Donald E. Westlake was one of the greats. That is as true and factual statement as one can make in matters of art opinions. He wrote the Great American Novel, but not enough people noticed, because he wrote it in bits and pieces, across hundreds of thousands of pages, across dozen different sub-series and one-offs and using half-a-dozen pen names. I have read almost two dozen Westlake books, which for most writers would be plenty, but for him it’s just a drop in the (extremely large, and probably blood-soaked) bucket: “I have written about eighty books, seventy-six have been published. I don’t mind telling you about fifty: twenty-one Donald E. Westlakes, twenty Richard Starks, five Tucker Coes, an Ace paperback science fiction novel called Anarchaos by Curt Clark[…] The pen names are simple brand names, used to differentiate the types of books.” This is from a 1974 interview, conducted with Albert Nussbaum (famous more for his armed robberies than his work as a writer); Westlake had three more decades of writing him after that one. While he’d slowed down form his heyday, by the 21st century he never stopped writing. When he died he had already passed the three digit mark1.
When you publish so much it’s hard to contend with your work; hard to find a singular novel to point to as a ‘must read’. I guess you point to The Hunter or The Hot Rock (two starting points of his most famous book series), but these are merely good entry points to the world of Westlake, not necessarily his masterworks. Because most of his works had a bit of masterwork to them, they are best viewed as a whole, like Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Like Balzac, his often-interlinked stories often engaged with the place of the individual in wider society and way the gears of system could often grind the people into fine dust. Unlike Balzac, his tend to feature more gunplay and heists-going-badly.
All of which is to say: no one could quite capture Westlake’s work in other mediums. Not that they didn’t try, several of his books have been adapted into the silver screen to various degrees of success, most of them being from the Parker series (the reason we’re here after all), which follows the titular mono-named protagonist. A sort of the ultimate professional, Parker is a robber of banks, betting houses, armed cars, galleries and what-have-you, and his existence in entirely within his job. His private life is a respite between crimes. While the money these jobs provide allows him a lifestyle that was the envy of 1960s Playboy readers, jumping from one expensive motel to another while shacking with beautiful women, you always get the sense that he tries to spend the money as quickly as possible simply so he can get on to the next job. As Darwyn Cooke describes him: “he’s a very simple, very boring person, outside of the way he manages people, and the way he thinks about his work. He’s an empty vessel outside of that.”
It sounds like a bad idea, a whole series of novels built around a man with as little personality as possible, but Westlake makes it work. He makes it sing. In a world of phonies, liars and self-deluded idiots, Parker thrives because he an honest man. Not a "good man," by any stretch, but an honest one. Honest when planning and executing another one of his jobs, but more importantly – honest with himself. Parker knows what he is.
Parker is the wellspring from which so much of macho-fiction is borne, from him come Jack Reacher, Johnny Alpha, Golgo 13 … I don’t particularly know if the people who made these books ever read a Westlake novel (though there had been so many, and they were so popular, the odds point to a "yes"), and it’s not like the archetype of the taciturn-and-capable man hadn’t been there before. But with Parker, Westlake brought the whole thing into apotheosis. Everything before feels like a lead-in, everything after a – footnote 2.
As previously mentioned, there have been plenty of Parker adaptions. They call him "Walker" in Point Blank (based on The Hunter), "Porter" in Payback (likewise), "McClaine" in The Split (based on The Seventh), "Macklin" in The Outfit (based on the novel by the same name); he got called "Parker" once, in the selfsame movie starring Jason Statham that is as forgotten as a movie can be. Some of these have been good, others bad (others worse). None of them had really been "Parker" the way Westlake writes him.
Because, in a way, for him to be like Westlake described him you need the serial aspect. His story is not a done-in-one adventure, we need to see him again and again until he becomes as familiar and certain as the stars in their orbit. Until the stories become less about the man than the way people react to him. They try to use him, abuse him, swindle him, cheat, backstab … because this is America. This is what happens to honest men, even if they are criminals. Which is probably why the best Parker adaptation are the Darwyn Cooke stories – four graphic novels and two shorts, collected for the first time all in a single volume from IDW5.
There has always been something of the comic book character about Parker, the way he was the endless unchanging object. Times shifted around him6, but he stays solid, like Judge Dredd or Usagi Yojimbo. The world tries to move away from him but remains anchored in place, no matter how hard modern times pulls at him – he will not move, he will not budge.
The first smart decision Cooke made, in a series of smart calls, is to keep the series in its own time. Parker made it all the way to the 21st century but it’s always hard to imagine him contending with cell phones and the internet7; a man with no identity can slip through an American airport in 1968, not so much in a post 9/11 world. This decision also allows Cooke to ramp-up the style. These are the sorts of stories that simply work better when people are dressed in suits and ties. Because suits can be stylish, if drawn right, even when crumpled and beaten.
The opening scene, with Parker walking across a bridge, building for over a dozen pages before we’re allowed to even see the protagonist’s face, is a hymn to the power of a good, crumpled suit. Beaten and scrapped, it hangs off him in a manner no t-shirt would. It allows him to look respectable enough, like a functioning member of society, while still showing us on what side on the line he stands. Which is interesting because Cooke insisted he was trying to play the stylish element down, bringing the character closer to the down and dirty manner that was written on the pages: “I had to resist all the story training I got at Warner's, which is to amp it up, to stage it bigger, to make more of everything. In this case, to keep it down where it was.”
In the same interview with Tom Spurgeon, he mentions the constant fight to keep Parker unsympathetic, unsentimental. This is a man who has little problem killing his own wife, and mutilating the body, just to keep the heat off for a couple of hours longer. A man whose response to an accidental death of an innocent person is an annoyance – doesn’t she understand her death interrupted his plans? 8. Which is where Cooke’s version of the book hit a snag for me, a snag it could never quite untangle itself from.
The words in the narration and the story on the page had Westlake’s tale down. The character Cooke was writing was certainly Parker. But I don’t think the character Cooke was showing, drawing, was Parker. The above-mentioned face-mutilation scene is played in a respectable visual distance. We understand what is it that Parker does, and in case we don’t, two cops later explain they found a dead woman with a cut face, and we understand his reasoning for it. But the way it is drawn, so elegantly, so beautifully, dulls the impact of the scene. And a lot of scenes in Cooke’s Parker adaptions are like that – brutal in theory, but not so much in execution.
Reading through these stories it becomes clear Darwyn Cooke likes these stories, this character a bit too much. Not in a “I think he’s a great guy and everyone should act like him.” But in a “This is what I liked as young man and I can never quite untangle myself from these memories” way. It’s the kind of thing that dregs down many of Garth Ennis’ revivalist works, from his Judge Dredd to Johnny Red, you can sense the boy taking over from the man behind the typewriter.
Think of another scene from the The Hunter, with Parker strangling the helpless Stegmann. There is meant to be something horrible about it, about the remorseless and decisive manner in which Parker simply disposing of an object in his path (with his bare hands, not even using a gun). In the comics version Cooke pulls away once again, allows the scene to be played mostly in the shadows. I can see it but I can’t sense it. Because to sense it would break a certain spell, would allow us to understand what exactly we see being done9.
Cooke obviously adores these books, adores Westlake. That’s the only explanation for how a project like this was even possible on the American market. In many ways it feels everything he’d done before, even the best-reviewed of his superhero fare, was just building a ramp to allow to reach Parker. Making his reputation, his style, his financial bonafides … all to allow him to do the closest thing in America to the European album format. The kinda thing Kim Thompson wrote about when he wrote “More Crap is What we Need”
And Cooke’s Parker books are the best form of crap. The most entertaining, the most fun-to-read (a "page turner" is a cliché but this exactly what these books are, the constant tension between the desire to indulge the artwork and the desire to see what happens next is palpable) and certainly the best-looking crap you find on the American shelves 12.
The things in these adaptations that want to be noticed are the flashy bits, like the way the different heists are portrayed in The Outfit, but they are their best the more straightforward they are. The part in Slayground in which Parker is preparing for combat, wordlessly, by making the place into a death trap. In these moments Cooke reaches that pure visual equivalent of Westlake’s prose – not a line or a panel wasted or added beyond sheer necessity. The sheer ridiculousness of the scene, making an amusement park into an arena of doom straight of a Batman vs. Joker set-up, is overcome by the sheer craft of it.
The best of the books is The Score, the third full-size story, which works because by this point Cooke’s version of Parker has been established enough to bounce him off other characters, especially Grofield13, who work as a contrast. This is a book about a job so big Parker needs to not simply work with other people but trust them, allow them to venture outside of his gaze . It allows Cooke to loosen up a bit, go for comedy, without becoming lost in the formalism of The Outfit’s various heists.
It also allows The Score to show a bit more of what made Westlake so good. Because, yes, the books are about Parker, but they are about Parker in new environments, meeting new types of people who engage in different sorts of crime. America, for Westlake, is a gigantic crime scene. In order to understand the country best you must first understand its underbelly. The Score allows Cooke to engage more widely with world around Parker, to break it down into parts and see how it works. There’s a lot of balls in the air throughout The Score, a tight narrative in Westlake’s terms, and Cooke catches them all.
Cooke’s take on Westlake ends up being too stylish, too adoring, too nice … but it also so fully itself that one finds it hard to argue with it. It’s not necessarily what I wanted, but it’s what I got. Which as apt as an adaptation of Parker could be.
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The post ‘You either take my word for it or you don’t’: Revisiting Darwyn Cooke’s <em>Parker</em> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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