Cases Closed

The Handle
by Richard Stark
Chicago, 176 pp., $14

The Rare Coin Score
by Richard Stark
Chicago, 160 pp., $14

The Seventh
by Richard Stark
Chicago, 168 pp., $14

When Donald E. Westlake died unexpectedly last New Year’s Eve, thousands of people who’d never met him, myself included, felt as if they’d lost a friend. We knew him only through his novels, of which there are more than a hundred, none of them, so far as I know, obviously autobiographical. He almost always wrote about crime, and more often than not he wrote about it with the express intention of making his readers laugh. Small wonder that we loved him so: In a world that grows less amusing by the hour, Westlake never lost the consoling knack of being very, very funny.

Fourteen of Westlake’s novels featured a hapless career criminal by the name of John Dortmunder, a sad sack who embarked on a lifelong losing streak shortly after departing the womb. As all of Dortmunder’s loyal fans know, he was born in Dead Indian, Illinois, raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, and thereafter relocated to Manhattan, where he operates out of the O.J. Bar and Grill, a seedy Upper West Side joint whose obliging bartender allows small-time crooks to conspire in the back room.

Dortmunder’s widely varied capers have two things in common: They always make use of the same string of maladroit, maladjusted hoods, and they never quite work out. While failure ultimately endowed him with a measure of cynical wisdom (“Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear”), it never persuaded him of the wisdom of turning an -honest buck, and to the end of his creator’s long and fertile life, Dortmunder kept on breaking and entering, unprofitable though it might be.

In Get Real, the last book that Westlake finished before his death, Dortmunder gets tangled up with a producer of reality TV shows who resolves to put him on the air. While it isn’t one of the stronger entries in the series, Get Real contains more than enough laughs to give satisfaction. Here as always, the fun comes partly from the precision-tooled farce plot (my favorite Dortmunder novel is called, appropriately enough, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?) and partly from what happens between pratfalls. A master of droll description, Westlake loved to salt his books with pointed one-liners and testy digressions about whatever happened to be on his mind at the moment. Needless to say, reality TV is the easiest of targets, but it offered Westlake a sufficiency of satirical opportunities, and he made the most of them:

Like P. G. Wodehouse, a writer with whom he had much in common, Westlake was at his best in his series books. Unlike Wodehouse, though, he had a contrasting string to his bow. Eight years before Dortmunder made his debut, a crime novelist by the name of Richard Stark began publishing a series of paperback originals that featured a humorless, flint-hearted heister named Parker (his first name was never disclosed) who will do anything to anybody in order to get what he wants. Mystery buffs eventually figured out that Stark and Westlake were one and the same man, since the first few Dortmunder books all contained stealthy references to Parker and his henchmen. In 1974 Westlake went so far as to publish Jimmy the Kid, a clever piece of postmodernism avant le lettre in which one of Dortmunder’s pals gets the idea for a kidnapping by reading a Richard Stark novel called Child Heist. (Alas, Stark never got around to writing that one.)

Upon closer inspection, it became apparent that Dortmunder was Parker’s benign alter ego. Parker specialized in can’t-miss crimes that went wrong only because of the fallibility of his less single-minded associates; the Dortmunder novels shifted the premise of the Parker novels to a parallel universe peopled with losers whose plans were infallible only in the sense that they never failed to go sour. Yet both men, for all their self-evident differences, are dedicated craftsmen who worship at the altar of professionalism. Dortmunder’s criminal credo can be found in Nobody’s Perfect, published in 1977:

Parker feels the same way. “I’ve always believed the [Parker] books are really about a workman at work, doing the work to the best of his ability,” Westlake said in one of his last interviews. The difference is that Parker is as amoral as a loaded shotgun, a man devoid of introspection who lives solely in the present moment, never looking back and thinking ahead only far enough to plan his next job. (I never could figure out why he chose to acquire a steady girlfriend in The Rare Coin Score, published in 1967, though the coolly beautiful Claire Willis is as suitable a companion for Parker as could be imagined.) He is, I suppose, a sociopath, if you go in for that sort of label, yet you can’t help but cheer him on in his tireless quest to redistribute the wealth of America into his own bottomless pockets by any means necessary, up to and very much including murder.

Unlike Westlake, whose ornate digressions are the best part of his comic novels, Stark was a styleless stylist who got to the point with laconic immediacy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to savor the hard elegance and sober wit with which they are written. He liked to launch them in medias res with a sentence that started with the word “when”:

It was his only trick–and a brilliant one.

In 1974 Westlake stopped writing about Parker. “The character just kind of died for me,” he later admitted. Richard Stark remained on ice until 1997, when he published a novel called, appropriately enough, Comeback. By that time the Dortmunder novels, which had continued to appear at reasonably regular intervals, had made Westlake a minor celebrity, while the Parker novels, all of which had gone out of print, were fiercely coveted by mystery buffs willing to pay large sums of money for tattered first-edition paperbacks. The publication of Comeback won Westlake full-fledged critical réclame, and he spent much of the rest of his life alternately chronicling the adventures of his two most popular characters.

In later years the Dortmunder novels grew discursive to a fault (though never less than diverting). Parker, by contrast, was more interesting after his quarter-century hiatus than before it. All seven of the novels that followed Comeback are of the highest possible quality. Most of the earlier novels, on the other hand, are somewhat coarser in literary tone than their successors, but still of a piece with the post-Comeback books and wholly satisfying in their blunt, unmannered way.

Last year the University of Chicago Press acknowledged their excellence by embarking on a uniform edition of the first 16 novels in the series. To date, 9 have been published in sets of 3, and their consistency is impressive. Of the latest batch, The Seventh, originally published in 1966, is the best, though interested parties would do well to begin at the beginning and read The Hunter, the 1962 novel that John Boorman filmed five years later as Point Blank, in which Lee Marvin was the first and finest of the half-dozen actors to play Parker on screen.

Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments, and despite the undeniable charm of the Dortmunder series, I expect that it is Parker for whom Westlake will be remembered longest. Anyone who doubts the existence of original sin would do well to reflect on the enduring popularity of these unsettling books, whose “hero,” lest we forget, is a cold-eyed monster of self-will, the kind of guy you don’t want to meet anywhere near a dark alley. Parker’s only virtues are his intelligence and his professionalism–yet somehow you always end up rooting for him. Nietzsche knew why: When you look into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.

Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and chief culture critic of Commentary, is the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.