Parker Score: Run Lethal

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

Returning, belatedly, to the Parker Mega Score—that stack of Coronet paperback editions of the Parker novels I acquired over the summer—we have Run Lethal, published in the UK by Coronet/Hodder Fawcett under a Raymond Hawkey-designed “bullet hole” double-cover in 1972—the second […]

Parker Score: The Outfit

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

Time to pull another Parker from the pile of eleven pristine Coronet paperback editions colloquially known as the Parker Mega Score. And this next one might be of particular interest to Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent, seeing as he doesn’t […]

Parker Score: The Steel Hit

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

Plucked from atop the Parker Mega Score stack—i.e. that haul of British Coronet/Hodder Fawcett paperback editions of the Parker novels I recently acquired—comes The Steel Hit, Coronet’s title for the second Parker outing, The Man with the Getaway Face (the publisher […]

Parker Mega Score Prelude

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

Good lord, has it really been nearly four months since I last posted something at TVWoP? Tsk, I dunno: anyone would think I’d recently become a father or something. (Let’s not get into the fact that I’ve managed about a dozen […]

Westlake Score: The Black Ice Score (Allison & Busby, 1986)

This will be my last post for The Violent World of Parker for a little while—for reasons I’ll be outlining on Existential Ennui before too long—so as an adieu, let’s have a quick Westlake Score, in the shape of a 1986 Allison & Busby hardback edition of The Black Ice Score (dust […]

Westlake Score: The Jugger

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

I unveiled the bulk of the Westlake—or rather, Richard Stark—Scores I acquired from Alan White Fine Books in one great big splurge of a bloated blogpost on Wednesday, but I kept one back because it dates from slightly earlier in the […]

Westlake Scores: Gold Medal Parkers

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

So apparently there’s some movie out in the States starring Jason Statham and based on the nineteenth novel in a twenty-four-book series featuring a cold-hearted taciturn career criminal. Dunno what that’s all about, but whatever it is, I’m certainly not about […]

University of Chicago Press releases Parker character guide

I haven’t had time to look at it yet, and don’t have time even to find a graphic to illustrate this post like I usually do, but I wanted to get this posted ASAP on more than just Twitter.

In order to celebrate fifty years of Parker, and on the eve of the release of […]

Parker Progress Report: Flashfire (2000)

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

With Backflash (1998), the second entry in the second run of Donald E. “Richard Stark” Westlake’s Parker novels, Westlake was firmly back in the Parker groove. It was a classic Parker heist tale: an intriguing target (a casino riverboat); a familiar […]

Parker Progress Report: Backflash (1998)

NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.

In the previous Parker Progress Report, I took a look at the seventeenth Parker, Comeback (1997), originally published twenty-three years after the sixteenth Parker, Butcher’s Moon (1974). Luckily, Parker fans didn’t have quite so long to wait for the next book […]