The Score, by Richard Stark

Tags:  crime-fiction,

A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.

This is book five in the Parker series, written by Donald Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark. I haven’t read the others, so I didn’t know what to expect. The intro to the Library of America edition quotes Westlake as saying that he took the name Stark when he wanted to write spare, lean, hardboiled prose. He does accomplish that much, at least.

The book opens with Parker walking through the streets of Jersey City late at night. He’s going to a meet up with a bunch of other thugs to plan a heist. Someone follows him as he walks. Parker ducks around a corner, waits for the guy, then kills him with a single karate chop to the throat. At this point, I made a mental note never to follow Parker if we happen to walking around the same town at night. I’ll just cross the street and walk the other way.

Parker meets his old buddy Paulus and a new guy named Edgars in some seedy apartment. No one has a first name, because this is hardboiled crime. Or, perhaps all these unlucky fellows are like Groundskeeper Willie from the Simpsons who, when asked what his last name was, groaned, “Ach! Me family was too poor to afford a last name!”

Anyway, Edgars presents his plan to Parker and Paulus: let’s invade the town of Copper Canyon, North Dakota, in the middle of the night, tie up the cops, the firemen, and all the telephone operators, then rob the banks, the jewelry stores, and everything else in town.

“My!” say they all, “That sounds like a lovely outing.”

Parker growls and grumbles about all the risks involved, but eventually they agree to go through with it. These conversations, by the way, go on for several chapters. When they finally finish talking, you hope they’ll get to the action. But wait! There’s more talking to be done. Roll out a few new one-named characters in various other cities and towns. The crew needs financing from a crooked doctor in New York City. And they need guns from an old, blind toystore owner upstate.

Parker gets the guns from the old man, reminding him every few sentences what a worthless old, blind loser he is. I guess he sees it as a kind of pulic service. Wikipedia begins its description of Parker with this sentence: “A ruthless career criminal, Parker has almost no traditional redeeming qualities, aside from efficiency and professionalism.”

Correct.

Parker and his gang finally arrive in Copper Canyon in the second half of the book. The next few chapters unfold very much like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Lots of shooting and explosions and fires. Too many characters to keep track of. All goes according to plan until everything goes haywire and the crew has a big mess on their hands.

After completing their commando raid, the remnants of the crew holes up in an old mining camp and waits for the heat to pass. This gives them plenty of opportunity to exchange more tough-guy talk. Parker doesn’t like the skirt Grofield picked up in town. (Skirt = Young Woman, in case you didn’t know.) He urges Grofield to shoot her and bury her down in the canyon below.

Not that she’s done anything wrong. But give her time and she probably will. The bullet is a preventive measure against potential future misbehavior.

Grofield resists. He likes the broad. He wants to put something else in her besides bullets.

That gives Parker an idea. He hasn’t had any lady action in a while, and he doesn’t want any from a tame little church girl like the one Grofield picked up. He knows exactly who he wants. The foul-mouthed alcoholic tramp that Edgars locked up in a hotel room in Minnesota before the heist.

He goes back and gets her. Of course she wants to hook up with him. Who wouldn’t, after being insulted, mocked, taunted and treated like dirt? What woman wouldn’t want to go to bed with the nice fellow who just plundered and burned a town of innocents and led her boyfriend to a fiery death?

(During a break in reading this book, I watched an old episode of Seinfeld. Jerry asks Elaine why she’s still dating a boyfriend who treats her like crap. She says, “He ignores me and doesn’t care about me. I respect that.”)

So, back to the questions at the beginning of this review. Why was this book written? I guess it was riding the coattails of the crime fiction boom that started in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and peaked in the forties and fifties. When a genre begins to age, some authors will just go through the motions, hitting the expected plot points without doing the work to make the reader care. Maybe Westlake/Stark did that work in the earlier Parker books. I don’t know. But I didn’t see much reason to get on board with a guy who has built a career out of being a violent, hard-nosed, thieving prick. (I mean Parker, not Westlake. Westlake is actually an excellent writer.)

Second question, who would want to read this? Answer: fans of Hammett’s Red Harvest and Michael Bay films. Maybe as a break from watching porn and jacking off.

Third, why include it in the Library of America series? Because it’s a well written cultural artifact. Walk into a dime store in 1963, and this is the type of thing you’ll find among the mass-market paperbacks.

Westlake was a prolific writer. This was the seventh novel he published in 1963, and the twenty-fourth in four years. He knew what readers wanted. In the action/crime genre, it wasn’t character development or nuance. It was tough guys acting tough. The Score delivers on that front without distracting the reader with pointless questions like, Don’t these guys have anything better to do with their time?