Donald Westlake's Parker

Donald Westlake's Parker is a hardened professional thief who appeared in a string of crime novels published in the 1960's and 70's and written under the pen name of Richard Stark. Parker has been the inspiration for several movies, most recently Mel Gibson's Payback (1999), based on the first Parker novel The Hunter. Darwyn Cooke is working on a graphic novel which is also based The Hunter, soon to be published by IDW. If you like Ed Brubaker's Criminal series, you will definitely want to pick this up. Brubaker has acknowledged that his work is in many ways inspired by Westlake's Parker.

Perfectly capable of murder, Parker has almost no redeeming qualities, aside from his professionalism and the fact that he is an honest crook. In The Hunter, Parker chases his ex-partners and his ex-wife, who have betrayed him in a heist and left him for dead. He survives, but is arrested by the police. Slowly, methodically, one by one, Parker kills his betrayers, ultimately taking on the mob in the process.

Parker is a loner, in many ways indistinguishable from the unnamed protagonist of Clint Eastwood's Dollars trilogy. He operates in an amoral world where everybody is a criminal of some sort. In this world crime pays, there is no good or evil, but simply different styles of crime. Crime is a business, and all business is a form of criminal activity. In fact, Parker is an entrepreneur of sorts, competing with the syndicate and fending off assorted psychotics, amateurs and losers. Of course, there is no law, so Parker cannot be caught and punished. He can only be injured or delayed. He has no connection to society, and seeks only to acquire money in order to remove himself to comfortable isolation.

But what makes Parker so archetypal and enduring is that he speaks to something very deep in our collective psyches. We envy Parker's lack of shame, or guilt, or any type of sentimental feeling whatsoever. Although he is hunted constantly, he is totally unselfconscious, totally focused on his purpose. Parker is a very remarkable, enduring anti-hero.