54

  Richard Stark’s (Donald E. Westlake’s)

  THE HUNTER, aka POINT BLANK (1962)

  Duane Swierczynski

  Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Yonkers and Albany. He attended colleges in New York state without graduating. Considered a writer’s writer by his peers, Westlake received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay,The Grifters, three Edgar Awards, and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His first novel,The Mercenaries, was published in 1960. Thereafter Westlake wrote under his own name as well as several pseudonyms, in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of production. His pen names included Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt, Edwin West, and Richard Stark. Under his own name, he invented the comic caper genre (The Fugitive Pigeon, 1965) and wrote a number of humorous novels about a luckless criminal named John Dortmunder. Meanwhile, as Richard Stark, he chronicled the brutal existence of career criminal Parker. Combining the two, Westlake’s comic caper novel,Jimmy the Kid (1974), features Dortmunder’s gang of bumbling kidnappers using a Richard Stark/Parker novel as a blueprint for a crime. Westlake wrote over one hundred novels, many of which were made into movies,The Hot Rock and Bank Shot, for example. The Hunter was filmed twice as Point Blank (with Lee Marvin) and Payback (with Mel Gibson).

  I discovered Richard Stark in Stephen King’s The Dark Half. In an after-word, King talked about how fictional tough guy writer George Stark was modeled on Donald E. Westlake’s “Richard Stark” alter ego. I was seventeen years old, and I remember thinking I really needed to track down some stuff by this Stark guy. He sounded like my kind of writer. But this was an Internet-less 1989, and I couldn’t find a single book by Stark, in print or used.

  Life moved on. In 1997, I read and loved a novel called The Ax by Westlake, and later remembered that, oh yeah, this was that Stark guy, under his real name. The first Stark novel I finally laid hands on was The Damsel, in a beat-to-hell Signet edition I found on the bargain shelves at Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Bookshop (shelves, I later learned, that Westlake helped build.) I read it in a gulp and instantly craved more. By that time, after a hiatus that lasted from 1974 to 1997, Stark had resumed writing the Parker novels (the first of the new ones had the appropriate title, Comeback), and slowly . . . very, very slowly . . . older Starks returned to print. In the years that followed, I finally managed to track down all of the 1962–1974 Parker novels, from The Hunter through Butcher’s Moon. If there’s a better series of American crime novels, I have yet to discover it.

  I also devoured all of the Westlakes I could find. While he is famous for his comic caper novels, I enjoyed his hard-edged stuff better: The Ax, Killing Time, 361, The Hook, Don’t Lie to Me, Murder Among Children, Killy, The Smashers (aka The Mercenaries). But it was Stark’s novels about Parker, a tough amoral heister with no first name, that really grabbed me. So much so that when I decided to write a straight crime novel, I wrote one about a mute getaway driver named Lennon. Needless to say,The Wheelman owes a serious debt to Richard Stark—the pace, the clipped emotions. So do a lot of other tough guy novels in the Stark mode, including Max Allan Collins’s Nolan series, Garry Disher’s Wyatt, and more recently Dan Simmons’s Joe Kurtz and Tom Piccirilli’s Chase. The influence goes beyond novels. Whenever I see a character like Terence Stamp’s Wilson in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, or even Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, I think of Parker. Whenever I read a Punisher comic, I think of Parker. Richard Stark infused the crime genre with fresh, cold blood. He made it okay to root for the bad guy.

  Funny thing is, I don’t believe Westlake set out to revolutionize anything. At the time, he was being published in hardback and wanted to write paperback originals under a pen name. So Westlake came up with a story about a remorseless, cold operator who, by novel’s end, would be caught and punished. Because that’s what you did to bad guys in crime novels back in the 1960s. You caught them. And then you punished them.

  But something weird happened along the way. Gold Medal, which had been Westlake’s intended target, passed on The Hunter. Pocket Books accepted it, but editor Bucklin Moon asked for one change. He wanted Westlake to let Parker get away at the end, so that the novel could serve as the first in a series. Westlake once told an interviewer: “So I wound up with a truly cold leading series character, which was an interesting thing to do and to try not to soften him. We came in here with this son of a bitch and we’re going out with this son of a bitch.”

  And that’s the nasty appeal of the Parker series: it’s fun to read about sons of bitches. It’s fun to watch how they respond when you start to apply the screws to them. The key to the Parker novels is that they aren’t about good guys vs. bad guys, or even flawed hero vs. bad guys. No—they’re about one bad guy versus even worse guys. You may not want to invite Parker over to the house to roll around with your kids in the backyard, but you can’t help admiring the way he operates. Parker doesn’t do office politics. He’s not passive-aggressive. He’s not going to lead a life of quiet desperation, like the rest of us mooks. Instead, Parker cuts out all of the bullshit we deal with on a daily basis, and figures out the straightest line between himself and his goal (which in The Hunter is $45,000 he’s owed). Then he walks that line. And God help those who try to stop him. Who wouldn’t want to be Parker?

  The series has a remarkable unity, not only because of its impressive tough tone, but also because each book has four sections. The first, second, and fourth are presented from Parker’s viewpoint, while the third is presented from the viewpoint of Parker’s antagonist, usually a fellow criminal who has double-crossed him. In addition, the books usually begin with a sentence that has the following structure: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.” “When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in.” “When the car stopped rolling, Parker kicked out the rest of the wind-shield and crawled through onto the wrinkled hood.”

  Despite Parker being a “son of a bitch,” my wife and I named our first-born son Parker, in honor of the Richard Stark character (as well as Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man). A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to meet Donald Westlake at the MWA Edgar Awards. Sarah Weinman introduced us, and I believe I just stood there, trying like hell not to say something stupid/stammer/collapse. What do you say to the writer who showed you the way? Thankfully, Westlake was gracious, funny, and totally laid-back—not at all like his cold-blooded creation. I shook his hand and thanked him for his “body of work,” or something geeky like that. Incidentally, this was the Edgars where Stephen King received the MWA Grandmaster Award. I wish I could have gathered both of them in the same place to tell them: You two! You’re the ones who did this to me!

  Duane Swierczynski is the author of several thrillers, including the Stark-inspired heist-gone-wrong story,The Wheelman, as well as The Blonde and Severance Package —which he’s currently adapting as a movie for Lionsgate. He also writes the monthly X-Men series,Cable, for Marvel Comics, and has penned adventures for such various heroes (or antiheroes) as Punisher, Wolverine, and the Immortal Iron Fist. Swierczynski recently collaborated with CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker on Level 26: Dark Origins, the first in a series of “digi-novels” that combine traditional book publishing with digital video. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, son, and daughter.

  55

  John le Carré’s

  THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1963)

  Denise Hamilton

  John le Carré is the pseudonym of David Cornwell, a former British intelligence officer who revolutionized the Cold War espionage thriller in the early 1960s with his character-driven, elegantly plotted, and morally ambiguous books. Born in 1931, le Carré worked for MI5 and later MI6 under diplomatic cover and as a political consul in Germany. He knew British double agent Kim Philby and ran spies, conducted interrogations, and debriefed defectors from behind the Iron Curtain. Le Carré is famous for his icy, intelligent writing and his insider details about the tradecraft of espionage. Many of his best-known novels feature British spymaster George Smiley. But Smiley plays only a fleeting role in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carré’s third book and his widely acknowledged Cold War masterpiece.Spy’s international success allowed le Carré to quit government work and devote his life to fiction. In 1965,Spy was turned into a movie starring Richard Burton. Other le Carré novels adapted into films include The Little Drummer Girl,The Russia House, The Constant Gardener, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a television miniseries with Alec Guinness as Smiley. After the collapse of Communism, le Carré settled into writing novels about the ambiguities, abuses, and secret operations of the war on terror. In a recent BBC interview, he ranked Spy as his favorite and best book.

  In 1963, a British intelligence officer stationed in Hamburg published a 256-page novel called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Set inside the murky world of British and East German intelligence,Spy was a departure from popular espionage novels of the time. There were no Bondian pyrotechnics, little glamour or gadgetry, and negligible violence. What there was—in spades—was cool, elegant writing, moral ambiguity, and almost unbearable psychological suspense.

  Alec Leamas, the book’s middle-aged antihero, embarks on a dangerous mission behind the Iron Curtain to frame the head of East German intelligence as a British spy. Trapped in a world of shifting realities, allegiances, and betrayals, Leamas begins to wonder if he’s also a sacrificial pawn. This is a masterful chess game of a novel, spinning out feints within feints in prose all the more haunting for its simplicity. Its plot reversals and twists are concealed one inside the next like a series of Russian nesting dolls, and the true purpose of Leamas’s mission and MI6’s perfidy is revealed only in the book’s final pages.

  The book lays out themes that le Carré returned to time and again— the morally corrupt world of the spy; the fussy, donnish spymasters spinning webs from the safety of Whitehall; innocents ensnared in sinister plots and agents on both sides of the Curtain whose similarities might just outweigh their differences. But if it was a “game,” it was deadly serious and played with real lives.

  When Leamas’s lover asks whether he cares that innocent people may die because of his lies, Leamas admits that the possibility makes him sick with shame and anger. But he can’t see things in black-and-white. His only concern is whether an operation, however foul, will be successful. Indeed few of le Carré’s spies see the world in black-and-white, which makes them infinitely interesting characters. The book’s bleak ending, where Leamas finally takes a doomed stand, suggests his disillusionment at realizing that all governments, regardless of ideology, regard their citizens as expendable cogs in the wheel of politics.

  Spy’s enduring appeal is that it illuminates a dark corner of mankind while also hinting at the redemptive power of love. Almost fifty years after publication, it remains as haunting and devastating as the day it was written. But le Carré has also captured a historic epoch, deftly sketching postwar Berlin’s “half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war”; the virulence of anti-Semitic East German officials even after the Holocaust, and the rigidity of the British class system.

  Protagonist Leamas is far from a privileged Oxbridge scion. He’s eminently unclubbable, lacks a degree, and is considered stubborn and willful by his Whitehall superiors, who suspect he may be part Irish. But Leamas gets results, which is all that counts. For years he ran the important Berlin station, where he cultivated a successful network of East German spies. But slowly they began to be picked off by his nemesis in East Berlin, an icy, unrepentant Nazi spymaster named Mundt.

  Spy opens with one of the most riveting scenes in thriller fiction, as Leamas’s last double agent tries to make it across the East German border into the Western sector on a bicycle and is shot down by guards within twenty feet of freedom as Leamas looks on, helpless. With his network blown, Leamas returns to London, where the Service has hatched their clever plan to bring down Mundt. Whitehall also hints about a mysterious “asset” left in East Germany, whom it is eager to protect from Mundt’s clutches.

  And so le Carré sets the first deception in motion. Leamas pretends he’s been sacked, starts to drink and brawl, and is approached by Communist operatives in London who hope to bribe the dissolute “ex” spy into revealing a rumored mole in the East German service. Spirited away to East Berlin, Leamas plants the seed of Mundt’s treason with his Jewish Communist interrogator, Fiedler, who itches to replace his Nazi boss. Mundt is put on trial, but then the plot twists jaggedly. When Whitehall’s schemes are exposed and Mundt is vindicated, suspicion falls on Fiedler. Was he Whitehall’s secret asset, Leamas wonders? Will Mundt now kill them both?

  Then le Carré lowers the boom. “Suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly trick.” The slight of hand that le Carré pulls off is diabolically clever. Check. Check. Checkmate.

  The book ends as it begins, with a nail-biting East German border scene as two people dash madly across the no-man’s-land to scale the towering, sinister wall to freedom. Le Carré keeps readers in suspense until the final two paragraphs, then sends them reeling in disbelief. Many will want to start rereading immediately to figure out how exactly the author did it, to pinpoint every hinge on which the plot turned, and catch the hints they missed the first time around.

  The Cold War is history now, and the covert battles waged by Soviet and Western spy agencies seem almost quaint after the visceral terrors of 9/11 and the ensuing “hot” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back then, captured spies were often exchanged rather than killed, and both sides waged mainly psychological warfare, played according to strict rules. There were no suicide bombers, videotaped beheadings, and other bestialities. At its core, the Cold War was fought between Western peoples with similar cultural backgrounds and reference points. No wonder we see it through a scrim of nostalgia.

  John le Carré was the bard of Cold War literature. He pierced the veil of secrecy and ideology and taught us about spycraft and skepticism while writing about universal human themes like honor, betrayal, and love.The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was a thriller of its time, but through the alchemy of le Carré’s words, it has grown into a novel that is timeless.

  Denise Hamilton’s latest novel,The Last Embrace, is set in 1949 Hollywood and features a missing starlet, gangsters, cops, and a special effects studio wiz. Denise also writes the contemporary Eve Diamond series and is editor of Los Angeles Noir, a best-selling anthology that won a Southern California Independent Booksellers’ award for best mystery of the year. Denise’s books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony, and Willa Cather awards. Her debut,The Jasmine Trade, was a finalist for the prestigious Creasey Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Association. Prior to writing novels, Hamilton was a Los Angeles Times staff writer. Her award-winning journalism has also appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel, and New Times. During the Bosnian War, Hamilton lived and taught in Yugoslavia as a Fulbright Scholar, where she met many spies. She now lives in a Los Angeles suburb with her husband and two boys.

  56

  Wilbur Smith’s

  WHEN THE LION FEEDS (1964)

  W. D. Gagliani

  Wilbur Smith (1933–) was born in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and nearly died of cerebral malaria. After a miraculous recovery, he spent his early life on his father’s huge cattle ranch. A reader from early on, his hated years at boarding school and university led him to an unwanted—and blessedly brief—career in accountancy, and an ardent desire to write fiction. The second novel he wrote became his first to be published and attracted a lot of attention, including the sale of film rights, foreign and book club sales, and critical acclaim.When the Lion Feeds was based on Smith’s formative years in Africa, focusing on Sean and Garrick Courtney, competitive brothers who stand poised to participate in some of South Africa’s greatest historical moments, especially the Zulu War of 1879 and the subsequent gold rush. Following this auspicious debut with more chapters in the Courtney saga (The Sound of Thunder,A Sparrow Falls, The Burning Shore, etc.), then adding stand-alone contemporary and war thrillers, and eventually returning to the distant past, Smith made the best of the old writer’s advice to write what you know: his books are all set in the Africa he loves, albeit in different historical contexts. Many of them have been filmed with star power such as Lee Marvin, Roger Moore, and Rod Taylor (Shout at the Devil,Gold Mine, Dark of the Sun), and all have made him perhaps the most popular African-born author of all time.

  Already a voracious reader long before reaching high school, the boy has worked his way through Jules Verne and found an affinity for African adventures, fueled by Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon and lesser-known Dick Sands: The Boy Captain. Moving on to H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She, and later Robert Ruark’s Uhuru, the boy then stumbles onto a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version of Wilbur Smith’s The Sun-bird. Awed by the author’s ability to tell parallel stories set in present-day and ancient Africa, the boy hungrily seeks more by this author. He finds When the Lion Feeds, Smith’s first published novel, and the African landscape opens up anew.

  I was that boy, and I’d already consumed as much African adventure as one could stand, and more. I was enthralled by the movie Zulu, which recounted the unvarnished story of the British defense of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War of 1879, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the battle figured prominently in Wilbur Smith’s book. Despite the artistic license of placing a Gatling gun at Rorke’s Drift when no other historical text agrees (Gatlings were used by the British elsewhere in the war, but not at the mission station), Smith’s portrait of the battle, and the war itself, brought that conflict to life for a young military history buff. The rest of his works would prove as compelling to the writer-in-training I happened to be in the 1970s, but it was the hook of the Courtney saga that would keep me reading.