It's been more than three years I've been looking for cheap copies of
Richard Stark's novels featuring his laconic, professional, and very very deadly criminal called Parker, no-first-name. When I found last week a thin, cracked-spine copy of the 1984 Avon reprint of
The Outfit, I began reading it immediately. I finished it immediately too. Violent, efficient, ballsy, pulpy but without cheapness,
The Outfit bristles with macho energy but doesn't feel creepy or dated. This is classic crime fiction utterly assured of its mission: that you never put the book down and that you believe in its characters.
1973 movie tie-in edition from Berkley Medallion
The titular organization is basically the mob or Mafia but it doesn't go by that name. The Outfit wants Parker dead for past deeds they think were wrong but Parker knows were right. The guy they send to do the job louses it up and now it's Parker who's hunting the Outfit. In fact through a letter-writing campaign he encourages his fellow professionals - not friends, not for Parker, but men he's worked with - to knock over various illicit "businesses" run by the Outfit. This works extremely well, like clockwork even, and soon the Outfit's out nearly a million and the head, Bronson, wants Parker... you guessed it, dead. But Parker's got other plans.
1963 original edition from Pocket Books
My mind is boggled by the effortless way in which Westlake depicts the criminal underworld and their Byzantine cons and double-crosses and set-ups. One great thing about The Outfit is the time Stark spends detailing said cons, like numbers-running or betting on horses. Even though I love good crime fiction I find it difficult to grasp these logistics. He makes it easy. Stark's spare and precise prose makes you feel smart and tough at once. I like that in a book. Hell, I love that in a book.
Stark is the famous pen name of crime writer extraordinaire
Donald E. Westlake and it was under this name Westlake put out all his Parker novels.
The Outfit is 3rd in the series and I'm getting more.
The '60s are over, and unlikely private detective Moses Wine knows it. He's a Jewish divorced father of two young sons who likes to get high and tries to forget those radical days, because in '70s California, that could get you dead. Or worse - not voted into office. Then Lila Shea, the former lover Wine hasn't seen in half a decade, turns up at his door asking him for help with the the presidential campaign of Senator Miles Hawthorne. The self-exiled Abbie Hoffman-esque Howard Eppis has been endorsing the campaign with a series of flyers linking him to Mao and Lenin - positively of course - and the campaign calls on Wine to track him down and get Eppis to stop. Hawthorne might be progressive, but he's not crazy. So the wonderfully named private dick Wine hits the scorching streets of East L.A. looking for answers... and soon, for who killed Lila Shea.
Roger L. Simon has written several novels with Wine over the years in which his detective seems to be mapping out a chart of contemporary history. I spent months looking for a copy of The Big Fix in bookstores and had no luck till I was browsing in a Hollywood bookstore. I wasn't blown away by The Big Fix or anything, found it good in places and confusing in others; even, at times, unbelievably violent, in the sense that characters seemed more brutal than I found credible. If anything, I recommend the delightful 1978 film version with Richard Dreyfuss, who's perfectly cast as Wine, trying to hang onto ideals long since forgotten by everybody but him, it seems (too bad he didn't play the character again). It cuts down on some of the book's more outre plot (satanic cults) and captures a laid-back LA of the time filled with uptight political wranglers, as well as Wine's tough-comic-cynical nature and his concerns for the impact his odd lifestyle will have on his sons. I've been digging on LA noir lately so if that's your thing too, you should see if The Big Fix will fix you right.
