This time, tough guy Parker steals the cash from a rock concert. He and his colleagues get away with the loot, but there’s a loose end and two bad guys find out about the job. They go after Parker and the rest of his gang. As usual, they should have stopped before they got to Parker: “If someone double-crossed him in a job, tried to take Parker’s share of the split or betray him to the law, everything else became unimportant until he had evened the score”.

This is a typical Parker novel, more plausible than some. The author (real name: Donald Westlake) builds suspense by shifting between Parker’s perspective and his girlfriend’s. She gets into a serious jam and is left hanging while we backtrack to Parker, who can’t immediately come to her aid.

Parker is the perfect guy to have on your side if you have a problem with a couple of dangerous, greedy malcontents. The foreword to the novel says that “in some ways, Parker is the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, the consummate hard-toiling craftsman whose craft just happens to be robbery” — and the mayhem that’s part of the craft in Parker’s universe.

Published in 1964, this is the fifth in Donald Westlake’s series of hard-boiled crime novels. This time Parker agrees to join a dozen or so other thieves in taking as much as they can get from a small town in North Dakota. They plan to knock over a mining company, some banks, a loan company and some jewelry stores all in one night.

This is one of the best Parker novels I’ve read. It’s fast moving and relatively plausible, although Parker breaks some of his own rules, which leads to the usual complications. 

Parker only speaks when necessary and only says enough to get his point across:

“I don’t kill as the easy way out of something. If I kill, it’s because I don’t have any choice”.

“You mean self-defense”. 

“Wrong. I mean it’s the only way to get what I want”.  (7/8/12)

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)