The Mourner | Richard Stark

Hi.  Chris here.  Is it as hot where you are as where I am?  It is frickin' H-O-T.  When it's this hot and humid this late at night and your air conditioner's on the fritz there's only two things that can make it okay: Tom Waits and hard-boiled crime fiction.  This is a fact - ask your parents.

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Out of the thousands of ways to know you're a bad-ass, having someone bite into a poison tooth and kill themselves at your presence ranks right up near the top. Someone wants to gnaw the top off their cyanide tooth rather than tussle with you? You, my friend, are a Grade-A, Top Quality Bad-Ass.

You also most likely go by the name of Parker, and you're the star of Richard Stark's series of excellent pulp crime novels, one of which, The Mourner, features the passage in question.

I don't know if it's the sickening slick heat that's been hanging in the air like cellophane the last few days, or just the need to revisit familiar stomping grounds, but I decided to throw that tentative June reading list out the window and treat myself to another dose of Stark's concise, knife-edged prose. The Mourner finds Parker a few days after the end of previous novel The Outfit, sleeping in his hotel room when a wheezing and clanging on the fire escape tells him he's about to be paid an unannounced visit. We find out we're actually a few days into the new job: the stealing of a rare statue, the Mourner, one of 17 unique statues lost through the ages. But this being a Parker novel, nothing is as simple as it seems, and soon Parker and his friend Handy find themselves in league with a corrupt Russian defector who plans to steal $100,000 from the same mark that has the statue. Of course each party plans to double-cross the other, but the surprise turns out to be that the defector, Auguste Menlo, isn't quite the soft, loquacious sap Parker takes him for. Menlo is a great character, fleshed out and given the run of the story for whole chapters, a definite departure from the previous novels, all of which never strayed from the Parker's POV. It's rare to see such depth of character in such a slim volume (approximate 210 pages), especially one that relies on the plot mechanics that are the norm for the crime genre as it stood in the early 60s. But because Stark, aka Donald Westlake, is able to pack so much using so little nothing feels extraneous, and there's ample room for another's perspective.

Like each of the other entries in the series, The Mourner has cool to spare, and evokes the past without once feeling dated. I know from the publication date it takes place around 1963, but once the gears begin to mesh (usually by the third sentence) times seems to slip away, both in the fiction and in the fact. We see a little more of the man Parker is, but never enough to really say we know him. And that for me is one of the best aspects about the character: as much as you think you have him nailed, he'll turn on a dime and do something you never would have expected him capable of.

For years it was a crap shoot to try and find any Parker novels. Hunting through used book stores, libraries, and eBay was a weekly if not daily ritual. So kudos to the University of Chicago Press for bringing the series back in a beautiful and affordable collection. Westlake is one of the few grandmasters of the crime novel, and the chance to have one of his greatest creations back in print feels like the perfect antidote to the suffocating heat.