THE PROFESSIONAL

7 3 R T H E P R O F E S S I O N A L T I M O T H Y P E L T A S O N About halfway through Richard Stark’s The Seventh (1966) – the title refers both to the protagonist, Parker’s, share of a heist and to the fact that this was the seventh of an eventual twenty-four Parker novels that Donald Westlake wrote under the Stark pseudonym – our man encounters a police detective who is a good deal more competent than most in the series, almost as competent as Parker himself. Coming to The Seventh from the first six of Stark’s novels (starting with The Hunter of 1962), we already know how quietly, lethally good at his job Parker is, at planning and executing the robberies that center the plots of most of the novels, and at finding his way through and out of the nearly inevitable complications that the robberies lead to, the results of bad luck and bad behavior, unanticipated consequences of all kinds. Careful as he is, Parker knows how easily things can go wrong; he and his creator display throughout the series a healthy respect for the obstructions and unmanageabilities not just of criminal life but of any life filled with other people. And there are always other people. Although Parker is friendless and emotionally self-contained, he rarely works alone, joining in each novel a temporary coalition of fellow professionals, thieves 7 4 P E L T A S O N Y who find one another out through a silent, extensive network of coded contacts, virtual letters of introduction, occasional chance encounters. Characters recur unpredictably from one heist and novel to another, though with little of the reliance on outlandish coincidence that fuels the plots of many other such series. These recurring characters are sometimes nemeses, though nemeses don’t last long in the Parker world, never more than a novel or two. More often, they are what passes in this morally nebulous underworld for good guys, people who can be counted on to do their jobs, to hold their end up, to observe the rules, a code not of honor among thieves but merely of the minimal decencies and predictabilities that make concerted action possible. For readers, these characters provide the pleasures of recognition and familiarity, though they have relatively few of the identifying crotchets that make, say, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels or Westlake’s own series of comic capers such appealing rehearsals of the human comedy. For Parker, they perform a necessary function, though it is impossible to say whether he likes them or takes any pleasure in them as persons. For all the time that we spend in his company, Parker remains opaque to us, even to the narrator, who can tell us only that Parker would be bored and baΔed by such talk of liking or disliking. The Parker novels, like Parker himself, find their power as much in what they withhold as in what they deliver. This may seem surprising, given that Donald Westlake was a journeyman writer – a journeyman of rare talent – eager to give satisfaction both to his readers and to the many di√erent editors whom he had to please in order to get to those readers and to get the advances his early livelihood depended on. Surprising, too, given the a√ability and availability of Westlake’s most popular works, the misadventures of a doleful thief named John Dortmunder and his oddball crew. Westlake published fifteen Dortmunder novels between 1970 and 2009, having warmed up for the work with a series of one-o√ comic novels whose likeably clueless young protagonists fall into crime and romance against their will, operating in a universe at once Hitchcockian and cushioned against real harm. But he had prepared for Parker, too, with another series of early novels featuring the corruptions of small-city politics – Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key was an important influence – and the T H E P R O F E S S I O N A L 7 5 R costly moral compromises of other young protagonists, who...