Category Archives: Fiction

Ask the Parrot by Richard Stark

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For someone who makes his living as a thief, Parker doesn’t pull off many easy jobs. Something, or more than one thing, usually goes wrong. 

In this episode, Parker is on the run after a big bank job and conveniently meets a civilian who wants to pull off a different job, robbing a racetrack where he used to work. Instead of lying low and then pulling off the racetrack job, Parker and his new pal join a posse that is hunting Parker. Nothing goes smoothly after that. People get killed. Other crimes are committed. There’s a chapter written from the point of view of the parrot (it doesn’t end well). 

Parker is still a professional tough guy, but he does an awful lot of talking in this one. He shouldn’t have joined that posse.  (5/23/12)

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

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Rogue Male, a novel published in 1939, isn’t about an elephant on the loose. It’s about a wealthy English nobleman who is a famous adventurer and apparently a big-game hunter. He decides to stalk the leader of a foreign country, supposedly not to assassinate him, but to see if an assassination would be possible. The Englishman, who is never named, is captured before he decides whether to pull the trigger. 

The foreign leader is never named either, but his country borders Poland, so it’s apparently Hitler. The Englishman is tortured and left for dead but escapes, eventually making his way back home. Unfortunately, he has to keep running, because the bad guys, not having found his corpse, are looking for him. So, eventually, are the police. Most of the novel takes place in the English countryside, and, surprisingly, underneath it. Once again, the hunter has become the hunted (hunters should be used to that by now). 

I heard about this novel because it’s one of the out-of-print books that the New York Review of Books has been reissuing. It’s a terrific adventure story and has been filmed twice. As with most adventure stories, it isn’t quite plausible, but it would be interesting to see a film version, or try to write one.  (5/17/12)

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

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I tried to read this novel a few years ago but couldn’t get into it. Last month, I watched a film version and discovered that the story is much more interesting than it first appeared.

The first line of the novel is justly famous (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”). I didn’t think it was as sad as that. It is the story of two couples who meet at a sanitarium around 1905. Their lives intertwine over the next ten years or so. There are love affairs and deaths. Mainly, there is the voice of the narrator, telling the story as if he were sitting in a cottage before a fire with the night wind howling outside (that’s how he describes his method). 

He is the husband in one of the couples, relating events that he didn’t understand at the time. He confesses that he doesn’t know much about the world. His story jumps around, eventually revealing who was in love with who, who was being misled, and who was terribly unhappy. 

The narrator is often confused and unreliable, but not always:  

“Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords — broken, tumultuous, agonised, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?” 

And later: 

“Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly-deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into the category of the passionate, of the headstrong, and the too-truthful… He (the “good soldier”) seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance.”   (5/10/12)

Butcher’s Moon by Richard Stark

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Butcher’s Moon, published in 1974, is the 16th entry in the Parker series of hard-boiled crime novels. This one is a kind of summing up, since Parker recruits many of the guys he’s worked with on previous jobs to help him destroy a criminal organization in a Midwestern city. And the next Parker novel wasn’t published for 23 years. 

The situation in this one is that Parker and his fellow thieves stole $73,000 a few years ago, but had to leave the money behind. He goes back to get the money where he hid it, but it’s not there anymore. He figures it was the local crooks who took his money, so he tells them he wants it back. They don’t cooperate. Obviously a mistake. 

Butcher’s Moon has too many characters, too many corpses and too many implausibilities, but it’s worth reading if you like this kind of thing. In the last chapter, Parker doesn’t say a word. Other people do the talking. That’s a fitting ending, since Parker only talks when he has something to say, using as few words as possible.  (3/30/12)

The Fall by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O’Brien

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Two men meet in a bar in Amsterdam. One of them, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, talks for the rest of the book. The other man is never named. He occasionally speaks but his words never appear. The Fall is a monologue, in which Clamence talks to his new acquaintance about the hypocrisy, foolishness and self-deception of the human race. 

Clamence eventually identifies himself as a “judge-penitent”. He used to be a lawyer in Paris. Now he occupies himself by striking up conversations with strangers who come into the bar. He then confesses his various misdeeds, including his failure to intervene in a woman’s suicide back in Paris. This is the penitent part of his new occupation. Having made his own confession, he thinks that he has the right to judge the rest of humanity. And judging the rest of humanity allows other people to share the guilt. Hence, his role as judge-penitent.

I often didn’t understand what Clamence was saying. But reading The Fall did have an effect. Near the end of the book, Clamence remarks that “we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we merely look back over our lives, there’s no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves”. He suggests to his new acquaintance: “Admit that you feel less pleased with yourself than you felt five days ago” (when their conversation began). 

I feel a little less pleased with myself after reading The Fall. Not because I am newly aware of any of my serious misdeeds (no news there). Rather because Clamence explains at one point how good it used to make him feel to do nice things for other people, like helping to push a stalled car. Such actions seem less significant when we consider how much we enjoy performing them. I might be less pleased with myself the next time I give someone directions or push a stalled car.  (2/21/12)