Parker (Stark novels character)
A professional robber specializing in large-scale, high-profit crimes, Parker is the main protagonist of 24 of the 28 novels Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark.In a 1981 introduction to a reprint of The Mourner (1963), Westlake's friend and fellow crime novelist Lawrence Block describes Parker as rare among anti-hero protagonists in that the character never develops a conscience."[3] Albert Frederick Nussbaum, a bank robber turned writer, notes that given Parker's "cold, methodical [and] humorless" habits, the character would be the villain in most books."[5] In The Man With the Getaway Face, Parker has plastic surgery in an attempt to evade The Outfit's retribution, so he's no longer recognizable to most who knew him before, though his general appearance (and the impression it makes on others) seems to be largely unchanged.In Chapter 3 of The Man With the Getaway Face it is mentioned that Parker "owned a couple parking lots and gas stations around the country".He has virtually no involvement with the operation of these businesses, allowing the managers to skim profits in exchange for creating the appearance of Parker having a legitimate source of income to avoid suspicion from "internal revenue beagles".However, Parker's always very aware that the law is out there, and that his fingerprints are linked to the murder of a guard at a prison camp—which means that he has no chance of ever being released if caught and properly identified.But Parker is by no means merely evil, merciless or insane; the brilliance of the books lies in their blurring of the distinction between madness and sanity, justice and mercy.Parker is not so much sick as blank, with the deep blankness of... humanity stripped to its essentials... [he is] callous, unable to feel guilt for his actions, completely lacking in empathy and incapable of learning from his own bitter experience... we admire and yearn for Parker's demented sense of purpose: he feels no embarrassment or shame... he is never afflicted or careworn; he is, in the way of all existential heroes and madmen, somehow stenchless, blameless and utterly free.The first and second sections are written in a limited third-person perspective focused entirely on Parker as he plans and undertakes a robbery or heist with colleagues.The first novel in Parker's series is The Hunter (adapted to film twice: as Point Blank in 1967, and as Payback in 1999), in which he chases a past associate who betrayed him in a heist and left him for dead.The tension in the novels often comes from Parker having to work his way out of increasingly dangerous situations on the fly, as his carefully planned heist collapses around him—all while he tries to keep hold of both the money he stole, and his life.In the novel Backflash, their home is described as "a house on a lake called Colliver Pond, seventy miles from New York, a deep rural corner where New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet... mostly a resort community, lower-level white-collar, people who came here three months every summer and left their 'cottages' unoccupied the rest of the year... For Parker, it was ideal.Good Behavior (1985) was originally intended as the seventeenth Parker novel following Butcher's Moon (1974), but, like The Hot Rock, was rewritten for Dortmunder.Over a decade later, Amazon Studios optioned the entire Parker property with the intent to launch a shared universe consisting of films and television shows.Max Allan Collins authored a series of novels with a protagonist named "Nolan" who was an homage to Westlake's Parker.Jim Doherty's short story, "The Ghost of Dillinger," published in the anthology Tales from the Red Lion, pits his series cop, Dan Sullivan, against a legendary criminal named "Karper," whose backstory derives from Stark's Parker novels.