The Jugger by Richard Stark

The Jugger (Parker #6) (1965) by Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark: For once, Parker isn't planning a heist but rather trying to find out why a retired 'jugger' (slang for 'bank robber,' though the character in question is a safe-cracker by trade) has written him asking for help. Parker really, really isn't someone one asks for help. 

But when Parker arrives to find out what's going on -- and whether this retired, occasional partner in crime represents a threat to Parker's hard-won anonymity -- the man in question is already dead. 

The local police chief starts following Parker almost immediately, and another thief is already in town. Why has a safe-cracker who's been retired for five years suddenly the focus of all this attention? Well, there's the novel. 

The Jugger plays more like a mystery than most Parker novels, with Parker as the reluctant detective. The small-town, Midwestern police chief plays a lot like something from a Jim Thompson novel like Pop. 1280, corrupt and scheming. But getting one over on Parker is a very, very difficult thing to do. 

But Parker novels are also lessons in how even the most competent of men may be at least partially undone by unforeseeable circumstance. The trick is knowing when to walk away. Highly recommended.

The Score (aka Killtown) (1964) by Donald Westlake

The Score (aka Killtown) (1964) by Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark: A typically terse, concise, matter-of-fact entry in Donald Westlake's series of novels featuring super-thief/burglar Parker. Westlake wrote them as 'Richard Stark' in order to avoid flooding the early 1960's market for Donald Westlake. Lee Marvin, Jason Statham, and Mel Gibson have played the amoral, hyper-efficient Parker in movies, to varying effect (Marvin was clearly the best, in the John-Boorman-directed Point Blank (1967). 

The scheme this time is fascinating and clever, and, as always, complications and double-crosses come into play before the 'caper' is over. Though 'caper' is far too jolly a word for anything in a Parker novel. So call it a heist. Grofield, a slightly more amusing Westlake character, is a member of the team in this one. Highly recommended.

The Cutie (1960) by Donald E. Westlake

The Cutie (a.k.a. The Mercenaries) by Donald E. Westlake (1960): Early novel from beloved crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, handsomely re-released in paperback by Hard Case Crime. It's also been given Westlake's preferred title, though the Cutie of the title is not what you'd think from the cover.

Westlake's strengths include a talent for intricate plots, apt bits of metaphoric description, and precise and concise characterization. Even this early in his career, all those strengths are present in The Cutie: you don't need to read this just to be a Westlake completist. You don't even need to care who Westlake is, though you will by the end.

Standalone novels like this one put Westlake firmly in the line of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. The Cutie's first-person narrator, a troubleshooter (pretty much literally) for a mob boss in New York, impresses the reader with his determination to find a killer even as his own almost split personality when it comes to violence becomes more and more apparent. He's not a dead soul, but he's probably damned.

Nonetheless, the narrator's pursuit of a murderer who's made things hot for his mob boss hums with menace and moral rot. And the narrator grows just enough in his own self-assessment that the ending comes as a grim epiphany: the things that the narrator  assumed worked one way may instead work completely differently, at least when you're the boss. 

Verisimilitude makes this sort of street-level thriller work. I don't know how accurate Westlake's depictions of the working of crime in 1960 really are, but they seem real. One of the best bits is a classification of all cops into one of four categories, with the pros and cons of each type. It seems like the sort of thing a killer who's always been too evolved for his econiche might formulate during his downtime. And it's moments like that, among others, that make Westlake worth reading decades after what were supposed to be disposable novels were published. Recommended.

Time Wasters and Time Abysses

Horror Express: written by Arnaud d'Usseau and Julian Zimet; directed by Gene Martin; starring Christopher Lee (Saxton), Peter Cushing (Wells), and Telly Savalas (Captain Kazan) (1972): Highly enjoyable 1970's Italian horror film in which those two Hammer Studios horror greats, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, get to fight on the same side for once.
Lee plays a British archaeologist of the early 20th century who unearths the body of a strange hominid from a Chinese cave and then bundles it up and puts it on the Trans-Siberian Express so as to get it home to study. Cushing plays a rival scientist who's curious about what exactly is in the crate Lee has in baggage. Needless to say, bad things start happening.

Lee and Cushing are both excellent as reluctant science heroes, as is much of the international supporting cast. Telly Savalas (!!!) shows up near the end to chew all the available scenery as a power-hungry Cossack officer. There's some real tension and horror here, effective special effects and make-up, and a loopy scientific explanation for things that fits right in with some of the loopy pseudo-science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One supporting character seems to be based on the infamous Rasputin. Recommended.

Parker: based on the character created by Donald Westlake and the novel Flashfire; written by John J. McLaughlin; starring Jason Statham (Parker), Jennifer Lopez (Leslie Rodgers), Michael Chiklis (Melander), and Nick Nolte (Hurley) (2013): Mediocre time-waster does no favours to Donald Westlake's super-thief Parker. The two heists are handled so perfunctorily here that all of the joys of a good heist movie are neglected, probably because the film-makers wanted Statham to kick ass, which is really his strength as an actor. His weakness as an actor is playing anyone other than kick-ass Jason Statham. There's not a moment here in which he seems believable as a master thief. A section in which Parker pretends to have a Texas drawl while wearing a giant cowboy hat seems like something out of SCTV's 3-D Midnight Cowboy.

The film-makers waste Michael Chiklis, Bobby Cannavale, Wendell Pierce, and Nick Nolte in supporting roles, while Jennifer Lopez is game but far too well-coiffed and well-ornamented to be plausible as a desperate real estate agent with severe cash-flow issues. Perhaps worst of all for a heist film, it drags. Not recommended.

Lex Talionis

361 by Donald Westlake (1962): Ray Kelly finishes his European stint in the U.S. Air Force and returns home to meet his father in New York City before returning to their hometown in Upstate New York. And then hell breaks loose, and keeps breaking loose for the rest of the novel.

An early novel from thriller maestro Westlake, 361 offers a lot of hardboiled thrills and reversals in its 200 pages. The strength of the novel lies in its plot, and in Westlake's sympathetic, somewhat genre-busting characterization of Ray Kelly. Events force him to be a tough guy. That doesn't mean he likes it, or likes committing violence. Kelly throws up a lot both before and after moments of violence, though there are subtler bits of characterization as well.

One can see, in Kelly's characterization, Westlake working against the dominant mode of hardbitten, almost sadistic protagonists of similar novels of the 1950's and 1960's that include the super-popular Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. Indeed, during a lull in the action Kelly tries to kill time by reading some (unnamed) paperback thrillers, only to discover that he can't suspend his disbelief at how violence has no lasting psychological effects on the protagonists. It's a lovely, subtle moment of metacommentary on the genre that Westlake would soon be an acknowledged, boundary-pushing master of. Recommended.