Burchfield at the Bijou: Parker versus Parker

Still too damn nice.

When the fresh-faced kid behind the box-office window offered him the matinee senior discount, Burchfield told him to go to hell.

“Screw you, buddy!” the cashier yelled. Burchfield took the ticket, spat on the window and entered the theater lobby.

Burchfield stopped at the snack counter, paid $10.00 for a small Coke and got back $10.00. The scotch-tape-on-the-fingertips trick still worked.

Then he stomped out his e-cigarette, spat on the door leading to a showing of Les Misérables and strode into the theater.

The theater was small, had a single aisle down the middle. It was the way Burchfield liked it. Empty. Like his mind. In the night. While watching American Idol with the sound off. Or sitting in the dark, thinking of nothing.

Two more guys came in. That was all. One sat right across the aisle from Burchfield. Their eyes met in the dark. Burchfield’s hand moved toward the holster under his coat. The guy got up, moved five rows down.

When you sit in a near-empty theater with Burchfield, you’d better sit in front of him. So he can keep an eye on you.

Then the commercials and coming attractions started. It had taken years for Burchfield to stop himself from marching into the projection booth and threatening the projectionist to hurry it up or else. Now it was pointless. Everything was run by computers. The machines just sat and blinked when he barked and waved his gun at them.

He could have shot the machine, shot it dead, but then he would have missed the entire movie. In the end, he decided, commercials were the cost of doing business.

Finally, the silk red curtain rose like a whore coyly lifting her skirt. The movie began.

The movie was called Parker. It starred Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Bobby Cannavale, and Nick Nolte. It was directed by Taylor Hackford. The picture was adapted from a novel called Flashfire by Richard Stark. It was the first movie to be adapted from a Stark novel since Stark vanished forever on New Year’s Eve, 2008.

It was the first movie from a Stark novel to use Parker’s name, instead of making one up, usual a weak, stupid-sounding name like “Walker”, “Porter”, or “Dortmunder.”

It sounded like a promise that the Parker in Parker would be just like the one in Stark’s twenty-four Parker novels. It would capture the spirit of original character. Parker fans would know they would get the same thing. The true Parker.

But it wasn’t. This Parker, played with a British accent by Statham, smiled when he didn’t have to. He bragged about his ethics (as though marketing himself as the Thief You’d Most Want to Be Robbed By.) He held therapy sessions with his robbery victims. He was sincerely nice to sick people. He smiled at Jennifer Lopez’s mother. He gave away the treasure he worked so hard to steal. He struck fear only in the bad guys, in no one else, least of all Burchfield.

Worst of all, Parker made friends with a dog. A tiny, yapping dog.

As the dog wagged its tail and barked and barked and barked, Burchfield recalled wise counsel from a famous comedian: “If you can kick it for distance, it’s not a dog.”

Burchfield leaned forward, anticipating the moment when Parker would kick the dog through some convenient goalposts. But the moment never came.

This Parker also killed many many more people than the literary Parker would have found necessary to complete his business. He was a very unbusiness-like Parker.

Burchfield was no touchy, obsessive fan boy. He got it that every movie from a novel had to stand on its own as a movie. Settings have to be changed. Plots have to be reworked and telescoped, characters, even good ones, have to be put down, brutally. In the case of a bad or mediocre book, Burchfield didn’t give a damn what they did, so long as the movie was good.

But a good book has a spirit to it. That’s why they want to make it into a movie in the first place—or should. A good movie adaptation of a good book may change a lot, but it keeps that spirit, makes it glow in the dark, even if it is a fire from Hell. The reason they decided to make a movie of the book survives and prospers. Look at The Maltese Falcon.

The spirit of Flashfire, of the Richard Stark novels, Parker himself, wasn’t the Parker of Parker. Probably couldn’t be helped. It was an expensive movie. Nowadays, the more expensive the movie, the wider the audience has to be to pay for it. The knife must be dulled, the edges softened. Otherwise, not enough people will come.

Hence the warm, sincere smiles, the moral vanity, the giving of money away.

And the dog. The damn stupid dog.

Not that Burchfield thought Parker a bad bad movie. He thought it was a well-made pulp crime movie typical of today: glossy, loud, clangorous, every punch ringing like a hammer on a bell, blood running like cherry syrup. Except for Ms. Lopez, none of the other actors and their characters were given much to do, besides curse and yell and then fall down and bleed all over.

At one point, Burchfield worried that Nick Nolte would burst into song. Good thing that didn’t happen.

Sometimes, it was funny as though another writer had applied his pen from somewhere. It became more like something written by that writer.

People who knew little or nothing about Parker wouldn’t know, wouldn’t care, would actually like this Parker. They’d think they were seeing the real Parker. They’d think it was the same thing.

Richard Stark and Parker, in their cold-eyed spirit, may not be at home in a big-budget A-movie. Parker needs an independent B-picture, or an HBO/Showtime movie, to be Parker, pure and simple, this ornery emblem of unbridled criminality.

“Who the hell’s Donald E. Westlake?” Burchfield growled as the credits started to roll. He rose, spat on the carpet, and strode grimly up the aisle. At the door, the usher stopped him, told him that it was against the law to spit on the floor.

“So what?” Burchfield said.

He left the usher with his feet sticking out of the trash bin. He hurried home, made it just in time to watch David Suchet as Poirot on public television.

At least they nailed him.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author
 

Thomas Burchfield recently finished writing Butchertown, a 1920s gangland shoot-'em-up. He also “friends” on Facebook and tweets on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Whatever Mask He Wore--Donald Westlake, 1933-2008

[I posted the following at The Red Room and at Open Salon in early 2009, after Donald Westlake’s sudden passing. In anticipation of the release of Parker, the first film from one of Westlake's Richard Stark novels to be released since his death (and the first to use the character’s real name), I decided to rewrite and repost it here on my official page)

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go hell. — The Hunter.

When the news came that Donald Westlake, among the greatest genre writers of this era, passed away suddenly on December 31, 2008, it was like a bullet through the heart.

A Brooklyn, New York, native (and graduate of no university) Westlake published his first novel, The Mercenaries (published as The Cutie by Hard Case Crime) for Random House in 1960. He rapidly became one of the most prolific writers around; so productive that, in order to keep his credibility, he adopted several pseudonyms, publishing up to four books a year, a clip that shames many of us, especially this fussy, slow-thinking scribe.

Maybe they weren’t all good, but when they were, Westlake’s novels were the best. He won three Edgar Awards and was award the Edgar Grandmaster award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993. (And though I loathe admitting that neocon pundit William Kristol can be right about anything, he gets credit for good literary sense with his quixotic campaign to nominate Westlake for a Nobel Prize.)

Reading Westlake’s prose is like surfing a series of small smooth waves—one sentence rolls smoothly into the next, with swelling tension, before it curls and thumps onshore with a brutal thud, followed by a dangerous undertow. He can deftly create a scene with the terse detail or bring color to a character with a few simple words. His prose never feels cluttered and rarely ever underdone.

His best novels spring and unwind with ingenious setups and plot twists and turns, some hilarious, others savage, with barbed insights. There are wonderful turns of phrase, many uproarious, some terrifying, even disturbing in the deepest and best sense.

Westlake is known mostly by crime-fiction readers for his comic novels, many of which feature John Dortmunder, the world’s most hapless thief. Several of these novels were adapted for the movies. A somewhat miscast Robert Redford played him in a film adaptation of The Hot Rock. An even more miscast George C. Scott played him in The Bank Job (both actors—especially the ever-intense Scott—fail to capture the sad goofiness embodied by Dortmunder). Paul LeMat played him in an adaptation of the unseen-by-me Jimmy the Kid, the funniest of the Dortmunder books that I’ve read.

Westlake was also a noted screenwriter. His gimlet-eyed adaptation of Jim Thompson’s bleak noir classic, The Grifters, was nominated for an Academy Award. Another excellent script was for one of that tiny population of worthwhile serial-killer movies, The Stepfather.

The comic novel of his I love most was the non-Dortmunder Dancing Aztecs, an amiable picaresque of The Maltese Falcon that leisurely follows a goofy confection of New York oddballs in their daffy pursuit of an Aztec statue. It’s a hilarious and charming adventure and an affectionate portrait of the city and its people, circa the mid-1970s.

“I like Dancing Aztecs too,” he wrote to me after I sent him a gushing review I wrote in Swing Time magazine of one of his pseudonymous novels. (He didn’t seem to think much of the rest of my review, but I sucked it up, just like a guy named Parker would; see below).

Often, Westlake wrote seriously—meaning non-humorously. Killing Time is a bull’s-eye revisit to the grim terrain of Dashiell Hammett’s masterpiece Red Harvest. A cycle of short stories, titled Levine, follows the anguish of a NYPD homicide detective trying to cope with the violent death he deals with every day. Kahawa is an epic action thriller about mercenaries on the loose in Africa. Under one of his pseudonyms, Tucker Coe, he wrote an intense series of mysteries about a fallen ex-cop trying to set his life straight.

The one serious Westlake novel that should remain his monument (by law of that unawarded Nobel Prize) is The Ax. Published in 1997, it tells a Swiftian tale of Burke Devore, a man who loses his job in a recession and goes to homicidal lengths to land a new one and regain what passes for dignity in modern capitalist America.

Burke is like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, if Willy, instead of committing suicide, decided to get back at the world by breaking bad. Thanks to Westlake’s concealed artistry, he comes to life as one of those who have been shunted aside after a lifetime of playing by the system’s rules. Read it, then read today’s economic news and you’ll see it hasn’t aged at all. It’s truly a novel for all recessions.

But the kid came back, carrying a small satchel. “I’m packed,” he said. ‘I left the note on the dining room table.’

“Good,” said Parker and hit him twice.

He buried him in the cellar in the hole the kid had dug himself.—The Jugger.

When I first read the passage above, from The Jugger  by Richard Stark, I threw the book down and stormed about my apartment, muttering,  “He killed the kid . . . he killed the kid!”

Some years later, when I read the same passage at a literary soiree in San Francisco, the audience screamed. Then they applauded.

Richard Stark: Westlake’s most famous pseudonym, another literary monument, cruelly provocative novels built brick by solid brick under a name that strikes like hammer, that cocks like a trigger.

Through 24 novels, from 1963’s The Hunter  to 2008’s Dirty Money, Richard Stark wrote what many believe is the best series of crime novels ever, noir and otherwise. They’re certainly the best I’ve ever read.

The Richard Stark novels tersely detail the grim career of a professional thief we know only as Parker. Besides palming all of Westlake’s other virtues, Stark tells these tales of heists gone wrong with spare power. I consider Parker to be one of literature’s great criminals, one who stands alongside such implacable monsters as Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter and—maybe this is far-fetched—Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Stark, as I recall from an interview where he wore his Donald Westlake mask, said he conceived of Parker as a “robotic John Dillinger”—single-minded, relentless, unfeeling.

I first met Parker during the mid-1980s, the early days of the Reagan Era, over ten years after the appearance of the last Stark novel, Butcher’s Moon. The plot of The Black Ice Score seemed a little shaky, but the writing was so strong that, whipped on by some Stark-loving friends, I started over wtih the first novel in the series, The Hunter.

The first three pages of The Hunter hit me like the first three pages of Gravity’s Rainbow: I was captured by a seething, relentless vision. I had read plenty of hard-boiled fiction, but this was different. 

Strangely however, Parker strode across the George Washington Bridge into my mind in a different way than perhaps Stark intended. On top of the vicarious thrill of riding around inside this exuberantly lawless world, I sensed a vastly darker world lurking underneath. 

Then, we were at the beginning of unleashed, unregulated capitalism whose wild whirling bandit’s shadow is only now passing (we hope).

To me, Parker seemed an emblem of the world at that time: the final logical end of an ideology of absolute individualism where the nihilistic pursuit of profit is the first value. Parker practiced a brute amoral pragmatism. (Parker does do good but it’s most always a trickle-down good, a mere side effect, as coolly shrugged off as the corpses he leaves behind).

This interpretation is not explicit in the text, but as in other great books, it hides, clever, malignant, and cold behind a curtain of coiled prose. The Parker novels growl at you, low, urgent, dangerous. You can hear Stark grinding his teeth with smoldering fury. The tongue may occasionally show in the cheek, but it’s barbed and deadly.

Parker leaned far to the right, aiming the pistol out at arm’s length in front of him, the line of the barrel sighted on Shevelly’s head. Shevelly read his intention and suddenly thrust his hands out protectively in front of himself, shouting, “I’m only the messenger!”

“Now you’re the message,” Parker told him, and shot him.” –

Butcher’s Moon

When I read the above passage at the same literary soiree all those years ago, they all screamed again. And applauded again.

At times, the Parker novels have the impact of a great horror novel. They are rarely, if ever, explicitly gory. Nor are they papered with wall-to-wall violence. But, thanks to Stark's chisel-and-hammer style, violence always lurks underneath the surface, a grim serpent. Unlike most noir novels, novels provoke a deep shudder.

This also is due to how Stark’s style fuses with his singular character. Parker is a monster, a monster of indifference to human feeling and suffering and the prose captures this, often line for line, as you can see in the quote above. When Parker gets angry, it’s a cold anger, like a wall falling on the perpetrator; the ruthless dismissal of someone who has little use for other human beings, unless they can help with his primary goal, namely stealing.

Books like these could well be unbearable. But, to me, Stark makes Parker bearable by surrounding him with a delightful and often sorrowful array of picaresque characters: fellow thieves and those foolish or unlucky enough to cross their paths. Their fear and bafflement give Parker’s impassive manner—what one admirer recently called his “Parkerness”—a deadpan humorous quality (something all the movies adapted from the novels have missed.)

“You know what your problem is, Parker?” one character nags him after enduring hours of Parker’s habitual stony silence. “You talk too much.”

Butcher’s Moon was the sixteenth and last Parker novel that Stark published in 1974 before Parker fled into the underworld for over twenty years.

The master thief returned in smashing fashion in 1997’s Comeback. From that point on, every Stark novel found its way to me as it soon as it appeared on the bookshelves. I would become a little like Parker: door locked, phone off the hook, a bare-tooth growl for anyone who dared interrupt me as I read.

Donald Westlake once stated that he counted Vladimir Nabokov, Dashiell Hammett and Peter Rabe (whose work I don’t know) as his three favorite writers. He took his writing as seriously as the lofty Russian (who disdained mystery fiction) took his own. He admired those three especially because, as he puts it on own website, “[they] could do something I very much envied, which was to make you feel the emotion in a scene without ever referring to it directly. It all roils below the surface while the surface remains apparently calm.”

He fully believed, as I do, that genre fiction could scale the literature’s demanding heights. The this-happened, then-that-happened way of story-telling, can, with right touch from the right hands, lead readers into new and startling worlds; can hide while revealing; that the discursive digressions of often-passive characters beloved by higher-brow critics, by themselves, were no guarantee of quality (a point he makes well in his excellent introduction to an anthology of crime stories by non-genre writers that he co-edited, Once Against the Law).

One more self-indulgent note: Westlake’s passing meant more to me than no more Richard Stark novels to look forward to. I was finishing my first novel, Dragon's Ark, and, like all writers, I entertain childlike hopes that my work will be read by the writers I admire most and return to them some the same pleasure they have given me over the years.

Whatever mask he wore, Donald Westlake stood at the top of that list. If I could mail my novel into the afterlife, I would.

(Re-edited 2/2/13)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author
Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Donald Westlake: Once More from Beyond

Donald Westlake, one of the best genre writers ever, may have passed away in 2008, but his master's voice still calls through the shade.  After his realist novel Memory was pulled from oblivion’s ashes by Hard Case Crime in 2010, it was thought that was it—no more treasures stashed in rusty drawers or musty attics; but, happily, we were wrong: Hard Case has unearthed one more: The Comedy is Finished.

Judging from the title and much of Westlake’s other work, you may mistake this for one of his broadly comic novels, maybe another Dortmunder caper. But that’s not quite the case, though there are darkly hued laughs throughout.

The Comedy Is Finished is a kidnapping caper, set in 1977. The kidnappers: the People’s Revolutionary Army, a fractious, scruffy band of leftover leftie radicals. They’re comprised of Peter, their insecure, but fanatical ringleader; Larry, the house intellectual who sees the world through a melted window of rhetoric framed by spindly theory; Liz, a woman so burned out, she has only dry ice left for a soul; Joyce, a seemingly innocent hippie chick who may not be so innocent; and Mark, a cold, but inwardly raging shark who shares a secret with their victim.

The times are passing this gang by. The country is drifting conservative, but they have not. Desperate to regain lost momentum and the old revolutionary spirit, they select as their victim, no, not a politician or ruthless capitalist, but a legendary comedian, name of Koo Davis, jester to Presidents and U.S. troops overseas. (Readers of a Certain Vintage will immediately envision a certain Bob Hope by the pattern of his personality and his patter.)

The first problem this troubled army faces after they kidnap Koo is that, like them, their prize is also fading into irrelevance. It turns out that getting anyone to care about a guy on the Road to Has-Been City is a little trickier than they imagined: The only person who cares for Koo is his agent. (In our times, imagine a band of right-wingers kidnapping Keith Olbermann . . . really, who would care?)

As for the FBI, their hair isn't exactly on fire either, so they assign Mike Wiskiel, a disgraced agent who seeks to right a ruined reputation and regain past glory, to the case. After while, even he wishes he were back investigating Watergate.

Meanwhile, the kidnappers start to crumble due to the inevitable divisions from within and some surprising intrusions from without. Though their outlook seems quaint—the novel is much too topical—Westlake does an excellent job of portraying their their conflicts, both internal and interpersonal, and their state of physical, spiritual and intellectual exhaustion; of people who have burned too bright and too fast, and who can’t fathom just how little the world cares about their passions. (Even the imprisoned former fellow bomb throwers whose release they demand in exchange for Koo’s have moved on.)

It isn’t just Koo Davis’s comedy that’s finished—theirs has, too.

According to the introduction, The Comedy is Finished was written in the 1970s and reached its present state in the 1980s, when Westlake mailed a copy to fellow mystery writer Max Alan Collins, who hung on to what seemed to be the only copy for thirty years. Westlake is said to have abandoned the novel because it too closely resembled Martin Scorsese’s unsung bizarro classic movie about a celebrity kidnapping, The King of Comedy, released around the same time. Even so, the resemblance doesn’t seem to me to be that strong beyond the initial concept.

Actually, I would have been more worried about Bob Hope and his lawyers, because Koo Davis resembles Hope in his glib, strolling personality, delivery, and mannerisms down to his buttons and collar. All that’s missing is the ski nose. The portrait, though completely different in biographical details, is nearly a mirror image of the totemic comedian.

To my mind, in fact, Westlake’s portrait of Koo is this novel’s strongest suit. Westlake successfully inhabits the mind of a compulsive comic, a guy who has been spinning jokes and gags for so long, that even when he’s in mortal danger, it’s only another excuse for a round of wisecracks: silly, lame (like a lot of Hope’s material), and sometimes even funny.

I recall John Cleese once saying, in a long-ago Dick Cavett interview, that “you don’t learn very much from comedy.” Koo Davis sure hasn’t—his knee-jerk jokery and love for show biz’s glittery nonsense has cut him off from the world, kept him from seeing deeper into the life both around and within. (He’s barely aware he has a family, and they return the compliment). Like many professional humorists, he’s always mining for the next gag and once he’s found it, continues in search of the next one, seldom looking deeper.

I’m not crazy about the title (as I’m not crazy about the titles of some other Westlake novels) and, like other manuscripts-in-a-drawer, it could have used a final polish from its polished author. Still, the appearance of this book is an entertaining, happy occasion, not only for Westlake’s admirers, but for those new and curious. 

Hard Case insists that is really really the last one we can expect from Donald Westlake. But I hope they’re wrong.

(Re-edited 4/2/12)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.