But you can’t judge a book by its cover, and what lay inside was not quite as advertised—although by no means a disappointment. Quite the reverse, actually. This was a solid, high-quality thriller. (But badly put together. I remember a typo on the second page: “actaully” for “actually.”)
First surprise: it was Canadian, not American, set in Montreal at the turn of the 1960s. (Copyright date was 1962, I remember.) The opening was a very short expository info dump, via dialogue. The city government had just changed, and an anticrime crusade was starting, aiming “without delay to put vice on ice in Montreal.” Then we meet the hero, a private investigator named Maxwell Dent. Like most of his generation, Dent is ex-services, and pretty solid—a bit of a stiff, basically. Then the rich guy with the daughter problem calls him—very Raymond Chandler. The daughter is a heroin addict, and to feed her habit she’s stolen a family ring—not only valuable, but recognizable.
And we’re off to the races.
What follows is Dent’s mission to rescue the lovely Helen Ashton, and to bed Helen’s equally lovely big sister Thorn, and to get the ring back, and finally to bust the Back Man, thereby saving future Helen Ashtons from the relentless hell of drug addiction. I guess the mechanics of the narcotics trade are a little dated, but nothing else is, really. This is where thrillers were in about 1960, and not much has changed.
Lee Child turned to writing thrillers after being made redundant by Granada Television in 1995. His debut novel, Killing Floor, appeared in 1997, featuring his series hero, the peripatetic ex-military policeman Jack Reacher. It won the Macavity and Anthony awards. There are seventeen Jack Reacher novels in total, the most recent being A Wanted Man (2012). In 2011, Child won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for 61 Hours (2010). He was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America in 2009. A film of his novel One Shot (2005) will be released in 2013, directed by Christopher McQuarrie and starring Tom Cruise.
The Hunter (aka Point Blank and Payback)
by Richard Stark (1962)
F. PAUL WILSON
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Richard Stark was one of the many pen names of Donald Westlake (1933–2008), a hugely prolific writer of novels and short stories, most of them in the mystery genre, who operated under more pseudonyms than most convicted fraudsters. He was a committed writer from his youth, and began writing soft-porn novels under the pen name Alan Marshall at the end of the 1950s before finally publishing The Mercenaries, his first novel as Donald Westlake, in 1960. He won Edgar Awards in three different categories, and many of his works were adapted for film, most famously his 1962 novel The Hunter, which became the basis for John Boorman’s 1967 film Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, as well as Ringo Lam’s Full Contact (1992), and the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback (1999).
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As a Lee Marvin fan, I couldn’t miss the movie Point Blank. And being an aspiring writer at the time (we’re talking 1967), I always kept an eye on the credits for the name of the screenwriter. This film had three but was “based on the novel The Hunter by Richard Stark.”
Who the hell was Richard Stark and how did he get The Hunter made into a film?
I went on the hunt myself and found a movie tie-in edition. I didn’t know that Richard Stark was a pseudonym for Donald Westlake and wouldn’t have cared if I had—Westlake was a relative newbie then. I plunked down fifty cents and started reading.
Whoa! I’d thought the movie gritty and violent, but that was kindergarten fare compared to the novel. The protagonist, Parker, capitalizes the “anti” in “antihero”. Parker who? Who Parker? We never know. He has aliases, but most of his cronies, his wife included, know him only as Parker. He even thinks of himself simply as “Parker.”
Set in the early 1960s (published in 1962), The Hunter opens with:
When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.
He’s in the process of walking across the George Washington Bridge toward Manhattan—a penniless, raw-boned man in ill-fitting clothes, a man with a major chip on his shoulder, a man with a purpose, but we don’t know what. By the end of the day he’s scammed his way into a new suit, a hotel room, and eight hundred bucks in cash. Along the way, he skates a subway turnstile, bums a dime from “a latent fag with big hips,” is needlessly cruel to a diner waitress, forges a license, and empties some poor SOB’s bank account. And that’s just Chapter 1.
All right . . . this is the bad guy, right? When do we meet the good guy?
Don’t hold your breath.
Chapter 2 opens with Parker looking down at a beautiful blonde whom he’s just slugged and knocked to the floor.
As shocking as the scene was, this neophyte writer was struck by the economy of the transition. A page later, intervening events are backfilled in a couple of sentences, but Stark spares us the trip from Parker’s hotel to the apartment house, as well as entering the apartment and (most important) delivering the punch. Instead, he plops us in medias res.
The woman is Lynn, Parker’s wife. We learn that she betrayed him after a heist and left him for dead to run off with Mal Resnick, one of the heist crew.
“I was never a whore, Parker,” she said. “You know that.”
“No. You sold my body instead.”
We learn Parker’s mission: to get his hands around Mal Resnick’s throat and squeeze the life out of him.
The next morning he finds Lynn dead of an overdose, and his only emotion is anger that he now has to dispose of her body. He spends the day with the corpse, drinking and watching TV. The whole while, his wife is never “Lynn,” but simply “her” or “she.” He’s severed all connection. Once night comes, he dumps her body in Central Park. He doesn’t want Mal spotting a photo of her in the paper, so he slashes her dead face until it’s unrecognizable.
Whew.
In the course of his search for Mal, we learn that Parker and Mal and a crew massacred a dozen or more South American revolutionaries who’d come north with ninety thousand dollars to buy guns. We also learn that Parker was planning (surprise!) to kill Mal and take his share, but Mal got to Lynn and forced her to shoot her husband. They left Parker’s body and set the house on fire.
Parker wasn’t dead, of course. He pulled himself from the burning building, but before he could start his pursuit he was jailed on a vagrancy charge. Finally, he killed a guard, escaped, and headed for New York.
The story switches to Mal’s side. He now has a managerial position in the Outfit (read: organized crime). He’d bungled an assignment a while back, resulting in a big loss to the Outfit, but he used the proceeds from the gunrunner heist to pay off the debt. Now he’s sitting pretty . . . until he hears that some tough guy is asking questions, looking for him. Who? When he learns Lynn has disappeared, he knows it has to be Parker, back from the supposedly dead.
After some cat and mouse, Parker tracks him down, gets his hands around Mal’s throat . . . but eases back. Where’s the money? When he learns Mal gave it to the Outfit, Parker gets a list of names from him, then strangles Mal.
End of story? No. Parker decides that killing Mal isn’t enough. Half of that ninety thousand was rightfully his, and he wants it back. To do so, he’s going to have to take on the Outfit. Well, why not?
Now things get a bit surreal, but really interesting. Everything that’s happened so far has been about settling debts. Lynn and Mal owed him. Other people who died simply got in the way. Now, the way he sees it, the Outfit owes him. And what is owed must be paid. Simple as that, as he explains to one of the Outfit’s bigwigs:
“The funnies call it the syndicate. The goons and hustlers call it the Outfit. You call it the organization. I hope you people have fun with your words. But I don’t care if you call yourselves the Red Cross, you owe me forty-five thousand dollars and you’ll pay me back whether you like it or not.”
Throughout the novel, Parker reveals only what’s necessary about himself. But as he makes his moves against the mob, we sn
eak a peek inside him. His lifestyle until now has involved living in luxury resort hotels, financed by one or two juicy heists a year. That pattern was changed by Lynn’s betrayal and he’s now caught in a new pattern of collecting on debts. The forty-five thousand will allow him to return to his old pattern. This is his true mission: to restore the old lifestyle.
I don’t want to spoil the resolution for those who haven’t read it, but I will tell you that it doesn’t end like any of the film adaptations. In fact, the final chapter has a tacked-on feel.
Only years later did I learn that The Hunter was intended as a one-off, but Westlake/Stark’s editor suggested he change the ending to allow for more Parker novels. Was Parker killed in the original? Jailed? Sadly, Donald Westlake is no longer around to answer.
But what is it about Parker that created an audience for twenty-four novels and eight films? (Three based on The Hunter alone: Point Blank, Full Contact, Payback. None of the films has the real Parker—Hollywood can’t resist infusing him with empathy—but Brian Helgeland’s Payback: Straight Up: The Director’s Cut comes the closest, and he was fired from the film because of that.) Parker has no respect for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness except his own. He’s a sociopath who steals and kills without remorse. He has no code, no honor, even among his fellow thieves, as witnessed by his plan to kill Mal and take his share of the heist.
Yet clearly in The Hunter he is the wronged party (just marginally so), and we wind up rooting for him. Perhaps it’s Parker’s single-mindedness and relentless efficiency that draw us.
I remember tearing through The Hunter and wanting more more more, and going out to find it. During the reread to write this essay, the 1962 period setting offered a few smiles: ten cents for a cup of coffee; eighty-five cents considered extravagant for a roast beef sandwich; Mal “splurging” thirty-two bucks on a Midtown hotel suite.
I hit some speed bumps that I hadn’t noticed before. Stylistically, the writing is crisp and terse enough to overcome a surplus of passive voice. Try as I might to suspend disbelief, Lynn’s betrayal of Parker, despite Mal’s threats, doesn’t wash. Also, the novel seems padded in spots, most blatantly in Mal’s dalliance with the prostitute, and in Parker’s surreptitious invasion of the Outfit’s hotel only to discover what the reader has known for quite a while: Mal has moved out. Knowing Parker’s elaborate B&E will not lead to a confrontation robs the sequence of all sense of anticipation.
These are quibbles against the big picture of a writer taking a major risk in creating a murderous sociopathic protagonist with a supporting cast that includes not a single decent, trustworthy human being. And making it work.
The Hunter: a violent, twisty, oft-imitated tour de force crime novel that was sui generis in its time.
F. Paul Wilson is a New York Times best-selling author who has won the Stoker, Inkpot, Porgie, and Prometheus awards. His forty-five books span science fiction, horror, adventure, medical thrillers, and virtually everything between. He has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media as well, and his work has been translated into twenty-four languages. His latest thrillers, Nightworld and Cold City, star his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. Jack: Secret Vengeance is the last of a young-adult trilogy starring a fourteen-year-old Jack. Paul resides at the Jersey Shore. Visit him online at www.repairmanjack.com.
Gun Before Butter (aka Question of Loyalty)
by Nicolas Freeling (1963)
JASON GOODWIN
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Nicholas Freeling (1927–2003) first conceived of his series hero Inspector Van der Valk while under arrest in Amsterdam. Formerly a chef, the author wrote eleven Van der Valk titles, the first, Love in Amsterdam, appearing in 1962. The inspector’s widow, Arlette, appeared in a further two novels after Freeling killed off Van der Valk in 1972. The Henri Castang series of novels followed, the first of which, A Dressing of Diamonds, was published in 1974. Freeling also published a number of cookery-related titles, which functioned as semiautobiographical works. The winner of the Edgar Award for The King of the Rainy Country (1966), Freeling was also the recipient of a Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and a CWA Gold Dagger.
* * *
Nicolas Freeling suffered a career setback in 1972 when he casually topped his detective, Van der Valk, halfway through his eleventh book. Fans were furious, and his French and Swedish publishers dropped the series, but Freeling refused to resurrect him. Arlette, the detective’s wife, took over for a spell, and there were stand-alone thrillers both before and after Freeling went on to create Henri Castang, who never had quite the same persuasive power. Perhaps he was too close to Simenon territory—territory that may have informed, but never overshadowed, the original Van der Valk series.
Gun Before Butter—the title is quirky and brilliant—was the third of them, published in 1963 along with Because of the Cats, set in a Euroland that stretched from Amsterdam to Brussels, with Van der Valk as the unconventional policeman in a conventionally Dutch force. Driven by a dispassionate curiosity about human nature, overstepping the mark a tiny bit each time, Van der Valk edges his way into a case, teasing out its details like a man pulling on woolen threads. He cares about the men and women he investigates, sometimes—as in Gun Before Butter—to the point of letting the wrongdoer go free.
But then Freeling himself was a pretty unconventional writer. Born in London, and raised in Southampton and the Irish Free State during the war, he slouched around Europe and became a chef. In Amsterdam he went to jail for stealing food from the kitchen; fascinated by the policeman who interviewed him, he began writing his first novel, Love in Amsterdam, on prison soap wrappers.
He belonged to a generation that spat out Agatha Christie and her fellows, and admired Chandler. Writers respond to other writers more than they respond to real life, and Freeling was like Chandler in that he rebelled against the type of crime story in which plot is everything. Who cares, Freeling asked despairingly, who killed Roger Ackroyd? Much later he wrote that
of all those dreadful “rules” invented for the detective story, the most inescapable was that the personages should be cardboard, jiggled about to follow the Plot. The capitals are deliberate, for character was thought indecent, like taking off one’s trousers in church, and the Christie juggernaut was there to make the message felt.
In Gun Before Butter, instead of the country house, we have the slew of northern Europe, Holland, French Flanders, Benelux, Dusseldorf. Freeling was not an Englishman abroad: he was a European who happened to write in English. Both in their settings, and in their focus on character and slow-burning drama, Freeling’s novels belong to a tradition established by Erskine Childers in his 1912 thriller, The Riddle of the Sands; Childers, as it happens, was a cousin of Freeling’s.
The other obvious comparison is with Georges Simenon, but Freeling (like Childers) was more interested in contemporary issues. Simenon doesn’t talk much about the war—he was practically a collaborator—but in Freeling’s books memories, compromise, and loss lurk in the background. Van der Valk probes old wounds concealed under the veneer of polite Dutch society, and looks with wry amusement at the arrangements being made to prevent a new outbreak of hostilities. His stories are absolutely of their time, and, like all the best stories, timeless.
In spite of Freeling’s avowed disdain for plot, Gun Before Butter has plenty of it: not scaffolding, but delicate filigree work that almost invisibly supports the unfolding of the characters and places with which the story deals. There’s a fight between Dutch layabouts and some Italian boys with whom Lucienne Englebert, the object of Van der Valk’s affections in the book, is associating. Van der Valk remembers the first time that he saw her, at the scene of a car crash that killed her father, a noted conductor. With Van der Valk she’s initially frosty, but unbends a little at his musical knowledge. (Her father’s womanizing, Van der Valk thinks, had “lent Englebert’s music a tiny touch of the spurious, a hint of insincerity.”)
Out of disaffection Lucienne co
mmits a pointless misdemeanor, short-changing customers in a shop. She refuses to take a warning and, when Van der Valk reluctantly books her, she does jail time. She then blows her inheritance traveling round Europe and goes to France, where she can get a proper job. She’s a rich girl who doesn’t want money; what she wants is something real. She’s out of Van der Valk’s life for the moment, as his attention shifts to the murder of an unknown man in a small house in Amsterdam. There are no suspects, just a few oddities—a car left parked at a rakish angle in the burgerlich Dutch street, a painting in the house that seems too good for it, a link to a country shooting lodge . . .
Police procedural takes over from what is, really, a whispered love story, as Van der Valk patiently sets to work establishing the identity of the dead man. Freeling’s tone throughout is confidential, precise, and immediate. The political police are involved: Van der Valk sidesteps them neatly. When the dead man is revealed to be Stam, a butter smuggler, his superiors seem happy to leave it there: Stam murdered by a rival in a dodgy business, with no surprises. Van der Valk, however, knows too much—and so do we—to let it lie; he carries on with the investigation.
Later, he recognizes Lucienne as a pump attendant and mechanic at a roadside garage. Finally, she agrees to tell her story:
“I was very happy, you know. I should like someone to know about that. I don’t think there is anyone but you I can possibly tell.”
She doesn’t actually tell us her story: Freeling does. He goes back through Lucienne’s life: the details of landing her job, meeting a man, falling in love, losing her virginity. The slow and psychologically acute buildup to the murder is what Freeling is interested in: the crime itself—like Van der Valk’s own death, many books later—rushes by so quickly that you have to read it twice to catch it. Lucienne is both impeccable and real, a masterpiece of characterization: as autonomous as the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but much more believable. Freeling, incidentally, writes sex better than almost anyone, but not much in this book.