The burden of being Stark

an essay by Mel Cartagena

Straight up, is it or is it not cool to be Parker? If you make something out of the number of writers influenced by the unrepentant tone of Richard Stark, a collection that spans three decades and features names like Max Allan Collins, Brian Garfield, Lawrence Block and Elmore Leonard, then Parker has single-handedly spawned a new generation of professional thieves and ballsy conmen.

If you stack the preference among men for Richard Stark’s brand of fiction against the likes of other series characters (such as Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm or Don Pendelton’s Mac Bolan and The Executioner), Parker rises out of the paperback wars a hands-down winner. He is the secret ego dream of the Average Man. You either want to inhabit his white scarred skin or you want to be his friend. At the very least, you dream of being his point of contact, his liaison between the shady world he inhabits and the world of squares and straight Johns he steps into when he goes to work. (You get the cheap thrill of playing tough guy without actually having to prove it.)

And why not? He’s his own man, answers to no one, takes no shit from the Man or the Boss, is not intimidated by any of his peers, has no compunctions about taking a life (though is coolheaded enough to know it’s an easy out to be resisted), always places cold logic ahead of impulsive emotion, and takes full responsibility for what he does.

On the other hand, who could live like that indefinitely? Like a number of other series characters, Parker doesn’t seem to age, even as time and character incorporate into the greater myth that is Parker. It’s his personality, the core of his self, the literal contents behind his flat brown eyes and blunt muscularity that define him, that we secretly want to emulate (if only there weren’t consequences for that kind of behavior.) He is the virtual embodiment of the existential cult figure. Besides a wife that killed herself in the early chapters of The Hunter, Stark’s first novel, he has no earthly attachments of any kind; seemingly no past, and no discernible future. He lives to commit the next crime, to then retreat into a vacation resort, which serves as a form of hibernation until it’s time for him to be what he is again, a thief. (None of the E.W Hornug’s Raffles’ smoothness and charm here. He’s as blunt and direct as an upper cut, unconcerned with social niceties, and cares nothing for small talk.)

He is what Jean Luc Goddard’s Michel Poiccard could have been in Breathless if he’d found some focus for his energy. Restless drifting and lusting after the expatriate Patricia Franchini—who cared nothing for him—got him shot down by the police; Parker would have simply turned his back on her and moved on. (Another trait that is the secret envy of men. Parker simply won’t get into an argument with a woman. He’s not compelled to apologize for who he is, won’t be manipulated emotionally, and can’t be bothered with a dramatic tantrum of screaming curses and thrown dishes from a woman when there are others to be had.)

Parker is the realized Ubermensch that Raskolnikov tried to be in Crime and Punishment, a close cousin to Gene Hackman’s ‘Popeye’ Doyle (The French Connection.)

Which begs the question, who can carry on that lifestyle that indefinitely? How long can one person endure the strain of leading such a double life? The effort required to keep a humane front? What about the constant watchfulness it takes to keep unwanted intruders out of your secret life? (Police, angry business rivals, hitmen, nosy neighbors.) The ruthlessness needed to take swift and immediate action when an element of that secret life wants to invade your other face?

There’s a world of difference between the ‘businessman’ who goes to church on Sunday, donates to the little league and cancer research center, and shakes hands with the mayor for a picture in the midst of a fundraiser banquet, who also operates a criminal enterprise behind a veneer of respectability, and the hood who inhabits the shadows. (Parker does not delude himself, the way Al Capone declared to the world he was a ‘businessman’. He’s a thug, period.) The frame of mind between the single-minded operator, a man concerned only with the next score, and the criminal CEO who puts as much (if not more) effort on his public image as he does in running a smooth and secret operation is as vast as the theme of existentialism.

These mutually opposite types exist by inner compulsion, a choice that comes from within. Parker makes life below the gestalt of humanity appealing, but ultimately denies his own humanity. (Then again, Parker is not hampered by this because he simply has no need for other people except when he’s working, and a woman when he’s not. But Parker not only does not exist, he’s a type, a working variation of an existential figure carried to unusual extremes.)

Sooner or later his body will betray him through aging; he will need a nest egg, but his nature and the code of honor by which he lives (a code that’s not much different from Mike Hammer’s or Phillip Marlowe’s) determines that he live for the immediate reward of the next score, run through the money before it can be traced, and line up the next job before he has to resort to petty crime to survive.

The venerable ‘businessman’ living in a glass and steel high rise may not contain the inner ‘toughness’ and resiliency of Parker, but he’s aware of his limitations. The midnight runs of his early career, the sales of hot firearms, hijacked electronics and drug sales of his youth can’t go on forever. He’ll learn to launder money, set up legitimate business fronts, redirect money to untraceable sources, and extricate upstanding members of society around his illicit business, in case they’re needed. And he’ll be considered a great man by the world at large, if he can reign in his lust for power. (Consider Hugo Chavéz. After all the militant rants, the hour-long theatrical speeches and posturing while in militia garb—from a man that never served a day in his life—and the pictures with Fidel Castro that won him the presidency of Venezuela, he’s gone on to rewrite the country’s constitution to stretch his presidency for two more years, win a second term under suspicious circumstances, used Venezuela’s military to seize the country’s supply of crude petrol, and is presently engaging Colombia into an inter-border conflict that will probably launch both countries into war. Such is the man’s need for control.)

Then there’s the Parker-type: he’ll develop a chain of contacts with codes of behavior that make him feel comfortable; sharing space and time with those like him. Men who meet in the poorly lit rooms of backroad motels, eyeing each other with the wariness of Golden Gloves pugilists, each with the secret knowledge that this time he’ll come back with a cut of the swag, or not at all. (A theoretical example of this type can be seen in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Richard Burton embodies a latter- stage Parker in his role of Alec Leamas, the embittered, cynical, burned-out secret agent who has been on the fringes for too long but refuses to take a desk job, because he doesn’t know another way of life.)

These are the opposite sides of the Jekyll and Hyde coin. Dr. Henry Jekyll is the venerable gangster, living a seemingly respectful life, openly praised by the blameless cream of society, with his baser impulses hidden, while Edward Hyde (the Parker-type) roams the foggy, gaslit streets of London without the burden of a conscience or inner restraints. (In fact, it occurs to me that these two opposite extremes, inhabiting the body of one man, are the primeval versions of Parker and the venerable gangster. With time they have evolved into individual selves, each containing a spark of the other within, always fighting to keep this germ from contaminating the whole.)

This is the crucial divide among these types. It’s the reason why the venerable gangster ages honorably, has the mayor and chief of police speak at his eulogy (unless he makes the mistake of getting caught, in which case the ‘innocent’ can’t distance themselves from him fast enough, all the while denying they ever knew of his clandestine activities or having partaken of his dirty money), and have hospital wings and streets named after them, while the Parker type is either: 1) gunned down in a police showdown. 2) Sent to prison, where he dies at the hands of a rival, or a friend of a friend of the target he robbed who has contacts on the inside. 3) Found face-first in a weedy parking lot or barren field, either because he was wearing a wire to the meeting, was double-crossed after the heist went off, or was ordered to be removed by a third party who decreed him too hot to live.

It looks like I unwittingly created a flow chart for a plot generator, a sparser version of that cubed book they sell at Barnes & Noble that is supposed to help a writer blast through sticking points. (Is there anyone out there that uses this book? Has it worked for you? Let me know.) The question remains the same. Is it or is it not cool to be Parker?

January 23, 2005
Kissimmee, Florida

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Copyright © 2005 Mel Cartagena

MEL CARTAGENA was born in New York, raised in Puerto Rico, and currently lives in Massachusetts. His short fiction and nonfiction has been published in a variety of magazines in the United States, Europe and Canada. He has written a couple of screenplays, and wishes to produce one as an independent film this summer (if he gets the money and equipment.) He likes to exercise, listen to music, movies, long, lazy dinners, and writing (of course.)
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