Donald E. Westlake R.I.P.

Crime fiction's greatest is gone

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

July 12, 1933 - December 31, 2008

Stark Views: The Violent World of Donald Westlake

After two roars from the MGM lion, we cut to tough guy Parker (Jim Brown) kicking open the door to his girlfriend Ellie’s apartment. He charges inside, searches the place, and finds Ellie (Diahann Carroll) sitting up in bed, dead, skewered to the headboard with a sword -- "stuck there like a scarecrow put away for the winter." Checking the closet, Parker discovers that the money from the stadium heist is missing, and then -- "Whoa, wait a minute!" some of you are yelling now, "I saw THE SPLIT and it didn’t start like that! And who the hell is this Parker guy?! Jim played McClain in that movie!" Yeah, yeah, I know -- but if the producers of THE SPLIT had been interested in making a great caper movie instead of just a mediocre action flick that wastes a once-in-a-lifetime cast, they would’ve stuck closer to their source material: The Seventh, a fast-paced, ingeniously plotted crime novel written by the late Donald E. Westlake, under his "Richard Stark" pseudonym. Published in 1966 as a 158-page paperback from Pocket Books, The Seventh tells the story of seven crooks who rob a stadium during a college football inter-conference game, and the violent complications that erupt before the take is divided. The title refers not only to the one-seventh share of the loot that each crook is due to receive, but also to the fact that this was the seventh novel written by Westlake under the Stark alias.

"Stark" is right. During their peak in the late 60s and early 70s, these cold, hard, stripped-down books were extremely popular in prison libraries across the country, due to the fact that the main characters are killers and thieves who always get away in the end. Twenty-four of the twenty-eight books are about ruthless criminal Parker -- possibly the toughest tough guy in the history of crime fiction --while other novels shine the spotlight on his frequent partner in crime, Alan Grofield, a wisecracking stage actor who commits armed robberies to support the community theatre he owns in Indiana. Parker is a professional crook -- "Banks, payrolls, armored cars, jewelers, anyplace that’s worth the risk" -- and his adventures focus on the elaborate heists in which he participates, as well as the inevitable carnage that follows, with a few exceptions: The Jugger, a strange mystery set in a small town in Nebraska, brilliantly pays homage to Jim Thompson’s "crazy sheriff" stories (The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280), while The Handle is surely to blame for all those mind-numbing men's action paperbacks that Pinnacle started mass-producing two or three years later. In Butcher’s Moon, Westlake tips his hat to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest by dropping Parker and Grofield into the middle of a complicated plot involving gangsters and corrupt politicians. Grofield’s first three solo ventures (The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird) are clumsy, lightweight affairs that turn the fourth book, the downbeat and nasty Lemons Never Lie, into a sucker punch.

In 1973, Berkley Medallion Books reissued most of the Parker novels as a numbered adventure series, "The Violent World of Parker," in an attempt to cash in on Pinnacle’s popular Destroyer and Executioner series (the Coffin Ed and Gravedigger mysteries by Chester Himes underwent a similar facelift around the same time). Titles were changed -- The Score became Killtown, for example -- but Berkley screwed up the whole thing by assigning the wrong number to almost every book in the series! For maximum enjoyment, the Stark books should be read in a certain order (see list below), since characters from earlier stories return, and previous adventures are frequently referred to and sometimes even continued. Bett Harrow, the woman who sets up Parker for blackmail in The Outfit, is dealt with in the following book, The Mourner. The Damsel opens with Grofield still recovering from the gunshot wounds he received in The Handle. Parker spends half of Plunder Squad on the hunt for George Uhl, the double-crossing lunatic who fouled up a bank heist split in The Sour Lemon Score, and at least half of Firebreak tracking down a trio of losers, also from The Sour Lemon Score, who put a contract out on his life. In Butcher’s Moon, Parker and Grofield return to the Fun Island amusement park to retrieve the $73,000 that Parker stashed at the end of Slayground. The last three books (Nobody Runs Forever, Ask the Parrot, Dirty Money) form a trilogy focusing on Parker’s robbery of armored trucks during a bank merger, and the problems evading law enforcement and moving the stolen cash.

Westlake was the mad scientist of crime fiction for nearly half a century and the Stark books showcase some of his more daring experiments with style and structure. The Blackbird and Slayground both open with the same botched armored car robbery, told from two different points of view: Grofield’s in The Blackbird, Parker’s in Slayground. The two books share the same opening chapter, but go off in completely different directions; Grofield is captured by the police, then recruited by the CIA (!) and sent to Quebec on a silly James Bond-type adventure with a beautiful secret agent from Africa (the "blackbird" of the title); Parker, who gets away with the loot, ends up tangling with mobsters and bad cops in a shuttered amusement park only one block away from the scene of the robbery! Even more bizarre is the jaw-dropping plot twist in Plunder Squad that sends Parker wandering into chapter eighteen of Dead Skip, the first DKA File mystery by Joe "Hammett" Gores. And then there’s Jimmy the Kid, the third installment in Westlake’s hilarious Dortmunder series (following The Hot Rock and Bank Shot), which has its hapless crooks using the nonexistent Stark novel Child Heist as the blueprint for their own bungled kidnapping attempt.

Big screen adaptations of Stark’s novels range from mediocre to excruciating. The superb POINT BLANK (1967) is an exception but departs from its source material (The Hunter) early on, while others are more faithful but not very strong as movies (PAYBACK). Westlake himself wrote several drafts of a screenplay for The Score from 1964-65, for a project that was to be directed by Ed Spiegel and produced by Max J. Rosenberg. He didn't allow other writers to use the name "Parker," so Lee Marvin is Walker in POINT BLANK, Michel Constantin is Georges in MISE EN SAC (a.k.a. PILLAGED, based on The Score) (1967), Jim Brown is McClain in THE SPLIT (1968), Robert Duvall is Macklin in THE OUTFIT (1974), Peter Coyote is Stone in SLAYGROUND, and Mel Gibson is Porter in a second version of The Hunter, PAYBACK (1999), as well as director Brian Helgeland's revised cut, PAYBACK: STRAIGHT UP (2007). For Jean-Luc Godard’s MADE IN U.S.A. (1966), Parker became pretty Anna Karina as journalist Paula Nelson, in a political thriller bearing little resemblance to its credited source, The Jugger (though Westlake won a lawsuit against the film’s producer when he wasn’t paid for use of his novel).

The Novels of Violence by Richard Stark

The Hunter (a.k.a. Point Blank! - 1962) ***
The Man with the Getaway Face (a.k.a. The Steel Hit - 1963) ***½
The Outfit (1963) **½
The Mourner (1963) **½
The Score (a.k.a. Killtown - 1964) ***½
The Jugger (a.k.a. Made in U.S.A. - 1965) ****
The Seventh (a.k.a. The Split - 1966) ****
The Handle (a.k.a. Run Lethal - 1966) **½
The Damsel (1967) *
The Rare Coin Score (1967) ***
The Green Eagle Score (1968) ***
The Dame (1969) **
The Black Ice Score (1968) **½
The Sour Lemon Score (1969) ****
Deadly Edge (1971) ***½
The Blackbird (1969) **
Slayground (1971) ****
Lemons Never Lie (1971) ***
Plunder Squad (1972) ***
Butcher’s Moon (1974) ****
Comeback (1997) ****
Backflash (1998) ****
Flashfire (2000) ***½
Firebreak (2001) ****
Breakout (2002) ***½
Nobody Runs Forever (2004) ****
Ask the Parrot (2006) ****

Dirty Money (2008) ***

(This is a revision of an article that originally appeared in BadAzz MoFo #4, April 1999, p. 70)

The Cinematic Worlds of Johnny Handsome

by Nathaniel Poggiali

John Mitchell Sedley is a professional thief nearing the end of a five-year stretch in the state pen. Face disfigured since birth, a cleft palate leaving his speech muffled and snorting, Sedley coped with derision and rejection as a youth by drifting into a life of crime. While on the inside, as the guinea pig in a rehabilitation experiment, Johnny goes under the knife to repair his cleft, chin, ears, brow and broken nose -- an alteration so extreme that even the convict's own mother wouldn't recognize him. Once in the free world, his new face should find him the respect he needs to live a clean life, or so his surgeon Dr. Katsouras believes. On the outside, Johnny attempts to go straight but can't resist the lure of crime. It's not long before he's casing the local small town bank and planning his double-cross for Jappy, the tightwad who couldn't bribe a cop to keep him out of prison.

She was looking at him appraisingly. "You're handsomer than Tully. You know that?"

He nodded and said, "I'll be the best-looking man in the whole cemetery."

John Godey's The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome was an old tale even for 1972, the one about the ex-con who tried to go straight but fell into bad habits, and whose bland appearance masked an intricate, brutal revenge. The writer's name was also a kind of mask, being a pseudonym for the late Morton Freedgood (who also wrote The Taking of Pelham One Two Three under the Godey moniker). Freedgood's noir-ish tone seemed fatalistic enough to justify a nagging sense of the familiar. Crime fiction tropes were trotted out to form a routine largely consistent with the retrogressive nature of the main character.

In one sense an unusual approach to chronology seemed old hat for the genre: Donald E. Westlake, under his nom de plume of Richard Stark, was already using a non-linear structure in the Parker series (which likewise had its protagonist undergo plastic surgery).

Freedgood knew a trick worth two of that. In Part One, entitled "Free World," the mysterious "Mitchell" introduces himself to Jappy and his gang of misfits -- including whiny Sunny and her dim-bulb boyfriend, Tully -- and pitches a bank job. Mitchell claims to have learned of the gang from a cellmate known as "Johnny Handsome," a former employee of Jappy's who Mitchell says died in prison. What the reader isn't meant to know until the conclusion of "Free World," somewhere around page 70, is that Mitchell and Johnny happen to be the same criminal with different mugs. Part Two, "Inside World," is a flashback covering Johnny's time in the pen and his surgery, and Part Three ("Real World") takes us back to the robbery and Johnny's plan to double-cross Jappy and walk away with the loot.

Screenwriter Ken Friedman received sole credit for adapting Three Worlds as JOHNNY HANDSOME (1989). I don't know if he penned the majority of the script, or if director Walter Hill had a lot of input, but whatever the case, there seem to have been wise decisions made in transition. Scenes were placed in chronological order, presumably to gain the viewer's emotional investment in Johnny at an earlier point. The ex-convict (portrayed brilliantly by Mickey Rourke) had a more sympathetic reason for getting revenge, in that his best friend Mikey (Scott Wilson) was murdered by their partners during a jewelry store holdup. Jappy and Tully, neither character very memorable or fully realized, were combined to give us the alternately sinister and pathetic Rafe (Lance Henriksen), while a few heavies were dropped and Sunny's role beefed and spiced up to the point where Ellen Barkin nearly walked off with the movie. And Lt. Shannon, the inevitable crooked cop who wants a piece of the action, was traded for sarcastic but honest Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman), who dogs Johnny's every step and predicts the thief's fall as unwaveringly as his name would suggest. With his observations on the dubious moral character of ex-cons and the failure of reforming them, Drones voices the essence of both film and novel.

"Y'know, Johnny, you might fool this fucking quack and little sister over there, but I know you. I know who you are, and I know what you are. And we both know right where you're going. Don't we, Johnny?"

FULL CONTACT (HAAP DOU KO FEI), a 1993 Cantonese-language production written by Nam Yin and directed by Ringo Lam, does not seem a remake per se. Humorous, stylish with action, steeped in corny melodrama and homoerotic male bonding, the film is an early 90s Hong Kong action picture through-and-through, and never really embodies the gritty, cynical spirit of either Freedgood's novel or the American adaptation. But I do think that Lam borrowed from Hill's visual style and, more significantly, imagined an alternate version of Friedman's story in which the Johnny character's friend is the one who betrays him, adding an interesting twist to a rather generic revenge plot (though once again Westlake's presence can be felt, as the twist echoes his initial Parker novel, The Hunter, as well as its 1967 film version, POINT BLANK).

The Johnny figure is Ko Fei -- or Godfrey, or Jeffrey, depending on English subtitles and dubbing -- a Chinese bouncer in a Bangkok nightclub with a sense of ethics in opposition to his sleazy environment. Much like the Friedman protagonist, Ko Fei (Chow Yun-Fat) finds himself drawn into armed robbery to help a friend out of debt. He and buddy Sam (Anthony Wong) team up with the latter's flamboyantly gay cousin Judge (Simon Yam), and his bickering cohorts Yin and Madman, to rob a truck full of munitions. During the robbery Judge pulls a double-cross, Sam loses his nerve and, under pressure from his cousin, shoots Ko Fei and takes up with his friend's fiancée. Ko Fei, of course, is not dead, and after a few months in hiding he returns to steal the munitions from Judge -- the first step in an elaborate plan of vengeance.

"He looks awful familiar."

"There's no such thing as ghosts."

Lam, the director who brought us at least one unofficial Hong Kong remake of a U.S. production (WILD SEARCH, patterned on WITNESS) and who regularly lifts material from American genre pictures, seems to be an admirer of Hill and Friedman's approach. Aside of similarities in plot, the two films open with jewelry heists where a tastelessly dressed, sexually aggressive woman threatens customers, and where pistol barrels are shoved into the camera or photographed at such an angle that they appear larger than they are. Shadowy bars and deserted warehouse interiors are playing fields in both. Ko Fei's appearance in the nightclub, after Judge learns the munitions have been stolen, vaguely recalls Johnny baiting Sunny at the bar in their first meeting after his release from prison. Like Hill, Lam has a fondness for trashy retro hairstyles, clothing and automobiles (flashy humping dance choreography, however, is basically of the film's period, especially a nightclub act set to Extreme's "Get the Funk Out").

Supporting characters seem familiar. Madman and Yin could be Rafe and Sunny of the Far East, or even, at times, Tully and Sunny. The villainess of JOHNNY HANDSOME was a greedy ex-prostitute. FULL CONTACT throws in nymphomania for comic relief (Yin: "I used to get it seven times a day! It's been a week now, and I'm tired of begging!"), moving further down a twisted path of the novel (Sunny, as written by Freedgood: "I can't stand three days without a man….If I don't get it at night, I can't go to sleep"). Madman, ignorant and incapable of thinking beyond his stomach and libido, is not a schemer like Rafe, but a stooge like Tully.

But again, it would be difficult to label FULL CONTACT a remake or an adaptation. Obviously, Lam and screenwriter Yim do not include the disfigurement and plastic surgery elements. They're also far more compassionate with characters, allowing Ko Fei, Sam, and Ko Fei's fiancée, Mona, to learn from mistakes and atone for them. Ko Fei's ultimate goal is even noble: to deliver money stolen from Judge to a young woman horribly burned during the initial robbery.

The similarities are interesting, though, and I wonder how Lam would handle an actual rendering of The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome. With FULL CONTACT, we might have a rough idea.