The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

  Copyright © 1969 by Richard Stark

  Foreword © 2012 by Sarah Weinman

  All rights reserved.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77039-0 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77039-7 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77040-6 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933–2008.

  The dame : an Alan Grofield novel/Richard Stark; with a new foreword by Sarah Weinman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77039-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77039-7 (paperback : alkaline paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3573.E9D355 2012

  813’54–DC23

  2011033424

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  The Dame

  An Alan Grofield Novel

  Richard Stark

  WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY SARAH WEINMAN

  The University of Chicago Press

  PRAISE FOR THE DAME & RICHARD STARK

  “Nobody tops Stark in his objective portrayals of a world of total amorality.”

  New York Times

  “As elegantly and unfussily written as you’d expect.”

  NICK JONES, Existential Ennui (blog)

  “Guess that’s just the inexorable pull of the man like Westlake and the Parker universe: once you’re hooked, you’ll read anything even remotely Parker-related.”

  NICK JONES, Existential Ennui (blog)

  “A pleasure . . . Westlake’s ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “A book by this guy is cause for happiness.”

  STEPHEN KING

  “Energy and imagination light up virtually every page, as does some of the best hard-boiled prose ever to grace the noir genre.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Brilliant... Donald E. Westlake (aka Richard Stark) knows how to freeze the blood.”

  TERRENCE RAFFERTY, GQ

  “One of the best craftsmen now crafting stories.”

  GEORGE F. WILL

  “Marvelous. . . . Nearly half a century into his writing career, Westlake remains superb.”

  Entertainment Weekly

  “Thoroughly successful. Rough, macho stuff, but it is tight and exciting.”

  London Standard

  “Stark’s momentum is such that the more matter he throws into the hopper the faster the gears turn. The books are machines that all but read themselves. You can read the entire series and not once have to invest in a bookmark.”

  LUC SANTE

  “Crime fiction stripped down—as it was meant to be. . . . Oh, how the pages keep turning.”

  Philadelphia Inquirer

  GROFIELD NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

  The Damsel

  The Dame

  The Blackbird

  The Sour Lemon Score

  PARKER NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

  The Hunter (Payback)

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Outfit

  The Mourner

  The Score

  The Jugger

  The Seventh

  The Handle

  The Rare Coin Score

  The Green Eagle Score

  The Black Ice Score

  The Sour Lemon Score

  Deadly Edge

  Slayground

  Plunder Squad

  Butcher’s Moon

  Comeback

  Backflash

  Flashfire

  Firebreak

  Breakout

  Nobody Runs Forever

  Ask the Parrot

  Dirty Money

  Information about the complete list of Richard Stark books published by the University of Chicago Press—and electronic editions of them—can be found on our website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.

  to PARKER

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  FOREWORD

  IF YOU are brand new to the works of Richard Stark, my advice would be to put down this book for a while and acquaint yourself first with the many other noir crime novels featuring Stark’s main man Parker, that merciless and iconic antihero. Once you’re finished working your way through those small masterpieces, you’ll be ready to tackle these three entertaining tales (as well as a fourth) starring Parker’s quick-witted, dapper companion in heisting, Alan Grofield.

  Grofield, who first appeared in The Score (1964), isn’t exactly Watson to Parker’s Holmes—the very idea is discombobulating—but like Conan Doyle’s go-to narrator, Grofield himself leads a double professional life. “I’m an actor,” he explains in The Damsel (1967), “and it’s impossible to make ends meet these days as an actor in the legitimate theater. Unless you’re willing to peddle your integrity to the movie and television people, there’s nothing to it. . . . Do you realize that in my peak year so far I earned a measly thirty-seven hundred dollars from acting?”

  For Alan Grofield, you see, has principles, at least applied to artistic pursuits. No movies or television. His greatest love is the theater, and he channels this love by way of summer stock, operating a small troupe in the Midwest. Is it a living? Hardly. Which is why he turns to more illicit means of funding his theatrical enterprises. Early on in The Dame (1969), Grofield describes his origin story in criminal enterprise: he started off nervous his first time, since this whole heist business seemed so alien to his day-to-day life. But two jobs later, he’d graduated from amateur to pro, and by the time we meet him in The Score, Grofield is well-seasoned to the point where a hard man like Parker, wary and distrustful in the best of times, doesn’t think twice about turning to him for the tightest of tight spots.

  Alan Grofield appeared in print a grand total of eight times—four times as Parker’s adjunct, and four times on his own. As a sidekick, Grofield’s bon vivant nature emerged in snippets, but he never overshadowed Parker. If anything, Stark seemed to underplay Grofield such that he lit up the page almost by accident—his wit, skirt chasing, and Shakespeare quotes offering a welcome break from Parker’s tough, stoic worldview. On his own, however, Grofield is both more present and more enigmatic, almost as if Westlake viewed him as a perpetual experiment.

  Grofield was a lab rat for Westlake, who liked to experiment with tone—veering, somewhat wildly, between dark violence, witty banter, and absurdist humor—and plot. (Westlake commented that Lemons Never Lie [1971] was a way for him to experiment with a narrative arc featuring multiple bounces moving higher and higher, instead of the more common parabolic plot curve.) At the same time, the Grofield novels provide a transition between the hard-edged Parker series and the more avuncular, humor-laden books Westlake published under his own name.

  * * *

  The Damsel opens when a girl climbs in Grofield’s fifth-floor hotel window. He’s in Mexico, coming back from the near-dead after events described in The Handle (a Parker novel from 1966), with a bag of money he hasn’t, on account of his infirm status, gotten around to spending. His first spoken line in The Damsel is typical of Grofield’s wit and weakness for women: “If you’re my fairy godmother, I want my back scratched.” After pages of witty banter, Grofield will see his itch relieved, and much more, from young Main Line lass Elly Fitzgerald. What emerges is a mix of romantic comedy and adventure that echoed Westlake’s earliest ventures into humorous crime novels like The Fugitive Pigeon (1965) and The Spy in the Ointment (1966), published just a year before the first Grofield novel.

  In The Damsel, Westlake takes some time out from traveling Mexican highways filled with action-centered plotting to enjoy a little social satire. Here the author, under the cover of Grofield’s critical eye, astutely zeroes in on the community class system of the charming Mexican city San Miguel de Allende, comparing it to Greenwich Village, of all places:

  Along Macdougal and Eighth Streets the same faces could be found in all the tourist traps: the tourists themselves, looking embarrassed and irritable, and the unwashed, shaven youngsters living around here while going through their artistic phase, looking both older and younger than their years. Both the tourists and the youngsters were self-conscious, and neither could cover it all the way.

  But here there was a third kind of person, too. Around San Miguel there was a colony of retired people from the State, living on pensions. A thousand dollars a year was damn good money on the local economy, so these retired people could live in a climate as good as Florida or Califo
rnia, but at a fraction of the price. Their presence somehow made both the tourists and the youngsters look even more foolish than usual, as though somehow or other they’d been exposed as frauds. (58)

  Greenwich Village was a location Westlake knew well; he lived there for decades, keeping an apartment in the neighborhood even after he moved upstate. But comparing such seemingly disparate places allows the author to zero in on specific types, see through their chosen facades for the ridiculousness underneath and show how human behavior remains static, even common, no matter where one is. This section is a classic example of Westlake’s economy with sentences; so little says so much about so many people.

  Observation and travelogue take twin top billing in The Dame, perhaps because Westlake doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the plot, a cross between a locked-room mystery and a strung-out caper. From the very first, Grofield wonders what exactly he’s doing there. The book opens with “Grofield, not knowing what it was all about”; a little later he thinks, “here he was in the middle of somebody else’s story. To take a simile from his second profession, he had been miscast” (38). It should come as no surprise that one character cries out accusingly at Grofield, “God damn it, all you want to do is die a smart-ass!” (177). The net result is that, despite acts of bravery and saving people’s lives, Grofield’s character flaws seem unduly magnified, albeit in the way that makes the reader stay for the wild ride until the end.

  Even Grofield’s afterthought of a love interest can’t escape from comic flourish on the part of the author, thanks to her very name, Pat Chelm: her surname is a pejorative term amongst Jews, used to denote the most foolish of a town full of fools, whose antics are so steeped in stupidity that to mock them is to do them a service. What kind of private joke Stark was engaging here is anyone’s guess, but one possible clue lies in how oddly, and badly, women are treated in the Grofield novels. One must make allowances for prefeminist attitudes, but Grofield’s cavalier and sometimes contempt-laden relationships with women strike a more off-key note than, say, Parker’s. Parker is cruel to everyone, regardless of gender; he can objectify a CEO or a mob boss as easily as a dame. Grofield’s attitude towards women is somehow less palatable. In The Dame, for example, he ridicules Pat Chelm while she’s making a painful confession:

  “I had an abortion. I was seventeen.”

  She meant Look-how-young-I-was, but Grofield didn’t take it that way. “You’re twenty-two now, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it time you got over it?” (122)

  The lackadaisical loopiness of The Dame gives way to something a little harsher in The Blackbird. Its opening chapter is more or less the same as the Parker masterpiece Slayground (the scheduling quirks of publishing meant that even though the books may have been written roughly around the same time, The Blackbird was published in 1969, two years before Slayground). But here Stark follows Grofield’s path up north to Quebec City’s sumptuous Chateau Frontenac Hotel and a province jittery with dissident behavior. Stark didn’t spell it out—the setting, despite political overtones, seems more rooted in past vacationing by the author—but the province, and eventually the country, would be gripped by the actions of a breakaway group called the FLQ that advocated, violently, for Quebec’s separation from the rest of the English-speaking country.

  He is, however, fairly resourceful in The Blackbird. Finding himself locked in a basement, Grofield escapes through common sense and some degree of ingenuity, as Stark describes in typically matter-of-fact fashion, with the help of available tools and a good sense of spatial memory. He also digs deep to find his inner Parker, a surprising turn made more so, because Grofield spent the past two and a half books not taking himself terribly seriously—and as a result, the reader, lulled into relaxation, is shocked out of it.

  Grofield’s recaptured killer instinct serves him well in Lemons Never Lie (1971), which brings him back to his original, Parker-level noir roots. Further experiments in comedic tone and literary playfulness emerged thereafter under the Westlake name—for example, one of the Dortmunder novels, Jimmy the Kid, even patterned its plot after a fictional Parker novel. Ironically, in introducing Dort-munder, Westlake pulled one last rabbit out of his hat with respect to Grofield, using his name as the alter for one of Dortmunder’s cronies in crime, the “charming ladies’ man” Alan Greenwood. (Trent Reynolds, who maintains the Violent World of Parker fan website, looks on Greenwood’s appropriation of “Grofield” as a parody of the original. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s another nice touch of self-reference from a writer who clearly enjoyed it.)

  Grofield would appear only one more time, in Butcher’s Moon, which seemed to put the Stark pseudonym on ice for good. Grofield had served his purpose as a means of distinguishing between Westlake and Stark; it was as if the actor, having adopted so many different guises in playing both theatrical and criminal roles, represented Westlake’s own experiments with multiple styles. Consider, too, that after 1974, Westlake used fewer pseudonyms—just Samuel Holt in the 1980s and Judson Jack Carmichael in the 1990s—than earlier in his career, when Westlake published as Tucker Coe, Alan Marsh, and Curt Clark, among many other names. Dortmunder provided the final break between the comedic Westlake and the noirish Stark, but Grofield, unwittingly, helped force the Stark pseudonym underground for more than twenty years until his (and Parker’s) triumphant return in the late 1990s, never to leave until Westlake himself shuffled off of this mortal coil.

  Sarah Weinman

  1

  GROFIELD, not knowing what it was all about, got off the plane and walked through the sun into the main terminal building. He was at Isla Verde International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with sunshine and sea breezes sweeping through the open walls.

  He got his suitcase and went down a flight of steps to the circular counter of the car-rental agency. “I’m supposed to pick up a car here,” he told a clerk with a ferocious mustache. “The name’s Wilcox.” That was the name the letter had told him to use.

  The clerk pointed a triumphant finger at Grofield’s forehead. “Yes, sir! You been expected.” He was beside himself with joy. He bustled away, bustled back again, and plunked a set of keys on the counter. “Everything’s taken care of, sir. You’ll find all the paperwork in the glove compartment.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I’m supposed to give you this.”

  Another envelope. Grofield took it, thanked him again, and went out to the parking lot to look for the car with the same license number as this set of keys.

  It turned out to be a pale-blue Ford, two-door. The odometer registered a little over thirty-two hundred miles, and there was rust already on the bumpers. That would be the sea air at work.

  Grofield dropped the new envelope on the seat beside him and checked out the glove compartment first, but the only things in there were a Texaco map of the island and the form he should show if required to demonstrate he had this car legally.

  The envelope, when he opened it, contained nothing but a sheet of white paper folded once. Inside were typewritten instructions:

  26 and 3 to Loiza

  185 past Toma de Agua

  first left after 954

  .4 mile, turn right

  Well, that was terse enough. Grofield opened the map, saw that Loiza was eighteen kilometers west of where he was now, and did some figuring in his head to turn eighteen kilometers into just over eleven miles. Toma de Agua was three kilometers south of Loiza, which was just under two miles, but how far was “past”? And how far to that first left after 954, which itself was past Toma de Agua?

  Maybe another mile at the most. Figure a top of fourteen miles. To what? Home base, or just another letter?

  There was only one way to find out. Grofield started the car, backed it out of the slot, and headed it up-ramp.

  The airport roads were neat and broad, surrounded by green lawn. There was a lot of traffic, most of it ramshackle cars with here and there a ramshackle truck. Grofield had supposed he’d lose them all once he turned left away from the main San Juan highway, but a lot of them took the turn-off with him, and when the road narrowed from four lanes to two he found himself in the middle of an apparently endless line of slow-moving traffic. The road made sweeping curves back and forth, as though it had been designed by a water skier, and while at times it was straight enough to give the occasional Mercedes a shot at moving forward one place in line, Grofield and his Ford had no choice but to suffer in silence.