Parker Progress Report: The Score and more

So where are we up to on the Parker novels? Well, reading-wise, I finished Parker #5, The Score – 1984 Allison & Busby hardback, the edition I read, seen here – and I'm two thirds of the way through the next one, The Jugger, which I gots in a 1986 A&B paperback – see below. The Score was bloody great, possibly the best one so far, with a brilliant heist involving the take-down of a whole town, Parker working alongside a host of fellow criminals, including a debut appearance for Alan Grofield, who also pops up in a number of later Parker books and four novels of his own. I liked Grofield in this one: he's young, smart, and unusually upbeat for a Stark/Westlake character. But he also has his faults; at one point in the book he's criticized by Parker and another character for not paying his taxes. Which sounds a bit of an odd thing to have to do for a career criminal, but as Parker notes, non payment of taxes is a surefire way to bring the Federal government down on you.

The Jugger is a different beast altogether from previous novels. There's no score to speak of; instead Parker is looking into the death of Joe Sheer, the safecracker who acts as Parker's mail drop. Not for altruistic reasons, mind; simply because Sheer knew Parker's main alias, Charles Willis, as well as many of the scores Parker has taken. So when Sheer writes to Parker (prior to dying, obv) asking for help with a problem – something that men in this line of work just don't do, unless it's help with a robbery – Parker goes to see him with the intention of possibly killing him. It's always self-interest with Parker. I've just reached the Stark Cutaway on this one, where we find out what happened to Sheer. It's a different kind of novel, f'sure, but still terrific.

In collecting news, the Icelandic volcano has almost certainly delayed a Parker first edition I've got on order from the US, but in the meantime, I just nabbed this on eBay for a song:













The 1991 Allison & Busby UK paperback of The Sour Lemon Score (Parker #12). It may not look like much to you, chief, being somewhat scruffy, but the cheapest copies of this edition on AbeBooks at the moment are thirty or forty quid from the States, and on Amazon it's more like sixty quid. I got it for much less than a tenner. And yes, I know I already have this:













the 1986 A&B hardback, but I like the cover of the paperback, which sports an illustration by Stephen Hall, whose work graced a few of the later A&B paperbacks, as I've mentioned before. I haven't seen a picture of this particular cover online before. Looking forward to receiving it.

Oh, and I almost forgot: I made a cryptic comment about symmetry when I was blathering on about Comeback in this post, and I just realised I never followed up on that. The symmetry thing was I knew I had a 1974 US first edition of Butcher's Moon – the final Parker in the original run of novels – on the way to me, which is why it was nice to have a 1997 US first edition of Comeback – the first Parker in the second run – too. See? Symmetry. Proper US first editions either side of the twenty-three-year break.

Yeah, OK, bit of a weird one. I'm a funny old stick.

The (Absence) List

Ooh, I got all excited there for a moment. I was looking at the list of comics that are coming out this week, and managed to find five I wanted. So I was gonna post something about the irony of there finally being a week where there are five comics coming out that I want (as opposed to the usual one or two) but I wouldn't be able to get them anyway because the blinkin' Icelandic volcano has cut the UK off from the rest of the world and there are no new comics coming in from the States this week.

And then I realised I was looking at next week's list.

Sigh.

In fact, it wouldn't matter to me if the new comics arrived this week anyway, because, looking at this week's list, there are no new comics I want. None. Nuffink. Zilch.

It's almost as if the volcano knew...

Volcanic Activity

There may be hundreds of thousands of people stuck all over the world as a result of the Icelandic volcano, but it's only now that the real effects of the no-fly zone are being felt. To whit: there'll be no new comics in the UK this week! Diamond, the comics distributor, can't send over the latest shipment from the States. So this'll be two weeks in a row I won't have been to the comic shop. Good lord.

I've also got a book on order from the US, so that'll be going nowhere too.

Oh well.

Strike One

As a little aside to the previous post, despite my fretting over its whereabouts, I think I might have been a bit disappointed if my copy of Butcher's Moon had turned up any earlier. See, the strike-off line on the imprint page doesn't have a '1' on it. It runs "9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2".

For anyone who doesn't know, strike-off lines are what publishers use to keep track of which printing of a book is in circulation. If a book's strike-off line runs "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1" (or "2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1" if the text is centred rather than ranged left), it usually (but not always) means it's a first printing. If the "1" is missing – or the "1" and the "2", or the "1", "2", "3", etc. – it means it's a second printing, or third printing, and so on. For book nerds like me, first printings are what it's all about. (Used to be the printer would manually scratch off a number on the plate for each printing, but in the days of in-house repro etc., that happens less often.)

So my copy of Butcher's Moon is a second printing, right? Well, no. After I ordered the book (and was assured by the seller it was a first printing as well as a first edition), I did some research on another Random House book from the same period. (Astute followers of this blog – if there are any; followers I mean, not astute people – might be able to work out which book, but we'll come back to that another time.) And it turns out that during the 1970s, when Random House used a strike-off line (they didn't always), they generally ended at "2". So the only way to be sure an RH book from that period is a first edition is if it says "First Edition" (or "First Printing") under the strike-off line. Which my copy does.

Bloody confusing, but at least I worked that out before the book arrived. So now I know. And, probably to your eternal regret if you've read this far, so do you.

Butcher's Moon by Richard Stark

Here's what I was waiting for:













A first edition of Richard Stark's Butcher's Moon, published in the US by Random House in 1974. It's the sixteenth Parker novel, coming at the end of the original run of Parker novels from 1962–1974. It's also, I believe, either the longest or one of the longest of the Parker books, clocking in at over 300 pages. Most of the novels before this one are about half the length.

Took a wee while to track this one down, at least at a price I could afford. It's one of the rarest Parker novels; there have only been three editions of it up to now: this one from Random House, a UK Coronet paperback in 1977, and an Avon paperback in 1985. The Random House edition is the only hardback edition. There'll be a new paperback edition from University of Chicago Press (who've been reprinting the Parker books) either later this year or start of next.

This is a nice copy; it's not ex-library, the jacket (which I love; it was designed by one Ira Teichberg) is clean and bright with a few small marks on the spine, and the pages are cream. The only defect inside is on the listed previous Parker novels at the front, where the book's last owner has, rather sweetly, put a small, neat tick next to the titles he or she owned at that point.













You can just about see they're missing The Mourner, The Green Eagle Score and Plunder Squad. I hope she or he tracked them down eventually.

And for good measure, here's the board cover too, with its black spine and cute mirrored buildings deboss on the front:

The wait is over.

The book has arrived. So what was it I was so worried about? Why I reckon that deserves a post all of its own.