The Disconcerting Dissonance of The Hunter

Cognitive dissonance. College-level psychology may teach the technical details of the term, but experience usually schools us all in a far more primal understanding of it early on. We learn quickly that cognitive dissonance is best friends with perplexity, confusion and denial. It wrinkles the brow, raises your blood pressure and knots the muscles in your neck. It likes to show up when you realize that, yes, you just intentionally cut off that person in rush-hour traffic and, no, your recently completed story doesn't seem to be drawing the accolades you believe it so richly deserves and, huh, maybe buying into the financial sector a couple months back wasn't the bright idea your stockbroker made it out to be. Cognitive dissonance can tie you in mental knots, wake you up before the roosters and put the most absurd rationalizations in your mouth. The peculiar mental state that arises when holding on to conflicting suppositions is something I'm becoming familiar with after reading Richard Stark's dark-as-night noir The Hunter.

Parker should have died after the heist. His accomplice in thievery, Mal Resnick, had forced Parker's wife to empty a revolver into him and then had set fire to the building as he lay bleeding. But Parker struggled out of flames only to be caught by the cops and sent straight to the pen. There he nursed his broken body and wounded pride, waiting, formulating a plan. He wanted Mal, wanted his neck in his hands, wanted to twist and squeeze until the life fled. Then one day opportunity gave him an opening. A guard got sloppy and then got dead, and Parker got out of jail early. Now he's out to indulge in revenge, the oldest of vices. The hunt is on.

Let me say it straight: I like The Hunter. I like Stark's striking, unadorned style. (In case you didn't know, Richard Stark is the pseudonym of the prolific and ever-entertaining crime writer Donald Westlake.) I like the plot's inexorable progression, how Parker homes in on Mal like iron to a magnet. What I don't like is Parker himself. We're told that stories need at least a mildly sympathetic protagonist to succeed, right? But there isn't a single amiable thing about Parker. He lies, steals, bullies, extorts, betrays and murders. He abuses women and kills men, often with his bare hands. He is not, as an old Lit prof used to say, the kind of person you'd want for a roommate. Trent at The Violent World of Parker calls him "a ruthless thug" who "doesn't care about a living soul other than himself. Some of the things he does will be repellent (I hope) to readers."

Sounds like a good reason to stay away, doesn't it? But hordes of fans haven't since Parker first appeared in print in 1962. Certainly excellent of craft, Stark's ability to seize the imagination with a handful of choice words, provided a draw. It did for me. It also helps that the novel largely avoids salacious detail, a fact that authors who work in the gritty genre hinterlands ought to note. But it's more than that. For myself, The Hunter reminds me that while humanity may be crowned with glory and honor, goodness isn't our natural state. We're closer to Parker inside than any of us care to admit.

(Picture: CC 2009 by jcoterhals; Hat Tip: Detectives Beyond Borders)

"Empty Hours"

Dornan showed up at the restaurant a half hour earlier than they'd agreed upon. He parked his 1983 Crown Victoria across the street in a parking lot behind a Burger King, killed the engine and rolled down the windows. He sat and watched the restaurant across the street, periodically lifting the Styrofoam cup he'd wedged between the car's dashboard and window and sipping from it. A string ran down its side, ending in a paper tag that read "Lipton."

He didn't like the place.

As I've recounted elsewhere, I grew up with crime fiction but fell away from the genre during college and didn't return to it for years. But when I eventually started reading it again, I found a stripe of crime story I'd never read before -- hardboiled. Tough guys facing tough odds while uttering laconic one-liners studded with outlandish metaphors. I loved it.

I also discovered the writing of Richard Stark, the penname under which comic crime author Donald Westlake penned his hardboiled and noir-tinged Parker novels. For the uninitiated, Parker is a professional thief and Very Nasty Man, one who's pathologically self-centered, utterly amoral, and not the least bit squeamish about killing those who cross him with anything ranging from submachine guns to his bare hands. Parker first appears in The Hunter, and while I deeply enjoyed the grim little novel overall, I strongly disliked Parker's attitude toward women. He uses and abuses them, both emotionally and physically. Nasty stuff.

My revulsion got the wheels turning upstairs: Could I write a Parker pastiche where the protagonist treated women like a gentleman?

So began "Empty Hours," a stripped-back hardboiled story about a tea-drinking chap named Dornan who (in his own words) "makes things right for people." In this instance, he's trying to fix something -- or someone -- for Juli, an attractive woman with a nervous twitch whose professional façade stands always about three blinks away from crumbling in on itself. During its many revisions, the story became something more than an admiring imitation of Richard Stark, going deeper and darker into the evil lurking unseen all around us -- and the evil crouching in our own hearts.

Needless to say, this one ain't for the kiddos.

"Empty Hours" appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Needle: A Magazine of Noir. Get your copy here. Many thanks to B. Nagel for providing much-needed feedback on an early draft. The story is better for it.

Two Never Quite Adds Up to Its Inspiration

We all know the old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and that aphorism holds no less true in the world of writing. Homages to the works of famous authors not only honor the individuals but show the extent of their influence in their chosen fields. The eldritch imaginings of H.P. Lovecraft have gotten mileage far beyond their original iterations thanks to artists as diverse as Brian Lumley and Neil Gaiman. Entire swathes of fantasy are basically testaments to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. What happens, though, when a pasticheur can't quite imitate another's excellence? Can the resulting work be considered a success? It's a question I found myself asking while reading Two for the Money, hardboiled author Max Allan Collin's tribute to Richard Stark's Parker novels.

Nolan is feeling his age. No, scratch that, he definitely feels older than his forty-eight years. Running from the Family will do that to you, and Nolan can't exactly blame the Chicago crime syndicate for chasing him. He'd been doing fine as Family nightclub manager until Gordon got promoted, the thug. You see, Gordon told Nolan to off an old friend, and ... Well, let's just say things got messy. Killing Gordon might've been excusable on its own, but absconding with $20,000 of Family money? That definitely wasn't. Now after sixteen years of hiding from Gordon's brother Charlie, Nolan's ready to call it quits. But to do so he'll have to pull off the most difficult job of his career, a bank robbery where he has a crew of amateurs, a bullet in his side and no other options.

You can't say Collins doesn't line up the Parker tropes like a row of dominos. An amoral, single-named protagonist. A high-stakes heist. A deadly double cross. Plenty of blazing guns and down-n-dirty fisticuffs. Yet despite such similarities, Two for the Money never quite feels like a Stark book. It simply doesn't read the same. Stark's name could describe his style. His novels are bare and unadorned, peeled all the way back to the bone. In fact, the actions of Parker and his associates often seem a little mysterious at first because Stark doesn't let readers into their heads or comment on their actions. He's almost a hardboiled Hemmingway. Conversely, Collins lets his characters unspool paragraphs of internal monologue, ruminating at length about most everything under the sun. That isn't to say the book's bad. Two for the Money does what pulp ought to, namely entertain. But somehow it never quite adds up to the works which inspired it.

(Picture: CC 2009 by il Quoquo; Hat Tip: The Violent World of Parker)

Getaway Delights in Details

In reviewing the 2004 thriller Collateral, film critic Andrew Coffin noted that director Michael Mann had such a distinctive style he could make a shot of Tom Cruise climbing stairs look fascinating. That's no small praise. Entertainment today tends toward spectacles and extremes, toward the fast and loud and not-even-a-little subtle. So you know you're dealing with something unique when a storyteller can make his audience not only pause for the small stuff but also delight in it. Which is exactly what Richard Stark does in The Man With the Getaway Face, the second Parker novel and sequel to The Hunter.

Career criminal Parker is in a spot. Murdering Mal Resnick gained him more than revenge: It earned him the ire of a massive criminal conglomerate called the Outfit. Now that his face has the top spot on its most-wanted list, Parker decides a change is in order and goes under the knife of a disgraced doctor who lost his practice because of Communist sympathies. Though the surgery gives him some breathing room, it also leaves him nearly broke, so he decides to rob an armored car in Ohio with three criminal acquaintances -- Handy, Skimm and Alma, Skimm's new squeeze. Only the complications come quick and heavy almost from the word go, and Parker soon finds himself concerned with a lot more than simply getting through steel plating. The cops have taken notice of his newly acquired (read: stolen) car. The doctor's punch-drunk handyman comes after him with a .45. And Alma seems to be eyeing more than her fair share of the takings.

Although Stark spends plenty of time on the heist itself (a requisite for this sort of crime story), he focuses much more of his attention on the preparations for it. Finding the proper escape route, buying a beat-up tractor trailer, divvying up the takings -- such things take up the lion's share of the text. And while paragraphs about dumping bags of change in a stream or test firing a revolver into a basement drain don't sound interesting, they really are. Stark uses all this apparently incidental action to flesh out Parker's character, gradually revealing through his management of circumstances an individual who is ferociously intelligent, completely self-serving and utterly rapacious. It's a fascinating stylistic device. This devil, it seems, really is in the details.

(Picture: CC 2009 by reway2007)

The Outfit Finds Humanity In Flaws

What is it that makes an individual human to you? Bear with me, I’m not trying to get existential here. What is it about a person that inspires affection? It probably isn’t incredible talent. The gifted can draw your interest or admiration, but their proficiency doesn’t give us warm fuzzies when we bump into them at a party and have to make small talk. If anything, it’s a bit intimidating. No, what binds soul to soul is a touch of imperfection, the knowledge that no matter how skilled this person may be, he hasn’t washed his car in three months, his computer breaks out in the blue screen of death whenever he enters the room and he loves reading about sparkly vampires. Flaws foment caring -- no less in narratives than in real life. It’s a technique Richard Stark puts to good use in The Outfit, the third in his series of novels about the near-superhuman thief Parker.

Parker didn’t think the Outfit would call his bluff. He knew he’d irritated the national crime syndicate when he’d forcibly recovered some cash one of their associates stole from him. Still, he’d believed his penchant for mercilessness (and the resultant growing body count) would’ve served as a deterrent. But a late-night visit from an incompetent hit man with a silenced .25 proved it hadn’t. Now Parker’s got an idea. Independent types such as himself don’t typically rip off racetracks or casinos or drug dens, anything the Outfit might have its fingers in. And without interference, the Outfit’s gotten soft. The way Parker figures, it’s up to him and his friends to take advantage of that fact -- and to do it fast.

Stark turns this installment of Parker’s adventures into an ensemble show, trotting out all sorts of quirky criminal types. There’s Clemy, the Georgia chop-shop man on a quixotic quest to turn a tiny Volkswagen into an uber-speedy getaway car. Klee, a purveyor of semi-legitimate firearms, displays the sort of affection for his wares that’s usually reserved for members of the opposite sex. Salsa is an illegal immigrant who once subscribed to collectivist philosophy but has now awakened to “the Truth of Self-interest” (which he seeks with a loaded firearm and a well-charted getaway route). They’re a delightfully oddball bunch, a far cry from the calm competence of Parker. But even he gets humanized a little. While writing a letter explaining his plan, he complains that the Outfit “thinks it has a greevance on me.” And in reading that, you realize you realize this unstoppable criminal possesses only the most rudimentary formal education. An unexpectedly poignant touch.

(Picture: CC 2008 by Auzigog)

A Cornucopia of Contests

Ah, what a great time to be a writer! Yes, achieving publication seems more challenging than ever, but there are also plenty of opportunities to hone one's narrative chops. Consider the following three writing contests.

Lady Glamis (aka Michelle Davidson Argyle) of The Innocent Flower is soliciting submissions of up to 7,500 words from basically any genre "except erotica." Manuscripts should be sent to annie [dot] louden [at] gmail [dot] com, who will strip all biographical data from them to ensure anonymous judging. For new readers, Michelle was one of the judges for The Literary Lab's Genre Wars anthology. Deadline for entry is June 1, and prizes include getting published to her blog and generous gift certificates to Amazon.com.

B. Nagel wears many hats, including those of librarian, MS Paint artiste and -- dream analyst? It seems B. is turning a night of interrupted sleep into a writing prompt, and he'd like the rest of us to join him. The image he can't get out of his mind is of

a hooded man's twisted, snarling face staring at me while a woman in evening dress drank something dark and viscous from a spiked iron chalice, her fingers and palms pierced by the vicious points. Then the hooded man winked at me as the woman fainted, presumably poisoned.

Read more about the nightmare here, and be sure to email him at bnagelblog [at] gmail [dot] com if you'd like to participate. Stories inspired by the prompt should be posted to your blog on June 4. The winner (obscure allusion alert!) will be given a white stone, and on it B.'s full first name will be written, and no one shall know it except him who receives it.

If you aren't up for longer projects as we near the start of summer, you may consider the Chicago-based Seminary Co-op Bookstores' 350-word flash-fiction contest. The setting? A bookstore, of course. The crime? A heist. The protagonist? Richard Stark's Parker, main character of The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face and The Outfit. Got it? Good. Now get to writing.

(Picture: CC 2010 by takomabibelot; Hat Tip: The Violent World of Parker)

Phraselet No. 107

Office women in passing cars looked at him and felt vibrations above their nylons. He was big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short. He wore a gray suit, limp with age and no pressing. His shoes and socks were both black and holey. The shoes were holey on the bottom, the socks were holey at heel and toe.

His hands, swinging crve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.

The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they knew his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree.

- Richard Stark, The Hunter

A Media Triptych

Dear readers, do you ever get tired of, well, reading? When you reach the end of the work week, do you sometimes want to rest your eyes on anything but print on a page or screen? It may be heresy to admit it, but sometimes I do. So for the word-weary on this Friday afternoon, here's a trio of eye-easy media offerings.

Odyssey Writing Workshop, a six-week intensive training session for writers held annually in New Hampshire, podcasts excerpts from past lectures by professional authors. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of world building to the role of humor in speculative fiction to how to pen the perfect query letter. While nearly all of the thirty-or-so podcasts are worthwhile, SF-veteran Robert J. Sawyer's talk on maintaining a coherent point of view is particularly valuable. In addition to explaining the various storytelling structures, Sawyer provides specific examples of common POV violations. You can directly download his talk here.

Though I've largely enjoyed the lean crime thrillers of Richard Stark and Jean-Patrick Manchette, I must admit to being something of a noir neophyte, having weaned myself on Ray Bradbury and John Christopher as a teen. For those who want to school themselves on the genre, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better primer than a recent appearance by Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky on Wisconsin Public Radio. He and Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Delhi Noir, discuss the category's defining characteristics, its transcultural reach and (very interestingly) a thematic thread that appears in many noir stories -- compassion. You can listen to the hour-long show at WPR's Web site.

Robots! Don't we love them? As you can see in this video, scientists are spending scads of grant money teaching them how to bounce rubber balls at dizzying speeds, catch foam blocks and twirl sticks. Fun stuff. But as soon as the little metal guys start speaking in Austrian accents, I'm grabbing a shovel and starting work on the fallout shelter.

(Picture: CC 2009 by gj_theWhite)

Sacred Monster Intrigues, Irritates

When an author tries something new, fans often react with equal parts anticipation and fear. This is doubly true when said author has a track list as long as your arm. Take Donald Westlake, who managed to pen over a hundred novels in his lifetime. Readers knew to expect slapstick crime stories when they opened a Westlake book or harder-than-cement-shoes hardboiled when he went under the pseudonym Richard Stark. So what must have gone through their heads when Sacred Monster showed up in the late eighties? It wasn’t a light-hearted caper or a tough P.I. tale. It was something altogether different, namely a Hollywood satire.

Oscar-winning actor Jack Pine doesn’t know why he agreed to do an interview on this of all mornings. He’s coming down off a bender so enormous he can’t even remember the past twenty-four hours, and his hangover is pounding him so hard it feels as though a thousand elephants are tap dancing on his cerebellum. Plus, this interviewer -- whatshisname and whereshefrom, oh, never mind, it hurts to think -- wants to know everything, from all about his best friend (childhood chum Buddy Pal) to the first girl he slept with (high-school vixen Wendy), from the ins and outs of his entire career (down and up and down again) to the details of his three spectacularly failed marriages (to Marcia, Lorraine and Dori). And Jack’s having a hard time dredging memory’s depths, because every now and again those chemicals in his bloodstream click just so and he drops over unconscious. But as the interview goes on, one thing becomes clear. Jack Pine is hiding a dark secret from everyone -- including himself.

As you might have guessed, Sacred Monster doesn’t stray too far from Westlake’s preferred genre, even though you have to get pretty far in before a mystery starts to emerge. A big clue pops up in the first chapter, then the book loses itself in poking fun at the idiocies of Hollywood excess. Good sport, that, and the slow insinuation of an old horror at around the midpoint intrigues. But the ending squashes the entire enterprise flatter than a lazy frog on a railroad track. Think of one of those implausible and irritating summer-movie twists, and you won’t be far off. Not to say the novel’s a terrible read. With his winning style and stupendous sense of humor, Westlake would’ve had a hard time writing one of those. On the scale of quality, Sacred Monster falls somewhere in the middle, neither reaching for the heavens nor plunging into the abyss.

(Picture: CC 2006 by DonnaGrayson )

Pearson on Unsung Setting

At Tor.com, Mary Pearson (author of The Adoration of Jenna Fox) considers how setting rarely receives its due in narrative writing. Excerpts:

Characters? Everybody loves them. They sweep on stage, grab your attention, and demand the spotlight.

Plot? It's right up there with character, stealing the show, swishing around with twists and turns, dipping, soaring, and making you zip through the pages.

But the silent partner in the performance, the floorboards, the rafters, and even the music that makes plot and character shine is the one I want to talk about today. The silent partner doesn't get to take a lot of bows or many times even take any credit, but without it, character and plot would trip all over their feet, fall flat, forget their lines, and say stupid things. Heck, they would stop breathing altogether.

The humble partner I am talking about is

setting.

See? It doesn't even ask for a capital S.

Read the whole thing. Pearson proceeds to argue that setting is the soil in which stories grow, the empty stage on which they stride. I think she's right. Consider how a simple tale of cunning detective thwarts career thief changes when moved from New York to Botswana or to one of Jupiter's Galilean moons. Despite sharing similar plot arcs, Neuromancer feels worlds away from any of Richard Stark's Parker novels. That's because setting is more than color or icing, more than a chance for an author to wax poetic. It sets boundaries, draws lines, holds the course. It says, "You go this far -- but no farther."

(Picture: CC 2008 by elward-photography)