When Donald Westlake invented Parker, the iron-cold thief protagonist of the series Westlake writes under the pen name Richard Stark, he didn’t know that Parker would be one of the noir genre’s most enduring creations. If he had, he’d have given Parker a first name. But Parker has been just fine without one through 23 …
Month: November 2006
Crime novelist Donald Westlake is a man of many aliases—Samuel Holt, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, pseudonyms picked up over the course of 100-odd published books—but two names stand out, his own and Richard Stark. As Westlake, he mostly writes comic caper novels, notably his half-dozen books about luckless criminal John Dortmunder. As Stark, he’s created …
Published in The A.V. Club’s Twin Cities edition, November 9, 2006. It’s no longer online there, so I’ve reposted it in full here. Kill the Vultures ain’t slick, and that’s no bad thing. The local hip-hop group’s approach has elements of the raw holler of old-style Delta blues and the jagged clatter of New York’s brash …