Richard Stark's Parker

AUTHOR: Stark, Richard (pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake)

ARTIST: Darwyn Cooke (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: IDW Publishing

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009-

Publication History

The first Richard Stark’s Parker illustrated novel, The Hunter, was published in June, 2009. The second installment, The Outfit, was published in 2010. Two additional volumes were planned for publication. Illustrator and adapter Darwyn Cooke is a multiple-award-winning writer and artist best known for his work on DC: The New Frontier (2004).

Crime novelist Donald E. Westlake wrote the Parker paperback novels between 1962 and 1974 under the pen name Richard Stark. They were adapted to film several times, and Cooke based his vision of Parker on Lee Marvin’s portrayal of the character in one of those adaptations, Point Blank (1967). In 2000, Cooke decided that the Parker books would be his next major project. He began to negotiate for permission to adapt The Hunter via a series of e-mails between Westlake, initially through his agent, and himself, assisted by IDW Publishing editor Scott Dunbier. Cooke had illustrated many characters for DC and Marvel, and he allowed Westlake to see scanned pages from DC: The New Frontier, as the series was set in the same approximate time frame as the Parker novels. The directors of the various film adaptations had glamorized and glorified Parker, against Westlake’s wishes, and thus no previous adaptation had been allowed to use the name “Parker.” After about a month of e-mails and presentations, however, Westlake realized that Cooke’s vision of the character was much more in line with his own and thus allowed Cooke to use the name.

Prior to the publication of The Outfit, IDW released a saddle-stitched edition of the first forty pages of the second Parker novel, The Man with the Getaway Face. Cooke explains in the introduction that he did not want to illustrate the entire novel but that a certain scene needed to be shown in order for future adaptations to make sense to readers.

Plot

The Hunter is set in the early 1960’s. Parker, the main character, is completely amoral, involved in one criminal enterprise after another. He is a brutal man who can be only temporarily diverted from his goal. The story opens with him walking across the George Washington Bridge, refusing an offer for a ride, and eventually hopping a subway turnstile. He falsifies a driver’s license, then goes to several banks, claiming to have lost his checkbook. One bank teller allows him access to “his” account, and Parker buys an entire new wardrobe to replace his threadbare one. Then he sets out to find the people who double-crossed him prior to the beginning of the story: his heist partner, Mal Resnick, and his wife, Lynn.

Parker goes to see Lynn, who lives rent-free in midtown Manhattan as part of a payoff from Resnick. He finds out when Resnick’s messenger will bring the rent money and coldheartedly encourages Lynn to overdose on sleeping pills. When she does, he cuts up her face and leaves her in the woods. The messenger gives Parker the name of Arthur Stegman, who runs an auto dealership in Queens, but even Stegman is afraid to tell Parker of Mal’s exact whereabouts. On the subway ride back into Manhattan, Parker reflects on the crime gone wrong. After the job he did with Resnick’s gang, Lynn shot him and Resnick took the money. Parker had always been involved with armored-car heists or gun smuggling but had never before dealt with the Outfit, the crime syndicate to which Resnick now belongs.

After checking in with several prostitutes, Parker confronts Mal and learns that the entire haul from the robbery, minus the monthly stipend for Lynn, was given back to the Outfit, which is working out of Frederick Carter Investments. The first volume ends with Parker visiting the office, wanting only his share of the money. Carter is killed, as are Mal and Stegman, and an arrangement is made for Parker to get his money delivered to him at a stop along the Long Island Rail Road. After avoiding several ambushes, he drives one of the getaway cars into the darkness, contemplating whether he should go to Miami or the Florida Keys.

Cooke wanted to adapt the third Parker novel, The Outfit, next. First, however, he adapted a small portion of the second Parker novel, The Man with the Getaway Face, as certain plot points in it are important to understanding the subsequent Parker installments. In this story, following the events of The Hunter, Parker gets plastic surgery to change his face, then starts looking for his next job. Some new characters are introduced, and Parker avoids a double cross. Now lantern-jawed and looking older, Parker believes he has hidden himself from the mob.

The Outfit opens in Miami Beach, a year after the events in The Hunter, with Parker now using the name Chuck Willis. While in bed with a woman, Bette Harrow, he manages to avoid an attempt on his life. The would-be hit man tells him that he was hired by Jim St. Clair, who runs the mob-owned Three Kings Club in Utica, New York. Parker is amazed to find that Skim Lasker, a bookie and an old friend from Cincinnati, has revealed his whereabouts. Sixteen months before, after removing the bandages from his plastic surgery, Parker met up with Lasker to undertake an armored-car heist in New Jersey. In Brooklyn, they and Handy McKay, one of Parker’s few friends, meet with Alma, a woman who works at a diner where the armored-car drivers often stop to eat. After the robbery goes off as planned, the group leaves in two cars. Alma, who is riding in the lead car, stabs Lasker, and Parker and McKay kill her as she tries to flee. Lasker survives the stabbing, and, after weeks of recuperating, he tells Bronson, a representative from the Outfit, where Parker is. After learning this, Parker finds Lasker and kills him.

Parker then sets up a new crew in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he is joined by McKay and a part-time actor named Grofeld. They pull off ten robberies, including a high-profile one at the Club Cockatoo in New York, costing the Outfit more than one million dollars. The book ends with Parker and McKay killing Bronson and his crew.

Volumes

•The Hunter (2009). Parker is double-crossed by his wife and partner, shot, and left for dead. Sixteen months later, he returns to New York City to settle scores.

•The Outfit (2010). Tying up loose ends from The Hunter, Parker organizes a string of robberies, each affecting the Outfit, in order to take his revenge.

Characters

•Parker, whose first name was supposedly known only by his dead wife, is in his thirties. Enlisted during World War II, he is now a career criminal who assembles crews in various cities to help him rob jewelry stores and armored cars.

•Lynn Parker is Parker’s wife, who shot him during a robbery after they had sex in an abandoned beach house. She is the only person for whom Parker has ever felt emotion, a compassion that he “feared.” He encourages her to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, which she does.

•Mal Resnick is a former business partner of Parker. Owing gambling debts to the Syndicate, he double-crosses Parker and leaves him for dead so he can take Parker’s share of the stolen money.

•Handy McKay is a criminal who helps Parker in several heists, often rounding up a crew while Parker scouts the designated establishment to rob. Always chewing on a toothpick, he hopes to make enough money to retire from crime and purchase a diner on Presque Isle, Maine.

•Arthur Stegman is the owner of an auto dealership in Rockaway, Queens. He is questioned by Parker about Resnick’s whereabouts and later tells Resnick about Parker’s visit.

•Frederick Carter runs an investment company that is a front for the Outfit. Parker confronts him regarding the money from the robbery, which Parker believes to be his.

•Bette Harrow is a rich woman who knows Parker by the alias Chuck while he is living in Florida. Once she realizes what kind of work Parker does, she helps him subdue the man sent to kill him.

•Clint Stern is a Miami Beach hit man.

•Jim St. Clair is the owner of the Three Kings Club in Utica, New York. He is one of Parker’s targets during a string of robberies.

•Skim Lasker is a bookie and an acquaintance of Parker who tells him about a small-time robbery involving an armored car. After being stabbed and left for dead by the waitress who helped set up the heist, he later resurfaces, and Parker is forced to kill him.

•Alma is a waitress at a New Jersey diner. She is shot and killed by Parker after stabbing Lasker and attempting to flee.

•Grofeld is another associate of Parker, a part-time actor in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

•Bronson is a high-ranking member of the Outfit.

Artistic Style

The Parker books are illustrated and colored in a single tone. The Hunter is entirely in black and white with blue tones. Cooke works in a grid pattern in which only the pastel washes act as borders, a technique he perfected when working on DC: The New Frontier. In The Hunter, a full twenty pages elapse before the reader even sees Parker’s face, and even then it is only his reflection in a mirror.

The Parker novels are set in the early 1960’s, so the background characters, such as businessmen on the street and pert young women lounging in apartments, have a glamorous look. Cooke occasionally breaks away from his grid format to allow for a single image that provides several paragraphs of exposition, at times ending with a line of dialogue that leads directly to the full-page illustration. He also implements this method when setting up the details of an intricate heist, providing a map of sorts, with images of vehicles, highball glasses, and road routes. The end result is one in which the art and the prose are mutually complementary.

Themes

The Parker novels provide a view of a man without a moral compass. Classic, pop-art pulp, Parker reads fast and smooth, portraying a character who is smart and completely amoral. The books touch on numerous themes involving the main character’s nihilistic attitude. Crime, corruption, and greed surround all of the characters, and all are driven by selfish desires. Westlake, writing as Stark, created a character engaged in violence and motivated by avarice, which are attributes that Cooke picks up on and accentuates.

Impact

DC’s Vertigo crime imprint was certainly influenced by the hardcover novel format of the Parker series, in tone at least. Although Westlake wrote the stories, Cooke sets up the scene, and his illustrations perfectly convey the characters’ thoughts and emotions. Building on Cooke’s prior work, the novels demonstrate an evolution in his use of single-color tones in storytelling.

Further Reading

Brubaker, Ed, and Sean Phillips. Criminal (2007-2010).

Cooke, Darwyn. DC: The New Frontier (2004).

Cooke, Darwyn, and Matt Hollingsworth. Selina’s Big Score (2002).

Bibliography

Rubin, Brian P. “Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter.” Review of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter, by Darwyn Cooke. Graphic Novel Reporter. http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/richard-starks-parker-hunter-review.

Sante, Luc. “The Gentrification of Crime.” The New York Times Review of Books, March 28, 1985.

Smart, James. “Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit, Adapted and Illustrated by Darwyn Cooke.” Review of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit, by Darwyn Cooke. The Guardian, November 26, 2010.