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Richard Stark

A Primer on Richard Stark’s Parker, Crime Fiction’s Most Brutal Thief

By Nick Kolakowski

March 31, 2022

When Donald Westlake adopted the pseudonym of Richard Stark and wrote the Parker novels, which follow a master thief through a series of bloody heists and betrayals, he pulled off a magic trick. The novels reveal precious little about Parker—not even his full name, much less a detailed family history—and yet he remains a compelling…

Featured Excerpt: Payback is Forever by Nick Kolakowski

By Nick Kolakowski

March 30, 2022

Excerpt   As hiding places went, you could do worse than the Village on a rainy Tuesday night. The bartenders at McSorley’s Old Ale House, on East 7th Street, liked to point to the dusty wooden chair tied to the ceiling and claim Abraham Lincoln had sat his bony ass in it a hundred years…

The 10 Best Modern Western Characters

By Jon Land

July 31, 2020

When asked about my Caitlin Strong series, I always describe them as modern-day westerns. And, in fact, the thriller form itself owes a great deal of its heritage to that genre. Having grown up with the films of Audie Murphy and Roy Rogers—not to mention classics like Shane, The Magnificent Seven, and High Noon along…

Capturing Corruption: 10 Crime Novels That Influenced True Crime Saga I Got A Monster

By Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg

July 21, 2020

Our book, I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, explores the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a gun-seizing unit praised for getting guns off the streets and supposedly stopping crime while simultaneously creating crime and running what one cop later called a “criminal enterprise” within…

Book Review: Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

By Thomas Pluck

July 9, 2020

Heist novels are a staple of the genre but often they are few and far between. Robin Hood thieves have taken hold, and often when I read fictional criminals, they are less like Richard Stark’s Parker and Wallace Stroby’s Crissa Stone and more like a shadowy justice department where the important thing is to steal…

The Edgar Awards Revisited: God Save the Mark by Donald Westlake (Best Novel; 1968)

By Mariah Fredericks

April 12, 2019

My parents were mystery readers. And when my mother died, she left behind a comprehensive library of mysteries popular in the 60s and 70s. Sayers. Le Carré. Margery Allingham. Ngaio Marsh. Most of them were British or British Empire. One lone American stood out: Donald Westlake’s Who Stole Sassi Manoon? Even as a kid, I…

Point Blank (1967): The Only Neo-Noir that Matters

By Peter Foy

December 8, 2016

I’ve been a consumer of countless crime fiction novels, films, and television for most of my life now—from eras ranging from Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard to Dennis Lehane—yet still I find myself pausing to ask this bleeding question: what the hell does neo-noir ever mean? Most commonly, people refer to neo-noir as anything that…

Back to the Beginning: Revisiting The Hunter by Richard Stark

By Eric Beetner

June 7, 2016

Parker has become one of the most celebrated characters in crime fiction. Over the course of 24 novels spanning four decades, this tough-talking, tougher-acting thief bulldozed his way through the years, never losing sight of his unique code of conduct. In the debut Parker novel, The Hunter from 1962, we meet a man who virtually…

Richard Stark and Parker: Thick as Thieves

By Adam Connell

May 17, 2016

“When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.” -Richard Stark, Firebreak When a book has an opening line like the one shown above, you’re compelled to rip through the rest of the novel straightaway, as if it were the most delicious hamburger you’ve ever tasted. The prolific Donald E. Westlake is…

5 Great Crime Novels Meet 5 Great Jazz Tracks

By Andrew Cartmel

May 11, 2016

Although reading is a largely visual task (albeit in practice and not in the sense of a picture), what makes it so enjoyable is the imaginative task of creating a world with all of your senses from what is being described through words. And, as often is the case, music is the perfect accompaniment to reading—the…

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