Richard Stark’s Parker: Snapshots from the Road — A Postcard Collection

The city is a staple of noir, and crime fiction has always been dominated by urban spaces — detectives, tough guys, mob operatives all slink around alleyways or inhabit neon-lit bars or cramped offices. On the other hand, Richard Stark's genre-defying and genre-defining novels involve a remarkable amount of travel, and that has inspired the art project you’re about to see. Although Parker was "born and raised in cities" (Butcher's Moon), the road is his domain as much as New York City is.

Novels like The Sour Lemon Score use travel as a means of frustration and conflict, Parker's driving across the country and up and down the East Coast in a fruitless search for the man who'd betrayed him; others like The Outfit involve two primary locations as a way to divide Parker's 'straight' life under name of Charles Willis and his real life of crime, as well as denoting one intruding onto the other when a hit on Willis is attempted in Miami. Similarly, the Grofield books mainly take place in exotic locales in order to suggest an experiment in genre — adventure, mystery, spy story — and then return to the US as Grofield also returns to the kind of novel he'd originated from.

This project is something I've wanted to put together for quite a while, and you may look at it as a roadmap of Parker's and Grofield's travels presented here in postcard and collage form. For fictional cities, I've opted to use the state instead, and for Slayground and Butcher’s Moon all available hints have been used to roughly determine the location of Tyler — a Midwest city with a hotel called Ohio House and an amusement park that may have very well been somewhat inspired by Cedar Point. Although many of the novels do feature multiple locations, I've only taken a few into consideration and expanded across several postcards for the ones where it is thematically or narratively relevant as explained above. The cover of the album where these postcards now reside has also been included, and the collage is presented in chronological order with one exception.