Parker's Black Law | Valerio Evangelisti

The 2011 Italian edition of Backflash features an in-depth look at Parker in the afterword by writer Valerio Evangelisti. Readily available in Italian on the Carmilla on line webzine, you can read Doug Headline's English translation below.

Parker's Black Law

Many will remember Lee Marvin, frowning, walking down an interminable hallway, seeking revenge as his footsteps echo and the events that led him to this murderous determination rush through his mind. The film was Point Blank (1967), directed by John Boorman, and under the name of the lead character played by Marvin, Walker, was actually hiding Parker, a powerful and central figure in the noir genre.

That film was based on The Hunter (1962), the novel in which Parker had first appeared before continuing his ambiguous career in about twenty more novels. The author of the book was Richard Stark, AKA Donald E. Westlake, AKA Tucker Coe, plus other scattered pseudonyms. A master of mystery and Noir fiction, he died in 2008, a victim in life of a curious schizophrenia: while Stark's signature works are brutal and violent, and Coe's tend toward bleakness and melancholy, Westlake's signature novels are instead predominantly humorous, and often hilarious and garrulous.

No such humor, however, is to be found in Richard Stark's Parker, given the singular nature of his trade. Parker has been called a gangster, but the definition is incorrect. He has no gang around him, he chooses his accomplices according to the robbery he plans, and changes partners as often as the women around him. Indeed, one would say he hates organized structures. Sometimes he happens to confront the Mafia, political power, and unstoppable corporations devoted to criminal activities. However, he does this without an ideological agenda, much less one driven by justice. He is in essence a loner, though not an individualist. He is certainly not a rebel: all he cares about is earning enough to live comfortably for a little while, waiting to prepare the next heist.

Violent, greedy, sometimes cruel, intelligent but within normal limits, almost devoid of culture and ideas of a general scope. Such is Parker. What then makes him sympathetic to millions of readers? Consider that this robber often kills, and who he kills is not necessarily a worse person than himself. Sometimes, though very rarely, his victims are innocent or nearly so. Parker, not particularly prone to murder, has no qualms about resorting to it when it serves his designs, for technical rather than moral considerations.

So it's in this that lies Parker's charm: professionalism. He performs his job as well as he can, with a basic honesty toward those who work alongside him. He respects and protects his accomplices as long as they are loyal; he is by no means a killing machine. Yet he is not attached to anyone, has no real friends, no old-school gangster solidarity in the style of Rififi or Grisbi. He is efficient, and that is all.

Richard Stark does not help us get inside Parker's head. He describes his movements, not his innermost thoughts. Mindful in this of the classic school of Noir, and in particular the one spearheaded by Dashiell Hammett, he avoids dwelling on psychological implications. Action is everything, and it explains as much as there is to explain. The attitude that, later, Jean-Patrick Manchette would call behaviorist, with reference to behavioral psychology.

From such an undercurrent, the plot stands out as the engine of the story. Will Parker's elaborate heist succeed? If complications emerge, will he be able to solve them? These are the questions it all boils down to. In essence, the same questions Parker asks himself, without further introspective complications. By taking the robber's point of view, identification with him is assured, for it makes the reader live the tale as Parker would and leaves him fascinated by its complexity.

Stark/Westlake belongs to a later season of Noir than the classic Hammett and Chandler era. Apart from him, it is dominated by Mickey Spillane, Englishman James Hadley Chase, later Lawrence Block (another writer capable of switching with ease from tragedy to comedy), and James Crumley.

Richard Stark – henceforth let us call him that, for simplicity's sake – does not indulge in the gratuitous sadism of Spillane and Chase, and at the same time is not on the literary level of Lawrence Block (to say nothing of Elmore Leonard). Parker's adventures are simple, articulated in very short chapters. Each description is actually an enumeration: there was this, and that, and the other, and the other. The point of view, usually hinging on the robber, sometimes abruptly changes. In Backflash, going back to the moment of the heist, the gaze that was formerly Parker's shifts to that of the secondary characters, at the cost of creating confusion in the reader. The epilogue is then somewhat contrived, I dare say, with the unannounced introduction of an unexpected character capable of screwing up a well-thought-out plan.

Every Parker adventure usually follows an identical pattern, well described by Manchette (Notes sur l'usage du stéréotype chez Donald Westlake, reprinted in Chroniques, Rivages, Paris 1996). The man plans an ingenious robbery. Everything seems to be going well, until the foolishness of one of the accomplices, or a chance occurrence, jeopardizes the plan. At that point, Parker consummates his cruel, sometimes most cruel, revenge. Sometimes he wins the spoils, sometimes not. In the meantime, he has left some corpses behind, fruits of wrath, chance or professional method.

It is the latter that seduces. Parker is thorough, methodical. He studies any heist carefully, chooses the right men, the right weapons. Repetition, novel after novel, becomes a virtue – a little, if that comparison is not too far-fetched, like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels, in which repetition of gestures and behavior becomes attractive. Having loved the first book read, one looks for others that resemble it. Neither Wolfe nor Parker, in this respect, leave one unsatisfied in their radical diversity.

There is little you can do: you get attached to them. In addition, Parker has a certain superhuman quality. Relentless, unstoppable, he rarely allows himself to be shaken or upset, partly because his inner thoughts are never revealed to us. He knows no fear; he seems to possess no fragile aspects, no faults. Once he gets on the warpath, no one stops him. He resembles the vigilante Paul Kersey, once played by Charles Bronson. Only he is not a vigilante. He is a thug. Easier to like, perhaps because of this transgressive undertone.

Backflash is like Stark's other novels. At the center of the tale is a robbery, this time of a floating casino that runs along the Hudson River. Parker lays out a meticulous assault plan and looks for the accomplices who fit the bill. His choice is sound, in fact, were it not for “outside” protagonists who he must necessarily come in contact with - first and foremost the shady politician who commissions the heist. Add a touch of the unexpected, in the form of an unwanted witness, and it becomes obvious that not everything will go smoothly.

The questions, however, are different this time. Will Parker be able to avoid the loopholes that threaten his project? How will he react to his enemies' actions? Will he manage to make a profit after making so many efforts and displaying such wits? I won't reveal anything more, except that the novel has, in a sense, a “happy ending.” That is, if the reader's identification with Parker has been total throughout, as is practically inevitable.

More interestingly, the politician set aside (a career-driven egotistic character), it is exclusively their craving for money that drives Parker and the other characters, whether they are on one side of the law or on the other. The moral fabric of the bandit is the same as that of his enemies. No one here follows any true moral code; they all simply want to get rich or gain power.

This is the “Noir” substance of the novel, and of the Noir genre proper (although in Italy it has become customary to call even the most traditional of detective stories “Noir fiction”). Corruption has taken everything over, organized society is merely a series of rotting institutions. In such a framework, encompassing the police, judiciary system, authorities and ordinary citizens, even a man like Parker can become a hero. He kills without any problem, that he does, but so do others, directly or indirectly. In a world plagued by a complete absence of values, in a pinwheel of turncoats, even simple professional scruples can look like virtue. That is why Parker, by no means a Robin Hood, inevitably ends up being likeable. All around him, even the cleanest have the mange, as the saying goes.

In light of the above, one can better understand the true value of Richard Stark's stereotypical language, of his very short chapters, of the breakneck action. What should he dwell on, Stark? He is painting a vacuum. Every word meant to give it some depth would be wasted. Every frill is a falsehood. Empty is the society in which our anti-hero lives. Crime has merged with officialdom. Parker obeys very few elementary laws, but to those, he adheres with methodical rigor. Around him reigns codified crime. How could one not sympathize with this belligerent hero who defies the chorus of those who call for democratic justice without believing in it for a minute?

Parker is at war. Of the Ten Commandments, few concern him. Ditto for the system, which pretends to believe in those Commandments. Then that system devotes itself, on a global scale, to violence of all sorts. Better a murderous scoundrel than a hypocritical agglomeration of power, equally murderous without admitting it. Better Parker than those who fight him. No wonder sympathy is mandatory. In a world of zombies, even someone riding a nag can look like an errant knight. Including a cutthroat.

It feels good to surrender to Parker, to follow him in his exploits, to share his moments of genuine ferocity. In his company one feels safe. Not because he is the Law — he is the antithesis of it — but because he is nonetheless the bearer of “a law.” In a social framework blackened by the dominance of arbitrariness and unprincipled greed, relying on a real thug and on his relentless code can successfully bring on consolation.