Parker Novels Progress Report

My quest to collect as many of the Allison & Busby hardback editions of the Richard Stark 'Parker' novels as I can continues with this, the latest arrival:













The 1984 A&B edition of the second Parker novel, The Man with the Getaway Face. Which was actually the fourth Parker novel A&B published, following Slayground (originally Parker #14), Point Blank (Parker #1) and The Rare Coin Score (Parker #9). God help anyone trying to make chronological sense of the books at the time.

Anyway, my copy of The Man with the Getaway Face (which I also own in a Coronet edition as The Steel Hit) came from the fair isle of Orkney, of all places. I spotted it for sale online for a fiver. It's ex-library, but it's complete, and in very good condition. The (minor) library stamps inside state that it came from Orkney library itself, so it must have been sitting in the library up there on the (I presume) Orkney mainland for a good many years, lightly borrowed and read judging by the condition, then eventually bought by the Orkney bookshop and held in their stock until I chanced across it. It's unusual to be able to pinpoint the provenance of a book like that. Usually you have no idea as to how many hands a book has passed through. It's almost as if the book was being held by the Orkneys all this time, just waiting for my interest in the Parker novels to ignite. Strange.

The Man with the Getaway Face aside, my Parker hunt has been a little quiet recently. My birthday's coming up, so I've turned the quest over to anyone looking to buy me a present. So all being well, I should get a bumper haul next week!

Parker Spelling Bee

Just came across a nice sequence in The Outfit where Parker's writing a letter – not something he does very often – and has to phone the operator to check how to spell 'grievance'. Which was quite sweet.

Ding Dong Dang, It's Dat Dere List

Crikey, looks like a decent clutch of comics out this week – at least ones that might be of interest to me, anyway. And it's my blog, after all. I care not a jot what anyone else might think. So ner. Let's take a liddle ol' look, shall we?

Batman And Robin #10
Criminal The Sinners #5
Ex Machina #48
Unwritten #11

Those are all definites. Grant Morrison's Batman & Robin kicked up a gear when Cameron Stewart came on as artist on issue #7, and this latest issue begins a new storyline which will culminate in the return of Bruce Wayne (who, if you didn't know, is dead, or at least believed to be dead, although in fact merely lost in time; an easy mistake to make). Criminal is the final part of Tracy Lawless' second storyline, and it's been as fine a slice of tough crime storytelling as you're likely to find this side of Richard Stark, and with lovely lurid colours too. Ex Machina is racing towards its final fiftieth issue, with a fair few revelations along the way, and Unwritten is still holding my interest. Just about.

I'll give these a look too:

Mystic Hands Of Dr Strange #1
Justice League The Rise And Fall Special #1
Twelve Spearhead #1

Doctor Strange continues to hold a strange appeal, despite the fact that I've never read that many Doctor Strange comics, and indeed have abandoned one or two Doctor Strange miniseries after their first issues. I think it's residual memories of being into The Defenders when I was a kid in the '70s/'80s. I think lots of kids were into The Defenders back then, despite the comics not being that great. I suspect that's simply because it was better distributed in the UK than other comics. We knew no better.

The big question on Justice League The Rise and Fall Special is, why do I keep getting suckered into buying rubbish Justice League comics when I know they'll be rubbish? It's either a masochistic personality defect, or a continuing disbelief that James Robinson has completely lost it as a writer (he has, clearly), or a lingering fondness for Grant Morrison's JLA and a dwindling hope that the Justice League can ever be that good again. In fact it's all of these things, and I need to take myself out the back and give myself a good kicking until I see sense.

Twelve Spearhead is a fill-in issue for the MIA J. Michael Straczynski/Chris Weston The Twelve maxiseries, which was supposed to be twelve issues long but stopped at #8 a few years ago and hasn't been seen since. I really liked The Twelve, and Spearhead is drawn and written by Weston, so I think I'll give it a go.

So that's five, possibly six, maybe seven if I'm really weak, comics this week. Hell's teeth. It's almost like the bad old days again.

(Parker Progress Report) The Man with the Getaway Face

This is the second of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's Parker novels, and I polished it off at the weekend (although the edition I was reading was actually a Coronet paperback from 1972, which bears the alternative title The Steel Hit). It's a great book, but what really struck me about it was Westlake's deadly dry prose – much more so than with Point Blank/The Hunter. The methodical planning of the heist and subsequent double-cross(es) and the occasional bursts of violence are laid out in such a matter-of-fact, unfussy manner that it's almost like reading a police transcript of events.

That's not to say it isn't gripping; it is. It's just that Westlake doesn't feel the need to over-elaborate. At one point a bar is described as an oblong, and that's almost as much detail as you get. And of course you don't really need much more than that. The characters are briefly sketched, but they still manage to come alive. Parker himself is utterly focused on the job in hand to the exclusion of everything else, so that when a wrinkle arises in the shape of a character from elsewhere in his life, he simply locks them away until the job is done.

After all the planning and build-up, the heist itself takes only a few pages, and the double-cross even less. That's all they need, however, and are all the more effective for it, particularly one killing, which basically takes place while our heads are turned. Brutal, perfunctory, perfect. And once again there's a nice twist at the end, a final, stinging slap in the face after all Parker's efforts.

Next up it's The Outfit, which apparently is where the series really gets going.

Progress Report: The Richard Stark 'Parker' Novels

The other package I was waiting for turned up yesterday, containing this:













The 1987 Allison & Busby UK hardback edition of Richard Stark's fourth Parker novel, The Mourner. It came in the same package as this:













The 1986 A&B paperback edition of the sixth Parker novel, The Jugger. And straight away something struck me as being odd about The Mourner. I looked at it in my hands, looked at the paperback of The Jugger, looked over to the other A&B Parker hardbacks on the shelf, looked back to the book in my hands... and realised it's smaller than the other hardbacks, about the same size as The Jugger, which is larger paperback size. At first I wondered if A&B started publishing the hardbacks at a smaller size from 1987, but that can't be right 'cos I have a 1988 A&B edition of the third Parker novel, The Outfit, and that's at the same larger size as the other ones. And it can't be that A&B dropped the size to fit in with later Parker novels they'd already published (A&B published out of sequence, remember), because my copy of the A&B edition of the eighth Parker novel, The Handle, which they published in 1986, is the larger size again.

Still with me? No? Good.

Well anyway, granted, in the grand scheme of things this isn't exactly earth-shatteringly important, and is probably of no interest to anyone other than, er, me. But it does leave me with two unanswered questions:

1) Why did Allison & Busby change the size of their Parker hardbacks? The logical course for them when they were republishing the novels in the eighties would have been to keep them all at the same trim size, thus creating a uniform library. So why the change?

2) Which of the A&B Parker hardbacks I haven't yet seen are in the larger size and which are in the smaller size? (I only have five of the sixteen hardbacks, and it's going to take me a fair while to acquire the rest, so I can't see this one being answered anytime soon.)

Oh, and one other book turned up yesterday:













A 1972 Coronet reprint paperback of the ninth Parker novel, The Rare Coin Score, with one of those nifty double covers. That'll tide me over till I can find an Allison & Busby hardback edition.

And for no one's benefit other than my own, I shall now list, in order of original publication (i.e. the sixties/early seventies dates) the Parker novels from the initial run I now own (and the edition I have 'em in), and the ones I still need to track down. Here's what I got and ain't got:

Point Blank/The Hunter (Allison & Busby HB, 1985; also Coronet PB, 1967)
The Steel Hit/The Man with the Getaway Face (Coronet PB, 1971)
The Outfit (A&B HB, 1988; also Berkley PB 1973)
The Mourner (A&B HB, 1987)
The Score/Killtown (still to get)
The Jugger (A&B PB, 1986)
The Seventh/The Split (still to get)
The Handle/Run Lethal (A&B HB, 1986)
The Rare Coin Score (Coronet PB, 1972)
The Green Eagle Score (still to get)
The Black Ice Score (still to get)
The Sour Lemon Score (still to get)
Deadly Edge (still to get)
Slayground (A&B HB, 1984)
Plunder Squad (still to get)
Butcher's Moon (still to get)

All of the ones I don't have are going to be tricky to find at affordable prices, but Deadly Edge, Plunder Squad and Butcher's Moon are going to be frickin' impossible. I don't think Allison & Busby even published those last two. In fact, I'm not sure they were ever published in the UK at all.

Ah, the thrill of the chase.

(Revenge of) This Week's Comics

Just realised I haven't done one of these for a while, so let's take a look at what I done got in that there ol' comic shop:

Crossed #9
Invincible Iron Man #24

Er, that's it. I've seen comments on the web that this is a quiet week, but I never seem to buy more than two or three comics most weeks these days anyway, so it's a standard week for me. I toyed with getting Valerie D'Orazio's PunisherMax one-shot Butterfly, but I read a preview online and it slightly bored me. Plus, y'know what? It's Just Not Garth Ennis (Slight Return). I did, however, pick up the new Doctor Who Magazine for 20p because the woman in WHSmiths gave me the wrong change. Result.