Donald Westlake (1933-2008) was an assiduous and creative author with about 100 crime fiction novels and dozens of short stories to his credit under various pen names including John B. Allan, Judson Jack Carmichael, Curt Clark, Timothy J. Culver, J. Morgan Cunningham, Richard Stark, and Edwin West. His bountiful imagination earned him the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993 and the Eye Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 2004.
He developed two series about professional thieves, one a comic character named John Dortmunder, the other was Parker, a career criminal with ice water in his veins. Parker is preternaturally level-headed under pressure, managing inept colleagues and one impossible escape after another. Parker first appeared in a few short stories beginning in 1959 and then in 16 novels between 1963 and 1974. A lapse of 23 years occurred after which Westlake revived the character, publishing eight books in as many years.
In the fourth book in the series The Mourner (Pocket Books, 1963) Parker has disentangled himself from the gang he’d been involved with and he’s a lone operator now. Unfortunately someone else had been present at the site of disentanglement and collected the gun that Parker used in the process. The gun can be traced back to Parker’s alter ego, which Parker wants to avoid. To receive the gun, Parker is charged with stealing a 15th century French statue in the possession of a Russian official attached to an embassy in Washington, DC. Parker enlists a trusted partner named Handy McKay to plan the theft from the Russian official’s home, only to discover another group is interested in the horde of cash the official has been quietly skimming for years.
The result is a violent story told at a frantic pace in Westlake’s signature clipped, tight prose. Analysis of his sentences is fascinating. If there is an extraneous word anywhere, I didn’t notice it, which helps give the impression of speed on the pages.
This incidentally is the last time Handy McKay works a job with Parker. McKay takes his share of the proceeds and goes to Maine where he buys a diner as his retirement job. Thereafter he appears in the books as Parker’s message service and go-between for people wanting to offer Parker work.
Re-reading these books is a great pleasure and one that I highly recommend.
For more stories about career criminals, see Garry Disher’s series about Wyatt, a professional thief in Melbourne, Australia.