Parker Mega Score finale: Richard Stark in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

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

If you missed the announcement on Existential Ennui on Friday, some (relatively) exciting news: I’ve established a brand new Existential Ennui permanent page:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

A companion page to Beautiful British Book […]

Review: Killing Time by Donald E. Westlake

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

Thanks to a series of Westlake Scores, I’ve ended up reading—and reviewing—some of Donald E. Westlake’s earliest novels this year. I wrote about his debut novel—under his own name, that is; he’d had a number of pseudonymous sleaze works published […]

Like having a scorpion in the room: an interview with Darwyn Cooke on Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score

Introduction

Darwyn Cooke does one in-depth interview for each volume in his series of comic book adaptations of Richard Stark’s [pseudonym of Donald Westlake] Parker novels. (Here are the interviews for The Hunter and The Outfit.) For his new one, The Score, he was kind enough to invite The Violent World of Parker to conduct the interview. “I thought it was time I geared whatever big interview I did more towards Don’s [Donald Westlake’s] fans, rather than my own,” he told us.

For better or worse, he got what he asked for. Nick and I managed two conference calls with Darwyn across three countries, three time zones, and two continents.

There are minor spoilers sprinkled throughout, but nothing, I think, that will affect the enjoyment of the reader of either Darwyn’s great adaptation or its source material. (I did remove one major spoiler, although not for this book.)

Thank you for sitting down with us, Darwyn, and thank you for your immense contributions to the violent world of Parker, and to The Violent World of Parker.

Dear reader: Dig in. I think you’ll find it as fascinating as Nick and I did.

Interview

Nick: [Opening after some green room chatter] Speaking of The Score: How was it this time? How did you find it? How did you adapt to it this time out?

Darwyn: There’s sort of a built-in need to find a way to make each one better than the last. That usually adds to stress and anxiety and all sorts of things you can’t control, but the more I work with Parker, the more comfortable it gets. It’s a pretty easy ride now.

I know how I feel about the character and I know how people have reacted to it, so I feel really free just to go ahead with it? And, in every case with Parker I’m just out to please myself. And that happens to be pleasing other people, so that’s great.

I’m never sitting there worrying about what it is I’m doing. It’s just a very comfortable, really gratifying job now.

We’re like old buddies.

Continue reading Like having a scorpion in the room: an interview with Darwyn Cooke on Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score

Review: Killy, by Donald E. Westlake (1963)

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

Slight change of plan here: I had intended to post a Westlake Score this week, but I’ve decided to hold off on that for the moment—partly because on a whim I actually started reading the Westlake Score in question, and so I […]

Guest slot: The Wolf Man, by Christopher Lyons

Let’s keep the introductions to a minimum this time: the first part of Chris’s two-part guest essay, “The Man Who Doesn’t Wink,” can be found here, so go read that (if you haven’t already) to get yourself up to speed. As before, we welcome your comments, even more so now […]

Westlake Score: Butcher’s Moon by Richard Stark; 1977 UK Coronet paperback

Time for my third and final post on Butcher’s Moon, the sixteenth Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake “Parker” thriller. And having eulogised the novel in an enervating fashion and examined the 1974 Random House first edition at laborious length, for this terminal missive I want to take a look at the first—and […]

Collecting Parker: Richard Stark’s Butcher’s Moon—how to identify a true first edition

Having expounded at length—and how—on the meat (groan…) of Butcher’s Moon—i.e. reviewing the novel itself—I thought I’d ruminate for a while on the American first edition of the book: its collectibility and current value, and how to identify a true first. Those whose interest in tedious matters to do with book […]

Parker Progress Report: Butcher’s Moon (Parker #16, 1974) by Richard Stark; a review

And so we reach the final novel in the first phase of Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake’s Parker crime series, and indeed in the first phase of my reviewing trawl through the Parkers: Butcher’s Moon. I’ve actually got three posts planned on Butcher’s Moon: this first one, which is, obviously, a review; […]

Lawrence Block’s trilogy of Parker forewords

Today, Mulholland Books posted Lawrence Block’s foreword to the University of Chicago Press edition of Butcher’s Moon. This means that all three of Block’s forewords, which form a trilogy of sorts, are now available for reading online.

The foreword to Butcher’s Moon, titled to make it more article-like “Canarsie and Westlake, […]

U of C reprints: Butcher’s Moon

OK, folks, here’s the one you’ve been waiting for. And you’ll have to wait a bit longer–official release is March 2011, which probably means Amazon will start shipping mid-February.

Still, waiting a bit longer beats the hell out of paying a fortune for a beat-up old paperback.

I really like this […]