"Richard Stark," Ask the Parrot [Library of Babel]

"Richard Stark," is, of course, the name that Donald E. Westlake uses when he wants to write books tat aren't funny. Ask the Parrot is the umpteenth Parker novel, picking up mere minutes after the previous volume, Nobody Runs Forever.

In that volume, Parker and a crew of other guys robbed a bank in western Massachusetts, and the job, as always, went a little bit wrong. At the end of the book, the cops are hot on Parker's tail-- trailing him with dogs as he flees up a hill into the woods. As this book opens, he reaches the top of the hill, and find a man there who offers to help him escape, if Parker will help him out with a scheme that he has.

Being in a desperate situation, Parker accepts, but of course, things get complicated. Before it's all over, there will be blood shed, and a host of smaller crimes committed.

As with all of the PArker novels, these are striking as much for what they're not as what they are.

The series generally has a reputation as being much darker than Westlake's other stuff, and it's certainly that. Granted, that's not that hard to do, given that most of his other books are deliberately silly, but Parker is a genuine hard case, and doesn't shrink from violence.

What's striking, though, is how seldom he needs to resort to violence. He's an extremely competent and professional criminal, and doesn't kill unless he absolutely has to. Now, the way the books play out, he usually abslutely has to kill one or two people before the end of the story, but along the way, he usually ends up robbing a whole bunch of other people without really hruting any of them.

I don't read a great deal of crime fiction, but this is a notable difference between these books and most of the rest of what I've read (Jim Thompson and Charlie Huston are the most directly relevant names, and some of G. M. Ford's stuff straddles the line between crime fiction and detective fiction). I've got a copy of Huston's A Dangerous Man sitting on the to-be-read pile, and I'm pretty sure based on the previous volumes that hardly anyone will make it out of that book alive. They're extremely bloody and violent books, and most of the named characters will at least be badly wounded, if not killed before it's all done, and the crimes are all violent.

Parker, on the other hand, rarely racks up a big body count, at least in the books I've read. For every crime that goes wrong, there are three that don't involve any violence. Outside of people who are obviously squirrely from the first moment they appear, there's actually a pretty good chance of the characters surviving.

Really, these aren't so much novels about crime, as they are novels about professionalism. The profession happens to be crime, but the real emphasis is almost always on Parker's cool and competent professionalism. Things may go horribly wrong with the plan, but he always keeps his head, and finds a way to get out of trouble with a minimum amount of damage. And sometimes with a good bit of loot.