to be (esteemed) co-blogger over there. Fortunately I have a small pile of Westlake Scores waiting to be blogged about, at the top of which is this:

A New York Dance by Donald E. Westlake, published in hardback in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1979 under a dust jacket illustrated by Mark Wilkinson, who I believe is this Mark Wilkinson, best known for his Marillion record sleeves. As such, his wrapper for A New York Dance must represent a fairly early piece of professional work.

I imagine A New York Dance will be an unfamiliar title to most Westlake fans, especially American ones, who will better know it under its original US title of Dancing Aztecs. It took me to a while to fall in too; back in 2010 I scored a 1976 Evans first edition of Dancing Aztecs:

with its Joel Schick-designed dust jacket (which, for the bibliophiles among us, was trimmed too short on the first edition, meaning that the grey boards can be seen top and bottom), stating that I didn't think it had ever been published in the UK. It was only much later that I realised Hodder had retitled the novel for the British market, something the publisher already had form with with Westlake's work: witness their paperback division's retitling of his Parker novels (written, of course, under the pen name Richard Stark) The Man with the Getaway Face, The Score and The Handle as, respectively, The Steel Hit, Killtown and Run Lethal.

Mind you, Westlake wasn't the only American mystery writer to have his work retitled by Hodder; his near-contemporary, Ross Thomas, had a couple of his novels retitled by the British publisher – his debut, The Cold War Swap, which became Spy in the Vodka (for a short while, anyway), and one of his pseudonymous Oliver Bleeck books, The Procane Chronicle, which became The Thief Who Painted Sunlight. And much later in Westlake's career another British publisher, Robert Hale, did some titular tinkering: The Hook became The Corkscrew, and The Ax gained an 'e'.

As to why I decided to acquire a Hodder first of A New York Dance when I already owned an Evans first of Dancing Aztecs, well, I think most people reading this will be familiar with my feeble justifications by now, so take your pick from:

a) A New York Dance popped up on eBay and it was cheap
b) the Hodder first is pretty scarce (only a handful of copies available online)
c) it gives me something to cross-post on The Violent World of Parker
d) I can add the cover to the Existential Ennui British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page (and have now done so)
e) all of the above, plus I'm demented.

And all of those apply to the next Westlake Score too – another Hodder edition which I already owned – and have already blogged about – in US first, and which again sports a Mark Wilkinson wrapper.

Darwyn Cooke's Parker: Slayground (IDW, 2013), Stephen King's Doctor Sleep (Hodder, 2013), and Some Notable Comments

I realise certain date-specific salutations are slightly ridiculous in the context of a blog post which might only be chanced upon weeks if not months or even years after after the event in question (if at all), and especially a blog post which itself arrives days after that event, but even so: happy new year.

I shan't be making any resolutions regarding Existential Ennui in 2014, nor any predictions, or forecasts, or – God forbid – formulating any kind of manifesto for the year ahead; any past such attempts have at best turned out to be only partially correct, and in any case, who (other than me... maybe) really cares what one insignificant books-related blog among so many thousands has planned for the next twelve months? (Not that there is much of a plan beyond the next week or so.) Instead I thought I'd ease myself into the new blogging year in (arguably untypically) unostentatious fashion by posting some thoughts on the two books I managed to polish off over the festive period (not bad going, considering the various demands of fatherhood and home life and travelling to see family over Christmas and whatnot), and drawing attention to a couple of comments which have appeared since I last posted, plus a few more from earlier in December and November.

Books first, beginning with this:

Richard Stark's Parker: Slayground by Darwyn Cooke. When The Violent World of Parker (where I'm co-blogger) supremo Trent and I interviewed Darwyn back in the summer of 2012 (Christ, was it really that long ago...?), Cooke's intention had been to adapt the eighth in Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's series of Parker novels, The Handle, as his next full-length Parker graphic novel, and after that do "a 48-page real boiled down version of Slayground", the fourteenth Parker outing. Evidently those plans changed, because instead of The Handle – of which there's been nary a sign – Slayground arrived as a 96-page graphic novel in December.

Of those 96 pages, Slayground itself takes up roughly 80, many of them, as the opening spread above demonstrates, as stylish and formally inventive as we've come to expect; there's even a foldout map of Fun Island, the closed-for-the-winter amusement park in which Parker becomes trapped. That the story lacks substance is less a fault of the adaptation than of the source novel – for me one of the slighter Parkers – but it's still an effective manhunt thriller, and in adapting it Cooke makes some intriguing storytelling choices, especially as regards the structure – swapping parts two and three and lopping off the ending where Parker tells Claire he'll go back for the stashed loot some day – and the character of Caliato, the local mob second-in-command, who in Cooke's hands becomes instead Benito, the son of mob boss Lozini. Presumably that change was made in order to give Lozini more of a personal beef with Parker for Cooke's final adaptation, Butcher's Moon, although if so, given that Lozini already regarded Caliato almost as a son, I wonder whether that was really necessary. I guess we'll find out in 2015.
 
Also included is Cooke's short adaptation of the seventh Parker novel, The Seventh (alias The Split). As I've mentioned before, The Seventh is one of my favourite Parkers, and consequently I'd been wanting to read Cooke's version ever since I learned that it was an extra in Parker: The Martini Edition, which I was reluctant to buy as I already owned Cooke's adaptations of The Hunter and The Outfit (which The Martini Edition collected). In the event I'm glad I held out, because Cooke summarily dispenses with the meat of The Seventh across a single spread and concentrates instead on Parker's climactic pursuit of his nameless nemesis, which, the payoff aside – which in any case is diluted by the abbreviating of the glorious madness which precedes it – is probably the least interesting part of the story. Still, it all looks lovely.

Incidentally, I expect there'll be a review of Slayground over at The Violent World of Parker before long, but if Trent doesn't have one lined up, I might end up posting a version of the above over there.

Anyway, the other book I finished was this:

Doctor Sleep, Stephen King's belated sequel to The Shining, published September 2013 and seen here in its British WHSmith limited edition. The phrase 'return to form' must have been applied to every Stephen King novel of the last twenty years, but in this case it's apt: Doctor Sleep is the best King book I've read since Cell – not quite up there with The Dark Half or Needful Things (and certainly not The Stand), but not far off. I think the reason for that is that Dan – formerly Danny in The Shining – Torrance is one of King's more convincing leads, an alcoholic like his father – and indeed like King himself – whose efforts to carve out some kind of life after a drink-sodden decade or so are at least as, if not more, compelling than the paranormal plot in which he becomes embroiled.

As for those comments, a Tehanu left a comment on my interview with spy novelist Anthony Price drawing my attention to the third novel in Charles Stross's series of "Laundry" occult spy thrillers, The Fuller Memorandum, which I'd not come across before but which apparently is an homage to Price's work. And on a similarly supernatural tip, an anonymous commenter left a message on this post on Andrew MacKenzie, confirming that as well as novels, MacKenzie did indeed pen a good number of occult works. And while we're on the subject of comments and updates, earlier in December a Saz left an enlightening pair of comments on this post on James Mitchell's Callan spy series which are well worth reading; "Going on Ninety" expressed thanks for reminding him about John le Carré; and in November a former associate of Dr. Strangelove writer Peter George's, Madeline Weston, emailed me with her recollections of George's suicide, and granted me permission to update this post on George accordingly.

Thank you to all of those folks, and to everyone else who's commented and emailed; when – as is its occasional wont – the Black Dog pays a visit and I feel like abandoning Existential Ennui altogether, messages like these act as a useful reminder of why I persist in this foolish endeavour.

Parker Scores: UK Hardback Editions of Richard Stark's Point Blank, The Man with the Getaway Face, Slayground and The Outfit (Allison & Busby, 1984/1989)

NB: A Version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker. Linked in this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

This, I fear, will be my final Violent World of Parker/Existential Ennui cross-post of 2013. The year is fast disappearing on me, and I can't in all honesty see myself returning to Donald E. Westlake or Richard Stark – or any others of Westlake aliases for that matter – before it breathes its last. Rest assured, however, that I'll be back blogging at The Violent World of Parker in the new year, although I suspect not with any greater frequency than I have of late; the demands of fatherhood, and life, and work – not to mention Existential Ennui (with which I'll be soldiering on in my usual intermittent fashion in the interim) – mean that I'll probably only manage one cross-post a month, if that. Cause for celebration in some quarters I'm sure, but at least I'm going out with a bang in the shape of a sizeable Parker Score, comprising not one, not two, not three, but four Allison & Busby British hardback editions: Point Blank, The Man with the Getaway Face, Slayground (all 1984) and The Outfit (1988).

Now, I should point out that I already owned all four of these editions. But these 'new' copies, which I purchased from Brighton book dealer Alan White, are in better condition than my ones, and Alan did me such a good deal on them I couldn't resist 'upgrading'. That said, my old copies are still in pretty good nick – even The Man with the Getaway Face, which is ex-library – so I'll be offloading them on eBay at some point, along with some other Westlake goodies. Although I might keep my other copy of The Outfit; curiously, and intriguingly, the copy I bought off Alan is bound in red leather rather than the usual black Arlin – although still foil-blocked on the spine – which makes me wonder if it wasn't rebound for either a private library or maybe even Allison & Busby's own files.

It'll be interesting – to me anyway – to see whether the Allison & Busby hardbacks hold their value once the new IDW hardback editions of the Parker novels start arriving next year. While the A&B editions weren't, in many cases, the first time the Parkers had appeared in hardback – Random House got there first with Deadly Edge and Slayground in 1971 and Plunder Squad in 1972, followed by Gold Lion with three earlier Parkers in 1973 and Gregg Press with another handful of early ones in 1981 – A&B did manage to issue more Parkers in hardback than any other publisher – thirteen in total from the sixteen-book 1962–1974 original run (A&B never published Plunder Squad or Butcher's Moon, and only ever published Deadly Edge in paperback). Presumably – assuming their new editions are successful enough – at some point IDW will pass that milestone, but even so, I think I'll still treasure my A&B editions not only as the piece of publishing history – especially British publishing history – they are, but also for how the collecting of those books led to both Existential Ennui becoming what it is today (for better or for worse) and to my becoming co-blogger at The Violent World of Parker (ditto).

Of course, whether or not I'll be able to resist the urge to start collecting the IDW editions too is another matter entirely...

Anyway, the acquisition of these books affords me the opportunity to add yet more Richard Stark covers to Existential Ennui's bulging British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s page, even though these Allison & Busby dust jackets, all designed by Mick Keates, are perhaps more indicative of the publisher's house style than of that particular era of cover design.

And there'll be further additions to British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s fairly soon, as I make a return to the work of spy novelist Anthony Price...

Parker Mega Score Finale: Richard Stark Joins British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s Gallery

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

If you missed the announcement on Friday, some (relatively) exciting news: I've established a brand new Existential Ennui permanent page:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

A companion page to Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s – the dark flipside to that gallery, if you will – it gathers together dozens and dozens of covers from '70s and '80s editions of thrillers and crime fiction and spy fiction and the like. Already in the gallery are a bunch of Donald E. Westlake dust jackets – along with contemporaries like Ross Thomas (and his Oliver Bleeck alias), Elmore Leonard, Max Allan Collins and Dan J. Marlowe – and now Westlake's alter ego, Richard Stark, makes his entrance, stalking through the doorway (the door having been kicked down by Parker, naturally) to take his place – in his own right, not under Westlake's name – with seven paperback covers, plus one hardback.

Some of those covers hail from the Parker Mega Score, that haul of Coronet paperback editions of the Parker novels I've been blogging about on and off for over two months – there are a couple more, the 1971 Coronet Printings of The Mourner and The Jugger, randomly illustrating this post – and which after four posts (five if you include this one) I think we've probably all had enough of by now (accordingly, this will be the final post to make mention of it). I've picked four books from the Mega Score to represent Raymond Hawkey's Parker bullet hole double cover design – The Steel Hit (Coronet, 1971, alias The Man with the Getaway Face), Run Lethal (Coronet, 1972, alias The Handle), Deadly Edge (Coronet, 1972, which shows a hand holding a gun on the inner cover, rather than the novel's title) and Slayground (Coronet, 1973, which boasts a gold rather than a silver outer cover) – plus the 1977 Coronet edition of Butcher's Moon, which sports a very '70s photographic cover which may or may not have been by Hawkey's design (I don't know for sure either way).

(Incidentally, I already owned copies of two of those Coronet editions before I came into possession of the Parker Mega Score – Deadly Edge and Butcher's Moon – but the Mega Score copies are in slightly better condition than the others, so I'll be divesting myself of my original copies in due course.)

As well as those, I've included the 1970 Coronet second printings of Point Blank! and The Rare Coin Score, both of which sport entirely apposite photographic covers, and my copy of the very scarce 1973 Gold Lion hardback edition of The Sour Lemon Score. By my reckoning that brings the number of book covers on the page up to 100, although it won't dally at that milestone for long: I'll be adding even more thriller covers as the week wears on, and there'll be yet more Westlake and Stark in there before too long. Needless to say, I'll update both The Violent World of Parker and Existential Ennui when that happens. And that link to the gallery again is:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

Parker Score: Run Lethal by Richard Stark (Coronet, 1972), alias The Handle, and the Parker Retitles

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

I hope to have something up on Tom Clancy – who passed away yesterday – shortly, but ahead of that, and fulfilling my Violent World of Parker contractual cross-posting duties, a return, belatedly, to the Parker Mega Score – that stack of Coronet paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker novels I acquired over the summer – with this:

Run Lethal, published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett under a Raymond Hawkey-designed "bullet hole" double-cover in 1972 – the second wave of those covers I guess you could say, the initial Coronet bullet hole editions – The Steel Hit, The Outfit and so forth – having been published in 1971.

Like The Steel Hit, Run Lethal was retitled from its original appearance. Indeed, of the twenty-four Parker novels, six have been retitled at one time or another, one of them twice. Four of those retitlings were the result of publishers responding to movie adaptations: The Hunter (Parker #1, 1962) became Point Blank in 1967 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here) and then Payback in 1999; The Seventh (Parker #7, 1966) became The Split in 1968 (Gold Medal edition here, Coronet edition here); and earlier this year Flashfire (Parker #19, 2000) became Parker.

But the other retitlings – The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2, 1963), which became The Steel Hit; The Score (Parker #5, 1964), which became Killtown; and The Handle (Parker #8, 1966), which became Run Lethal – appear to be the result of nothing other than publisher preference... and it seems they were all the fault of Coronet. See, for a long time I assumed it was Berkley, the American paperback publisher of the Parkers in the early 1970s, who retitled at least The Score and The Handle (I'm not sure if they ever got round to issuing The Steel Hit, even though it's listed, under that title, under "By the same author" in my Berkley reprint copy of The Outfit). But I own a copy of Berkley's edition of The Score, or rather Killtown:

and it was published in 1973 (November of that year, to be precise); whereas Coronet's edition of Killtown was first published in 1972. And it's the same deal with The Handle/Run Lethal: Berkley's edition of Run Lethal arrived again in 1973, and Coronet's in 1972. Which means that Berkley adopted the new titles from Coronet, not the other way round. Which in turn means that in the cases of at least two retitlings, Parker fans have us Brits to blame.

I'm not quite sure where I'll be going next with the Parker Mega Score; I think I might take a look at a bullet hole edition of a Parker Coronet had already published once, but I may change my mind, mercurial bastard that I am.

Parker Score: The Outfit by Richard Stark (British First Edition, Coronet, 1971)

NB: A version of this post also appears at The Violent World of Parker.

Time to pull another Parker from the pile of eleven pristine Coronet paperback editions of Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's crime novels colloquially known as the Parker Mega Score. And this next one might be of particular interest to Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent, seeing as he doesn't currently have it in his cover gallery:

The Outfit, first published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett in 1971 (originally published in the States in 1963). Another Raymond Hawkey-designed "bullet hole" double-cover, the only major difference from the Coronet edition of The Steel Hit (alias Parker #2, The Man with the Getaway Face) I showcased last week, cover copy aside, is the colour scheme; the text on the inner cover is orange rather than pale yellow:

Other than that, the back cover carries the same Anthony Boucher New York Times quote:

And the inner back cover sports the same bio and photo of Westlake:

That uniformity across most – but not all – of the bullet hole Coronets means that they can be an acquired taste. Doubtless some Parker enthusiasts find them a tad boring, but the bullet hole Parkers do have a following, and are fondly remembered by British Parker fans especially, for obvious reasons. Consequently many of the Coronet editions have become quite uncommon – at present there are just five copies of the Coronet The Outfit on AbeBooks, for example – but for collectors there are additional wrinkles besides mere scarcity. For one thing, as commenters on both Existential Ennui and TVWoP (including Trent) have pointed out, they're highly susceptible to damage: that die-cut bullet hole is prone to tearing, and the outer covers have been known to come loose altogether. And then there's the fact that many of the bullet hole Coronets went into second printings: over half of those five copies of The Outfit currently listed on AbeBooks are second impressions (and those that aren't don't look to be in terribly good shape). Tot all that up, and the Parker Mega Score starts to look really quite remarkable.

I think I'm going to jump ahead a year for the next Parker from the Mega Score stack, to 1972, in order to demonstrate how the Parkers were sometimes retitled by us Brits – and those new titles were often subsequently adopted by the Americans...