You can't go home again, or if you do you need to shoot your way out.

From the Wayback machine - 10 years ago! When I discovered Stark.

(And a follow up after)

Under the "finally got around to" category, I finished my first Richard Stark, Parker novel. I first heard of the Parker character when I watched the amazingly gritty noir-esque Point Blank. It starred Lee Marvin in a great suit, and the principal from Animal House (what was his name... a Canadian I think) in a nasty role.

The end credits said based on the novel, so I went looking. I was surprised, in a really good way, when I found out that Stark was one of the pseudonyms of Donald Westlake. I read a ton of Westlake as a teen, loved the character Dortmunder, and the movie Hot Rock (Redford and Segal, if I recall). But I have found that going back and reading stuff I liked as a teen is often a sad affair. Reading the Stark novel (The Jugger), I found it really clipped along, and I liked the darkness of the main character - he kills a guy and puts him in a hole that the dead guy had just dug. (Wait, does that make sense?) Anyway, it was hard boiled and sparse, but at the end of it, forgettable.

I might read another one, or watch Point Blank again, just for Lee Marvin. Onward to other summer books now - like Snow Crash, one that has been on my "got to get around to" pile for, oh, three or four years.

Follow up - 
Surprising to me, for how much he influenced me, that I only started reading Stark 10 years ago. After a morning of reading Donald Westlake articles, I see how long ago the love of crime fiction was planted. When I went to the library as a young teen, I scouted for three kinds of books:
1. Three Investigators. Ok, pre-teen. But I loved these stories about a trio crime fighting teens, unexplainably introduced by Alfred Hitchcock. They even get a mention in my novel Fall in One Day.

2. Philip K. Dick. A sharp and progressive 8th Grade English teacher turned me onto a book called, Ubik, and an obsession was born.

3. Donald Westlake. The Hot Rock, though Jimmy the Kid might have been the first, and the character Dortmunder fascinated me. The humour wasn't laugh outloud, especially for a kid reading above his grade level, but the quirkiness of these characters drove me to keep finding books featuring them.

So now, 10 years later than the original post, I'm still thinking about Stark, and even more obsessing about Point Blank and Lee Marvin. I think about my character Luke Fischer, and how he is an amalgamation of these early loves. Not sure how P.K. Dick fits in there - but definitely that Westlakian sense of humour shows up in Surf City Acid Drop. And the character in that book that is the most like Parker is not Luke, but rather Mostly Harold, a stone cold killer if there ever was one.

Embarking on the writing of a third Fischer novel, I know that Westlake, Stark, and Parker will be in the shadows... oh, and of course Lee Marvin, always Lee.