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: Comeback, by Richard Stark (Robert Hale, 2001)

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

If you’ve been following my Existential Ennui posts on the Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark first-and-other editions I’ve bought and collected over the years—and if you have, I’d like to offer both my commiserations and my profound apologies—you’ll perhaps have noticed that […]

Westlake Score: The Mercenaries by Donald E. Westlake; signed association edition (T.V. Boardman, 1961)

Happy new year, folks. And let’s open my 2012 Violent World of Parker blogging account with a very special Westlake Score . . .

Up top there is the UK hardback first edition of Donald E. Westlake’s The Mercenaries, published by T.V. Boardman as part of their American Bloodhound Mystery line (no. […]

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 indeed […]

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 collecting […]

Richard Stark’s Parker novels: the British Gold Lion editions

Always nice to start the week with a massive pistol, I find.

Now, chances are, you won’t have seen this particular Parker cover before. It’s a hardback-with-dustjacket, it dates from 1973, and it’s one of three Parker novels issued by the same publisher in that year which, together, rank among the most elusive—and expensive—editions […]

Westlake Score: The Jugger (Parker #6) by Richard Stark (Allison & Busby hardcover, 1986)

This latest Westlake Score—which, for those who’ve evidently been dozing or “goofing off” at the back of the class, are posts in which I detail newly acquired editions of various of Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake’s novels—may not look like much to you, chief, but to me it represents another step on the […]