Parker Progress Report: Backflash (1998, Parker #18) by Richard Stark, alias Donald E. Westlake

NB: A version of this post also appears on The Violent World of Parker. Featured as one of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books.

In the previous Parker Progress Report – my overarching title for my continuing blogging journey through Donald E. "Richard Stark" Westlake's twenty-four book series starring taciturn heister Parker – I took a look at the seventeenth Parker, Comeback (1997), originally published twenty-three years after the sixteenth Parker, Butcher's Moon (1974). Luckily, Parker fans didn't have quite so long to wait for the next book in the series: Backflash arrived just one year later, in 1998.

Clearly, Westlake was back in the Parker groove; where Comeback had taken him twenty years to write (on and off... mostly off), now he was writing the Parkers fast again: a new one would appear every year or two until the author's death in 2008. Whether that's why Backflash is a better book than Comeback – which, to my mind, it is – I don't know, but it's at least notable that that's the way Westlake wrote the Parkers in the original 1962-1974 run.

And actually, as with Comeback, Backflash could quite easily have slotted into that original run. It starts with a "When"; it's divided into four parts; and Parker's cohorts all hail from earlier books: racetrack driver Mike Carlow from The Rare Coin Score and Butcher's Moon; stout, fastidious expat Lou Sternberg and female heister (heistess? With the meistess?) Noelle Braselle from Plunder Squad; and professional wrestler Dan Wycza from The Score and Butcher's Moon – in the latter of which, like Comeback's Ed Mackey, Wycza seemingly came back from the dead. Although we never actually witnessed Wycza's death in the first place – Parker merely reports it in The Rare Coin Score with a perfunctory "He's dead", while Westlake heralds his resurrection in Backflash with an equally perfunctory, "There was a rumor he was dead for a while, but then he'd popped up again". And the score is classic Parker too; novel, sure – Parker and co. take down a floating casino on the Hudson River – but a straight cash grab nonetheless. Mind you, straight doesn't necessarily equate to straightforward: the heist itself goes as planned, but as is often the way in a Parker story, the aftermath gets bloody.

There's a belief among some Parker fans that the later books, and Parker in particular, are somehow softer than the earlier ones – that Westlake and his most famous creation mellowed with age. Frankly, I see little evidence of it here. From Parker's blunt assessment of a co-heister's condition following a car crash at the start of the book ("You're fucked") to his cold, calculating tying off of a – all-too-human – loose end in the latter stages, he's as heartless – and ruthless – as he's ever been.

The odd mishap aside, traditionally Parker has usually only killed when absolutely necessary: to protect himself, his money, his moll (Claire), or, and perhaps most importantly of all, his rep. And so it is in Backflash. That said, and to counter the "humanising" argument, I think it's possible to detect something new in his dispatching of his nemesis at the end of Backflash – an even deeper chill. Parker's never been a (movie) James Bond, dispensing terminally unfunny quips as he offs not-quite-as-bad-as-he-is guys, but he has proffered the occasional one-liner, perhaps the best being "Now you're the message" in Butcher's Moon. As menacing as that is, though, his closing one in Backflash strikes me as being even colder, simply because of the distracted, offhand manner in which it's delivered. With his adversary gut-shot and writhing in agony at his feet, Parker reflects on the act of mercy at the start of the novel which ultimately led him to this point. Ignoring the guy's "panting and spitting out words", Parker muses, "We live and learn", and shoots him in the eye.

Of course, having made the same merciful mistake with George Uhl in The Sour Lemon Score (Parker #12) and consequently paid the price in Plunder Squad (Parker #15), you'd have thought that's one lesson Parker might have taken to heart by now. If only he had one.

Next – the basis for the imminent Taylor Hackford/Jason Statham Parker movie: Flashfire.

Parker Progress Report: Comeback (1997, Parker #17) by Richard Stark, alias Donald E. Westlake

 

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

Crikey: would you believe it's been over a year since I last posted a Parker Progress Report? Long enough that I expect most Existential Ennui readers – and a good number of Violent World of Parker ones, too – have either forgotten what they are, or weren't even around for the last one (as in, weren't reading Existential Ennui, not weren't born; I've anecdotal and some reasonably scientific evidence – comments and stats, basically – that this blog has picked up a fair few new readers in the interim... although I guess some of those new readers could be babies).

To recap then: since 2010 I've been blogging my way through Donald E. Westlake's twenty-four-book series starring taciturn heister Parker, which were written under the alias Richard Stark (Westlake also wrote four spin-off novels under the Stark alias featuring actor/thief Alan Grofield – those I covered as The Grofield Files). The last proper Parker Progress Report I posted, back in November 2011 – leaving aside this one on the Dortmunder novel Jimmy the Kid, which boasts a Parker meta-cameo – was on the sixteenth Parker, Butcher's Moon, originally published in 1974. So, seeing as January 2013 marks the beginning of what is to all intents and purposes the fiftieth anniversary of Parker, and since there's a new movie based on the nineteenth Parker, Flashfire, due any day now (at least, in the US; it's not out in the UK until March for some reason), I figured I'd try and rattle through the Parker Progress Reports in order to reach that book, starting with the seventeenth Parker, Comeback (1997).

In a way, taking a year-long break between Parkers makes sense: after all, Comeback didn't appear until twenty-three years after Butcher's Moon, although you wouldn't guess that from reading it: the outside world may have changed, but not much has in the Parkerverse. Parker and his girlfriend, Claire, haven't aged, and neither have Parker's irregular cohorts, husband and wife heisting team Ed and Brenda Mackey (there's still no word on how Ed was resurrected having apparently died in Parker #15, Plunder Squad – that won't be addressed until Parker #21, Breakout). In fact the only real nod to change in the book is a mention that it's become harder to find cash scores – harder, but not impossible: the caper this time centres on an evangelical event at a stadium, where cash donations will total half a million dollars.

Structurally, too, things are much as they ever were: like the bulk of its predecessors, the novel is made up of four parts; there's the expected jumping back and forth in time, and the inevitable double-cross – and it won't be a surprise to anyone familiar with the series to this point that that comes courtesy of the man who arranged the robbery, George Liss. Even so, Westlake does have other surprises up his sleeve, notably a new spin on Parker's traditional plan of finding a local hideout after the score, rather than making a run for it – although for me, that doesn't quite work here; the hideout is a little too close to the stadium for it to be believable – and Parker posing as an insurance man and winding up in a hospital teeming with cops.

Still, to my mind, there's something missing from the book – that raw, searing intensity that the best Parkers – The Hunter, The Score, The Seventh – possess. There are some great scenes, some diverting business, but the novel never really coalesces or comes fully to life. That could be a consequence of the way it was written – in fits and starts over a twenty-plus year period, as Westlake explained in this 1997 interview by Jesse Sublett. Or maybe he just needed time to warm up. Either way, the next Parker novel, Backflash (1998), was written much faster, the way Westlake usually penned the Parkers, and for my money it's a better book – something I'll be exploring in the next Parker Progress Report.

William Boyd's Restless (Bloomsbury, 2006), the 2012 BBC TV Adaptation, and Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth (Jonathan Cape, 2012)

Enough with the procrastinatory obfuscation; time to get back into blogging proper, with a 2006 historical espionage novel I was inspired to read last autumn as a result of reading a 2012 historical espionage novel:

Restless by William Boyd, published by Bloomsbury in hardback in the UK in 2006, and bought in first edition by me in Bookworms in Shoreham last summer. Now, my original plan, when I read Restless, had been to read Boyd's most recent novel, Waiting for Sunrise, which was published by Bloomsbury in June of 2012, and which I showcased in signed first in August. But then I went and bought a signed first of this:

Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, published by Jonathan Cape not long after Waiting for Sunrise, and dove into that instead. Unfortunately it proved to be a disappointment – at least for me – both as a spy story and as a novel: Serena, the narrator, is a pretty rubbish secret agent, not to mention a rather dreary sort altogether, and though the final reveal does offer an explanation for that, it was all a little too tricksy and self-satisfied for my liking, and ultimately pointless, even given the meta trappings (which are undermined by the presumed complicity of Serena anyway). So, having enjoyed William Boyd's 2009 thriller Ordinary Thunderstorms, and knowing that Restless was, like Sweet Tooth, ostensibly a historical spy novel, I figured I'd give that a go, reasoning that it might act as a kind of palate cleanser (I know: bit weird, but that's how my mind works). And I'm glad I did, because not only did it turn out to be a cracking read – so much so that it ended up in my top ten books I read in 2012 chart – but a few months later, at the end of December, the BBC broadcast a two-part television drama based on the novel, adapted by Boyd himself.

And a pretty good fist he made of it as well, as did director Edward Hall and stars Hayley Atwell – playing Russian-born British World War II spy Eva Delectorskaya – and Rufus Sewell as Eva's handler, Lucas Romer. There's some stilted dialogue, especially early on, but once it gets going the TV Restless does a terrific job translating the subterfuge and set pieces of the novel, notably one exciting sequence where Eva is dispatched by Romer to Holland to witness the supposed defection of a German agent (an episode Boyd based on the real-life Venlo Incident).

Where the adaptation falls down slightly is in its treatment of Eva's daughter, Ruth Gilmartin. The novel alternates between Eva's WWII adventures, which are written in the third person, and Ruth's first-person recollection of the long hot summer of 1976, when her mother revealed to her that she was a spy during the war. Boyd spends quite a bit of time establishing Ruth's character and fleshing out her life: her friendly and amusing relationship with her professor at Cambridge and with the students to whom she teaches English (one of whom becomes infatuated by her); her fraught relationship with her estranged German lover (and his brother), the father of her child. In the adaptation, however, much of this excised – probably to keep the running time down to three hours, which I guess is fair enough (although why Ruth's professor becomes German in the TV version is beyond me); except that as a consequence, the strong, willful, warm Ruth of the novel is reduced to little more than a way of keeping the plot moving.

Still, if you haven't seen the television Restless, don't let that put you off: it has much to recommend it... just not quite as much as the book is all.

Existential Ennui in 2013: There Will Be Books

See that? That overfilled, double- and in some places triple-stacked bookcase? That, dear reader, is a visual representation of what's in store on Existential Ennui in 2013.

You see, this time last year, I posted a list of the authors that would be appearing on this 'ere blog in 2012. And many of those authors did in fact end up appearing – but not all of them: a good third either didn't feature on Existential Ennui at all in 2012, or only appeared in tangential fashion.

So, this year, rather than make promises I'll struggle to keep, I thought I'd proffer a more general preview, in the shape of a picture of my "pending" bookcase, on the groaning shelves of which reside the secondhand books I've bought but have yet to blog about. I might not blog about all of them in 2013 – in fact, I can pretty much guarantee that I won't – plus there are books on other, unseen bookcases (oh yes, there are other bookcases besides...) that I've also yet to blog about (a couple of nice Westlake Scores, for example) – not to mention a number of books on this bookcase that I have blogged about but haven't yet got round to removing to those other, unseen bookcases (it is, I'll readily admit, an imperfect system) – but I will almost certainly blog about some of the books on this bookcase this year.

Of course, annoying bastard that I am, I've made the picture too small to properly make out what half those books are. Even if you click on it to enlarge it.

I know: I hate me too.

Onwards!

The Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics: The Ten Best Books I Read in 2012

And so, suitably stuffed with turkey and sausages and Christmas pudding and the entire contents of a confectionery selection pack – and consequently suffering with the meat 'n' fruit 'n' chocolate sweats – we reach the final post in the three-part Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics – and indeed the final post for the year. And having presented a big long list of the sixty-four books I read this year – a list which, as usual, largely comprised books published well before 2012 (over sixty years before in some cases), and which, incidentally, this year was linked by both The Rap Sheet and The Comics Reporter – it's time to pick my ten favourites from that list.

I've elected to exclude any rereads, for the simple reason that if I hadn't, a third of the top ten would have been taken up by Patricia Highsmith Ripley novels, and I've endeavoured to restrict myself to just one appearance per author – although achieving that wasn't as hard as you might imagine: the only real candidates for two appearances were Donald E. Westlake with his Tucker Coe novel Murder Among Children, and Elmore Leonard with Mr. Majestyk. But there were other books besides those that could have quite easily made the cut in a less competitive year: John D. MacDonald's debut Travis McGee mystery The Deep Blue Goodbye; Anthony Price's fine espionage novel Other Paths to Glory; Brian Garfield's Death Wish; William Goldman's Marathon Man; P. M. Hubbard's A Thirsty Evil; and from 2012 itself, George Pelecanos's stylish '70s crime spree What it Was and Jeremy Duns's third Paul Dark spy thriller, The Moscow Option. And were I to expand the top ten to a top twenty, well: there's numbers eleven to nineteen right there.

As it is, I've cheated anyway: I couldn't separate the two books vying for the number ten spot, so I've made them equal tenth. If you have a problem with that, you could perhaps take a moment to consider that a) the top ten is drawn from a list of books which were published across seven decades, which makes it a fairly meaningless selection anyway (although arguably no more meaningless than other, more traditional "best of the year" lists); and b) it's my blog and ultimately I'll do what the bloody hell I like. So ner.

In ascending order, then, with links to whatever I wrote about them this year, here are the ten (ish) best books I read in 2012. Happy new year.

=10. Restless by William Boyd (2006)
The Human Factor by Graham Greene (1978)
I read a number of books this year over which Kim Philby cast his long shadow – including his autobiography – but these two were the best. Graham Greene's sad and moving portrait of a man who betrays his country for love clearly isn't, as Greene himself was at pains to point out, a roman a clef, but it's hard not to detect traces of Greene's old friend Philby in Maurice Castle's actions, if not his motivations and character. As for Restless, I read that one right after reading Ian McEwan's disappointing Sweet Tooth, in the hope that it would prove a more satisfying spy novel. In the event, it was a more satisfying novel overall, something I'll be exploring in a post in the new year in which I'll be comparing it to its recent BBC TV adaptation.

9. The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard (1969)
Elmore Leonard's debut crime novel, this meandering, surprising story, peopled with believable yet still idiosyncratic characters and peppered with choice dialogue, set the template for what was to come.

8. The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell (2012)
I've loved Eddie Campbell's comics since I first came across them in the 1980s; to my mind he's one of the most important creators ever to work in the medium, and The Lovely Horrible Stuff is as good as anything he's done: an extended meditation on the pernicious influence of filthy lucre, drawing on the history of the Pacific island of Yap as well as some very personal, not to mention raw, episodes.

7. A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household (1951)
Fast-paced, light, thrilling, a joy to read. Plus: badger ham. Yes: badger ham.

6. This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith (1960)
One of Highsmith's most powerful novels: an intense study of the mad impulses and justifications behind stalking.

5. Commander-1 by Peter George (1965)
An overlooked post-apocalyptic gem, as good as, if not better than, On the Beach and Alas, Babylon. I urge you to seek it out.

4. 361 by Donald E. Westlake (1962)
Westlake's third novel under his own name, and his first crime fiction masterpiece.

3. The Twelve by Justin Cronin (2012)
Beautifully written, epic in scope, and probably the most gripping novel I read all year.

2. Game Without Rules by Michael Gilbert (1968)
Eleven short stories starring devious middle-aged intelligence operatives Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. Sublime.

1. Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn (1967)
I stated back in May that Towards the End of the Morning was the best book I'd read so far this year, and as 2012 draws to a close, it still is. Follow the links to find out why.

The Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics, 2012: A Big Long List of the Books I Read This Year

It's the end of the year as we knew it, and I feel... bloody knackered, actually, to tell you the truth. But that's by the by – it's the fact that 2012 is rapidly drawing to a close that's the pertinent point here, because we're at the midway mark of the three-pronged assault on your senses – well, one of your senses; you can neither hear, smell, taste nor touch me, although I will allow you to do all four of those things for a substantial fee – that is the Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics. And that in turn means that it's time for a big long list of the books I read this year – an exercise perhaps even more arbitrary and pointless than the misty-eyed navel-gazing missive which kicked off this end-of-the-year extravaganza. After all, who but me really cares what the hell I've read this year? And anyway, if you've been following Existential Ennui throughout 2012, you'll probably already know, seeing as I've blogged about most of these books this year, as evidenced by the links provided below.

Not all of them, though: there are a number I never got round to writing about – graphic novels mostly, but some novels too. So, y'know... there's that...

Oh, who am I kidding: there really is no justification for a self-centred, self-serving post such as this, so let's just get on with it. Here, then, for anyone who remotely cares, is a big long list of the books I read this year, in the order in which I read them:

Game Without Rules by Michael Gilbert
Shockwave by Desmond Cory
Assignment to Disaster by Edward S. Aarons
One Endless Hour by Dan J. Marlowe
Secret Ministry by Desmond Cory
Operation Fireball by Dan J. Marlowe
Raylan by Elmore Leonard
Jimmy the Kid by Donald E. Westlake
What it Was by George Pelecanos
My Silent War by Kim Philby
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
Rogue Justice by Geoffrey Household
Congress of the Animals by Jim Woodring
A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household
Song of Freedom by Jeremy Duns
Tales of Adventurers by Geoffrey Household
I Gave at the Office by Donald E. Westlake
The Moscow Option by Jeremy Duns
Spandex: Fast and Hard by Martin Eden
The 9th Directive by Adam Hall
Trust Me on This by Donald E. Westlake
Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
Picture of Millie by P. M. Hubbard
A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith
This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith
Other Paths to Glory by Anthony Price
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Tucker Coe (Donald E. Westlake)
Richard Stark's Parker in The Score by Darwyn Cooke
Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean
Death Wish by Brian Garfield
Mr. Majestyk by Elmore Leonard
The Chase by Richard Unekis
Deliverance by James Dickey
Marathon Man by William Goldman
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins
Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (Donald E. Westlake)
Goliath by Tom Gauld
The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart
The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell
Batman: Earth One by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank
361 by Donald E. Westlake
Killing Time by Donald E. Westlake
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Hit Man by Lawrence Block
A Thirsty Evil by P. M. Hubbard
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Restless by William Boyd
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (reread)
Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith (reread)
Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith (reread)
The Big H by Bryan Peters
Amateur Agent by Christopher Adams
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (reread)
Dance of the Dwarfs by Geoffrey Household
Commander-1 by Peter George
The Volcanoes of San Domingo by Adam Hall
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Big Bounce by Elmore Leonard
The Sound of His Horn by Sarban
The Deep Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald
The Green Wound by Philip Atlee
King City by Brandon Graham

That gives us a grand total of sixty-four books, which is pretty good going, I think – more than last year (forty-eight), not as many as the year before (sixty-nine), and almost certainly more than I'll manage next year, for one reason or another. And of those sixty-four books: fifty-two were novels, eight were graphic novels, three were short story collections and one was a work of non-fiction; twenty-three I would describe as crime fiction, eighteen as spy fiction and the rest a mixture of thrillers, science fiction and I guess what you'd call literary works; seven were written by Donald E. Westlake (eight if you count Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Score), five by Patricia Highsmith and four by Geoffrey Household, with three each by Dan J. Marlowe and Elmore Leonard, and two each by Desmond Cory, Jeremy Duns, Adam Hall, P. M. Hubbard and Peter George (alias Bryan Peters); thirteen were published in 2012 itself, with the remainder published across the preceding sixty years; and four I'd read before.

And among those sixty-four books, there were ten that I thought were the finest ones I read in 2012 – ten books which will form the basis of the final post not only of the Existential Ennui Review of the Year in Books and Comics, but on Existential Ennui overall this year.

Now that really is reason to get excited.

Merry Christmas!