NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.
Over on Existential Ennui, I’ve recently begun a run of posts on paperbacks; should you be interested, over the coming weeks I’ll be showcasing and reviewing softcovers by the likes of Patricia Highsmith, Richard Matheson, and Elmore Leonard; published by such iconic imprints as Pan, Corgi, and Gold Medal; and featuring spectacular cover illustrations by the likes of Sam Peffer, Harry Bennett . . . and the man responsible for the cover art of this latest Westlake Score: Robert McGinnis, here painting to my mind one of his best visualizations of Parker. Published straight to paperback in the US in 1967, The Green Eagle Score was the tenth novel to star Parker, but only the second to be published by Fawcett/Gold Medal (second new one, anyway; Gold Medal also reissued the first Parker outing, The Hunter, in 1967, as Point Blank); the eight novels prior to the preceding Parker, The Rare Coin Score, were all issued by Pocket Books.
I’m not sure how many “Top Five Parkers” lists The Green Eagle Score would feature in, but it’s a solid Top Ten, I think, at least once you get your eye in as regards the greater series. In his brilliant book-by-book overview of the Westlake canon, Ethan Iverson memorably recalls how The Green Eagle Score was the first Parker he read, and how he “could not understand how dry as dust, simple, and matter of fact it was.” By this point in the series, Westlake/Stark’s prose is so stripped back, so deadpan and impassive it’s almost zen-like in its doggedness: just the facts, ma’am. And yet this is deceptive; the novel’s opening paragraph—also quoted in Trent’s precis—is a perfect example of the Stark less-is-more approach, of how much Westlake crams in with so few words:
Parker looked in at the beach and there was a guy in a black suit standing there, surrounded by all the bodies in bathing suits. He was standing near Parker’s gear, not facing anywhere in particular, and he looked like a rip in the picture. The hotel loomed up behind him, white and windowed, the Puerto Rican sun beat down, the sea foamed white on the beach, and he stood there like a homesick mortician.
I shared some other thoughts about the book back in 2010, so I shan’t go over old ground again here, except to note that I like The Green Eagle Score enough that spotting and then winning this copy of the Gold Medal first edition on eBay was an unexpected thrill. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s unusual to see US paperback firsts of the Parkers on this side of the pond, and nabbing them gives me the opportunity to hold little pieces of publishing history in my hands; to discover things about them—for example, the opening page of The Green Eagle Score:
Which affords a glimpse into Fawcett’s marketing strategy for the book, positioning master thief Parker alongside other characters in the Gold Medal stable: two spies—Philip Atlee’s Joe Gall and Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm—and a salvage consultant. Matt Helm I’ve blogged about on Existential Ennui before, but it just so happens that Messrs Gall and McGee—the latter created, of course, by John D. MacDonald—will be appearing later in my EE series of paperback posts. Stay tuned.
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This may be my favorite Parker cover of all. Brilliant. Maybe a little too handsome, though.
Can’t wait for your McGee posts, as most who know me know my favorite literary characters are Parker and McGee. They often strike me as opposite sides of the same coin. Both are rebels who refuse to live inside the structure and limits society sets, yet McGee is what Parker might be like if he had an opinion on most things and wasn’t totally amoral. (And I’m not knocking Parker–after re-reading a couple McGees in a row I can’t wait to dive into a Parker so I can get the cold as ice, economical, just the facts “Stark” voice–McGee can be awfully verbbose and preachy at times–too qualities Parker thankfully does not share).
Joe Gall rings a bell. I’ll have to wait for your posts to see if I can remember where I know that name from.
I read one of the Joe Gall books it wasn’t that good and it ended with a lecture on how we have to keep the “dark races” from taking over the world.
This cover is simply 60’s cool at it’s best. Love it! Those “Here’s Parker!” cover comments could be taken right off of a movie trailer voiceover from that era.
I second Dave’s comments about Parker and Travis McGee…2 very different and unique characters by 2 very different and unique writers. There is really no one else who matches up to either the characters or the authors IMHO.
I once had an idea for a story where Travis McGee is hired to find something that Parker had stolen. Of course, to write and publish it I need to get the rights from both Westlake’s and MacDonald’s estates.
I believe that The Green Eagle Score was the one where one of Parker’s partners in crime was staying with his ex-wife and their daughter. He goes through several contingency plans in case the heist goes wrong with Parker. One of which involves killing his ex-wife and taking off with his daughter. He of course mentions that Parker could have suggested killing them both, but didn’t.
Parker replies coldly, “I did not think you would go for it.”
Matthew, that sounds like a great idea! I’ve often thought what would happen if those two crossed paths. It’s highly doubtful you could get the rights to publish the story, but you could do it with different characters that “highly resemble” Parker and McGee. That’s what Philip Jose Farmer did when writing his Lord Grandrith (Tarzan) meets Doc Caliban (Doc Savage) trilogy (A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, The Mad Goblin).
Any Tarzan or Doc Savage fans out there, you should really give the trilogy a try. You will never look at Tarzan and Doc Savage in the same way again!;-) lol
Yeah, I thought of doing “higly resemble” story. I can’t imagine any situations were I get the rights for the characters. Don’t know if I will ever get around to writing the story though.
If you do, I’ll be the first one to buy it!
I read A Feast Unknown at a young and impressionable age. It did not make me want to read the others. Ye gods, PJF sure liked to perv everything up, didn’t he?
Against my better judgment, I also read his authorized Tarzan and Doc Savage novels (I Don’t Remember and Escape From Loki). They were both lousy. I also read about a third of his Oz book and quit when the hero screwed a munchkin. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever liked a PJF novel.
His Tarzan and Doc Savage “biographies,” on the other hand, are both brilliant.
I liked Farmer’s Tarzan book. There are other books by him I like. Night of Light was great. I liked his World of Tiers novels and the first two books of his Riverworld novels. That said I don’t think I’ll ever pick up a copy of A Feast Unknown.
His biographies were definitely his best books and they are really the only books of his that I reread.
I agree, Trent: PJF, like Robert Heinlein, does sometimes go into the “Twilight Zone” area of sexuality that is at times really creepy. PJF’s literary style is one I like, and there are other elements of A Feast Unknown I found appealing, but certain scenes caused my jaw to hang open!;-) lol The scene where Tarzan–er, Lord Grandrith gets buggered by the Albanian Slave Trader who captured him was simultaneously hilarious and disgusting. I viewed Feast as semi-comedic, I mean, I gotta believe PJF was having a laugh with these characters.
I’ve heard that the purpose of A Feast Unknown was suppose to be parodies by exaggerating the elements of sex and violence in pulp fiction. Thing is the Tarzan and Doc Savage novels were fairly chase in terms of sex. On the other hand, it seems like the only real explanation you could give for the novel.
Farmer and Heinlein writers to do this as they got older. Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories were started out mildly ribald, but more of his kinks started to appear in the later stories. Particularly S&M overtones.
Koike Kazuo’s Lone Wolf and Cub manga was certainly for mature adults but his later writings seem to descend in to weird porn. A Wounded Man is apparently mostly rape scenes.
I enjoy both Heinlein and now, Farmer’s work. I’ve only read Stranger in a Strange Land and the two Lazarus Long novels, but liked them very much. A Feast Unknown is well-written and I like Farmer’s style. I don’t mind these revisionist takes on classic characters, it reminds me of Robert Altman’s take on Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye. It’s refreshing to see a totally different take on a character you’ve known since childhood.
I’ll be checking out more works by PJF–especially now that many of them are becoming available for my Kindle.
I haven’t tried the Leiber stuff, and haven’t looked at a Lone Wolf and Cub comic since I was a kid, but I do remember Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga having some dark sexual overtones. I think the fantasy genre, of which I admittedly do not read much of, almost has a sub-genre of almost pornographic Sword and Sorcery epics. The Song of Fire and Ice books (which resulted in the very sexual HBO series Game of Thrones) come to mind, as well as other novels much more explicit than even that.
Whatever floats your boat–I;m not a prude, and don’t mind sex scenes in books. I remember reading Kahawa and being surprised how graphic DEW got in that one. Supposedly some longtime readers were put off by it but I wasn’t in the least. In fact, I thought it added realism to the story.
Leiber’s Fafhrd & The Grey Mouser stories were basically the successor to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. They were wittier and the characters more human than Howard’s. Many of the tropes that are taken for granted were created by Leiber. The concept of the Thieve’s Guild was more less invented by Leiber. They were also the first thing I ever read where the characters were professional criminals.
Leiber was also one of the first writers to write horror stories in modern urban settings instead of haunted castles. The Sinful Ones is a paranoid nightmare and Our Lady of Darkness makes 60/70s San Francisco as horrific as Transylvania.
What I don’t like about the PJF books is his obsessive need to take characters that were innocent and fun and insert sex, Sex, SEX! What’s the point? Other than his personal obsession, that is.
I’ll give him credit for this. He may have invented fan fiction, or at least the type where all of the characters are screwing each other and everything else.
I was _much_ less offended by A Feast Unknown, which was a pastiche where the Tarzan character fucks a panther and he and the Doc Savage character get huge boners when facing each other, than I was by Escape From Loki, where the official Doc nails a Nazi chick.
Doc Savage doesn’t nail Nazi chicks. Doc Caliban might, but Doc Savage doesn’t.
Had he been a little younger, he would have written the Hardy Boys double-teaming Nancy Drew. Fine, if that’s what you want to write, but don’t call it the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Call it the Hearty Boys and Nancy Screw.
Don’t call it Doc Savage. It’s not. Don’t call it Oz. Call it Doc Caliban and Uz to your heart’s content.
Somewhere online, I read that it was a good thing Alan Moore was not allowed to use the Charlton Comics characters in the project that would become Watchmen, because it would not be nice to see the characters turned into sociopaths, or made sexually impotent or inhuman beings. So I can see what you mean.
There actually is a book that is written as an autobiography of Nancy Drew where she admits to having Frank Hardy’s lovechild. It wasn’t by Farmer though.
Trent, have you read any of Farmer’s original work like The World of Tiers books or the some of his other science fiction novels? What did you think about it if so?
Oh, My God! Nancy and one of the Hardy Bros. produced a love child? Hahahaha.
Travis McGee is part of the Wold-Newton Universe, according to Farmer, but I don’t think he wrote anything about him. PJF never mentioned Parker as part of WN. I wouldn’t mind seeing a revisionist take on McGee and Parker, especially if they’re presented as “striking resemblences” of P and TM. Mainly because I consider anything not written by DEW and JDM non-canon. Fun to read and speculate on, but not part of the legit P and TM saga.
I had a ton of folks on a different website come down hard one me because I posited the idea of Travis McGee “tribute novels” which would be much like the current situation with the Bond novels, where popular authors write one book a year or so doing their take on the iconic character. It wouldn’t be a continuation series, so to speak, as one writer wouldn’t have the rights to keep writing sequels, but it would be cool to see a TM book by King one year (he actually wanted to do a McGee novel called Chrome but couldn’t get the rights), maybe Hiassen the next etc.
I don’t see why the same couldn’t work for Parker. Imagine a Parker “Tribute” by some of the authors who are Parker fanatics and have mentioned how much of an influence the books were on them? It’d be a fun way to continue the character without officially handling over the reigns completely to another writer.
I don’t have a problem with it. Parker and McGee will always be DEW and JDM’s legacy and anyone adding to that canon would never effect how much I love the original author’s work, no matter how bad or good the tribute novels were. And if the estates that own the rights to the character are very selective to whom they allow to write these tribute novels I can’t see there being any real stinkers.
Win Scott Eckert who really expanded Farmer’s writing. Wrote a book called Crossovers which tracks thousands of crossover stories centered around Farmer’s family. The book does not mention Parker, but it does mention a crossover between the Continental Op and Dan Kearny & Associates. Of course, Parker ran into Dan in Plunder Squad.
For me, the writers original work stands alone. It’s fun to read a story that implies that Nero Wolfe is the son of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. Of course, in the original canon Holmes was uninterested in romance with anyone.
I wonder what Chrome would have been like. King can be an uneven writer. He was never the hack that Harold Bloom claims him to be, but some of his works are better than others. (Interesting, I just finished reading It a few days ago.) MacDonald wrote the introduction to King’s first short story collection where he defends King from some of the critics at the time.
Matthew: No, I don’t think I ever did, probably because I cared so little for his pastiche novels. Also, I for some reason pretty much gave up SF and fantasy after high school. Nothing against them, and I will read along those lines every once in awhile, it’s just that my tastes changed.
Stephen King is often brilliant, often infuriating. It, for example, I thought was about 500 pages of good stuff that utterly collapsed in the final act and ruined everything that came before it. I ended up hating the book. But then, I liked Tommyknockers, which a lot of King fans dislike, so what do I know?
There is another Farmer Tarzan pastiche out there, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (shortened to The Peerless Peer in its current printing) where Sherlock Holmes meets Tarzan. I haven’t read it, but if I can find my copy, I probably will. It’ll give me a chance to read a Tarzan book with a crime fiction angle so I can review it for the site. (When I don’t have a lot to post, I feel guilty reading books I can’t review!)
Any of you guys read that one?
I’ve read Peerless Peer. I don’t remember any weird sex stuff in the book, but it’s been awhile since I read it. It did have a kind of goofy ending that while it didn’t ruin the book for me kept it from being really great.
I for the most part liked It, I thought the group sex thing at the end was weird. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I had no interest sex whatsoever when I was eleven. I pretty much thought it was the grossest thing ever. That would change sometime around my thirteenth birthday.
Haven’t read Peerless Peer yet, Trent, though it is available for Kindle. I have already bought and downloaded the second Grandrith/Caliban novel, Lord of the Trees, and after I finish a couple of other Kindle books I’m reading–David J. Schow’s Gun Work (actually rereading that one; read it when it first came out a few years ago) and Howard Linskey’s The Drop, both excellent books and highly recommended for Crime fans, I will venture into Lord of Trees, the second in the “Secrets of the Nine” trilogy.
PJF actually created a very cool and intriguing premise: these Nine beings have effected and manipulated things on Earth for centuries without our knowledge (sorta like the Illuminati, only more mystical/supernatural) and have afforded some exceptional mortals near-immortality (including Caliban/Grandrith; Grandrith is about 80 in AFU and is predicted to live another 30,000 years).
At the end of AFU Caliban and Grandrith realize they were unwitting pawns of the Nine and vow to exact revenge. I’m stoked to start LOTT and the final novel, the Mad Goblin (which concentrates more on Doc) is due to be reprinted and “Kindled” soon.
Again, some of the sex stuff is out there in the Twilight Zone (I get no personal joy reading these characters describe in intimate detail their penises and about Grandrith being sexually molested by another man ( that was a combination of WTF funny and creepy at the same time), but there’s still some damned fine writing on PJF’s part, and he obviously has a wildly inventive imagination.
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