Payback

A synchronous (or should that be serendipitous?) diversion last night: Payback was on telly. For those who don't know, Payback is the 1999 movie version of the first Parker novel, The Hunter/Point Blank, previously filmed as Point Blank in 1967. Infamously Payback was re-cut by the studio after director Brian Helgeland's version was deemed too dark; the director's cut later came out on DVD in the States (but not in the UK) and is supposed to be the better version. I still haven't seen that version; the one on telly last night was the studio version. And actually, watching it again, it held up better than I remembered.

A number of things struck me:

1) I'd forgotten the desaturated look of the film, which I rather liked (apparently this effect is removed in the director's cut).

2) I thought Mel Gibson made a pretty good Parker (or Porter, as he's called in the movie). He's too short, and he's a bit too flippant in some of the scenes, but generally he looks right and acts mean.

3) Having now read The Hunter, which I hadn't the first time I saw Payback, I was surprised by how close large parts of the film are to the novel. Sure, the movie diverges in places, but a lot of the novel is in there, and even the dialogue is often lifted right from the page. It's not a brilliant adaptation, but it's not too bad, and as a film it has its moments.

4) Mel Gibson smokes really well. Unlike a lot of movies and TV, you can really see/feel him draw the smoke in. And you can hear it in his voice.

5) That's yer lot.

Lawks a' mercy, missus, it's The List!

Well after last week's pathetic showing of one comic, which meant it wasn't even worth going to the comic shop, this week is looking... not that great either. There are only two definite buys for me:

Batman & Robin #11: Grant Morrison, Batman, a-yup.

Turf #1. This is the Jonathan Ross/Tommy Lee Edwards gangsters 'n' aliens comic book. From the previews I've seen it looks like Ross could do with an editor – some of those captions and word balloons are reeeeaally long – but it'll be interesting to wead Wossy's first comics effort.

There are a couple of other comics I might try: Avengers The Origin #1 is Joe Casey and Phil Noto's take on those original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby sixties Avengers comics, filling in the gaps between the panels; and Spider-Man Fever #1 marks Brendan McCarthy's return to comics, which should be colourful if nothing else.

I'm tired today, which is why this post might be a bit flat. Harumph.

And in a suitable coda

to the previous post, I just received a cancellation notice from Amazon for the "secret" Parker book I found. Turns out it was so secret the bookseller didn't actually have it.

Buying second hand books online

can be an unsettling, feverish experience. On the one hand, pretty much any book you care to mention will probably be available online somewhere, whether it's on Amazon, AbeBooks, Biblion, or countless other internet aggregators and dealers. On the other hand, having so much information at your fingertips is often bewildering. Quite apart from questions of cost (thanks to the interweb, old books may be more available than ever, but they can still be bloody expensive), condition (can you really trust whatever scant description of a book a dealer's bothered to offer?) and shipping (what if a book's only available overseas? Do you take the chance it'll make its way to you safely?), the sheer number of dealers online makes comparing and contrasting a logistical nightmare.

Take Amazon. You'd think that any dealer worth their salt would sell their books through the biggest online retailer. But you'd be wrong. There might be copies of a book you're looking for on Amazon, but there might also be further copies on AbeBooks that aren't listed on Amazon, despite the fact that Amazon now own AbeBooks. There might also be more copies on Biblion, or Alibris, or on some small bookshop's own website. Working out who's got what (and in the case of the non-Amazon aggregators like AbeBooks, if they even still have it; the listings on these websites don't always get updated once a book's sold), what they're selling it for, and where it is is time-consuming and frustrating. You could try BookFinder (which I've only just discovered; sigh), which aggregates results from loads of dealers, but I doubt even that will give you the whole picture.

But even simply looking on Amazon can be confusing. For instance, I've only recently discovered that there are "hidden" listings on Amazon – or at least hidden to me until I worked out they were there. When I've been searching for a book on Amazon, under the (hopefully, but not necessarily) correct edition of the book, I've been clicking straight to the "3 used" link under the title, which I've taken to mean there are only three second hand copies of the book available. But I've been missing a trick. Because if you click on the actual title of the book and go to its full listing, you might also find there are other copies available under "collectible". These don't always show up on the short listing, so unless you click on that edition's fill title listing, you'll miss them completely.

Which I have been. Until now. Luckily, with all the Allison & Busby Richard Stark/Parker novels I've been picking up, there's only one instance where I've seen a very slightly cheaper copy than the one I bought. But it's a close call on a couple of others. And I've just nabbed another A&B Parker on Amazon that I had no idea was there.

I guess I shouldn't really complain. Pre-internet, getting hold of these books would've been next to impossible. But a part of me slightly hankers after that more innocent time. Things were so much simpler then.

The Stark Cutaway

I've read four of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's Parker novels now (well, nearly; I haven't quite finished The Mourner yet), and there's a device that Westlake employs in each book, usually two-thirds or so into the story (although earlier in the first novel, Point Blank). Essentially he cuts away from Parker's story – the books aren't written in the first person, but they are largely told from Parker's perspective – and focuses instead on a different character (or characters), one he's introduced earlier in the book.

Point Blank contains the most celebrated example of this, where during Part Two we cut away to follow Mal, the Outfit man who's double-crossed Parker, and stay with Mal right up to the point Parker re-enters the story in a surprising fashion. (As an aside, and related to this earlier post, the 1984 Allison & Busby edition of the book slightly fluffs this reveal with an error, substituting a "when" for what had been a "saw". Well done again there, A&B proofreaders.) The Outfit, the third Parker novel, cuts away to follow multiple heists, while The Mourner (Parker #4) leaves Parker for dead before cutting away.

But my favourite cutaway so far, I think, is in The Man with the Getaway Face (Parker #2), and involves the unfortunate Stubbs. In its own way, the switch to Stubbs' story in Part Three is as surprising as the reappearance of Parker in Point Blank. Westlake lulls us into a false sense of security: the heist has gone well, the double-cross even better. And then the rug gets pulled out from underneath Parker's feet and everything goes to pot. End of Part Two. Then we get Part Three, and all of a sudden we're in a parallel detective tale, as we follow Stubbs on a woozy manhunt – woozy because Stubbs is the dumbest detective imaginable. A former Communist Party activist, repeated head injuries have left him in a severely befuddled state. But that only makes him and his adventure more entertaining, as he bumps into dead end after dead end and tries to keep himself on track.

And best of all it all leads up to a twist right at the end of the novel that brilliantly deflates the whole enterprise. So that's why I reckon The Man with the Getwaway Face has the best Stark Cutaway (so far, anyway).

The Black Ice Score

Another Parker novel turned up yesterday:














The Allison & Busby 1986 paperback of the eleventh Parker novel, The Black Ice Score. I did think I might get the hardback of this one for my recent birthday, but some other bugger bought the copy I'd identified before it could be bought for me. Never mind – this paperback'll do just fine.

So, that leaves three Parker novels from the first run I don't have in any edition: The Split, Plunder Squad, and Butcher's Moon. And I should have news on at least one of those soon...

I'm halfway through reading Parker #4, The Mourner, which is a little different to the previous books. There's a character in it, Menlo, who seems more like a character from a spy novel than Stark's usual hard-bitten cast. But the writing's as poetically matter-of-fact as ever, with lots of those lovely economical sentences, often broken at a rightangle halfway through by a comma, almost like really good song lyrics. I should probably write something about the previous Parker, The Outfit, at some point, but maybe I'll leave that till I've watched the movie, and then compare the two.