Guest slot: The Wolf Man, by Christopher Lyons

Let’s keep the introductions to a minimum this time: the first part of Chris’s two-part guest essay, “The Man Who Doesn’t Wink,” can be found here, so go read that (if you haven’t already) to get yourself up to speed. As before, we welcome your comments, even more so now that […]

Guest slot: The Man Who Doesn’t Wink, by Christopher Lyons

It’s guest slot time here on The Violent World of Parker. Trent has of course hosted guest posts before—one of them by me, no less, in my pre-co-blogger days—but now I’m muscling in on the act as well—partly because it saves me writing anything (apart from this intro), but mostly because this […]

Review: The Cut, by George Pelecanos

(NB: A version of this post also appears on Existential Ennui.)

I’ve a particular reason for cross-posting this review on The Violent World of Parker, as well as on Existential Ennui. I mean, George Pelecanos being ostensibly a crime novelist, and Donald E. Westlake/Richard Stark being an acknowledged influence on Pelecanos, obviously […]

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 1: The Name of the Game is Death (alias Operation Overkill)

(NB: This post also appears on Existential Ennui.)

In 1962, one of America’s leading genre publishers issued a paperback original by an author who’d only been a novelist a few years, but already had a handful of successful, critically praised crime works under his belt. Starring a violent career criminal who operates under various […]

Review: The Mercenaries (1960, a.k.a. The Cutie / The Smashers) by Donald E. Westlake

Let’s return to Donald E. Westlake’s debut novel (“official” debut, that is; he had other pseudonymous sleaze works published before it), 1960’s The Mercenaries, a signed, inscribed British first edition of which I blogged about just over a week ago. I mentioned in that post that Violent World of Parker proprietor Trent […]

Review: Darwyn Cooke’s Parker–The Martini Edition

People are cynical about repackagings, and they should be. How many cuts of Blade Runner are there now? I think there’s a box set to collect them all. And I will fully acknowledge that when I first heard about this project, the song that popped into my head was “Paint a Vulgar Picture” by […]

Westlake Score: Point Blank! by Richard Stark; Fawcett Gold Medal, 1967

Here’s a Westlake Score which has been the cause of a certain amount of consternation and confusion over the years, due to it being misidentified as an earlier edition of Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake’s debut Parker outing. What it actually is, in fact, is the 1967 Fawcett Gold Medal printing of The Hunter—which was […]

The slaying of writer’s block, Backflash, 361, and podcasts

One reason I haven’t been posting much lately is because I’ve had an acute case of writer’s block. You see, I read both Backflash and 361 recently, and felt obligated to write about them. It wasn’t working. And that was stopping me from writing anything else.

361 itself was partially a product of writer’s […]

An essay on The Hunter by Duane Swierczynski, plus 100 thrillers

Duane Swierczynski (or, as I like to call him, “Coach K”) is the author of, amongst many others, The Wheelman, a most excellent Parker homage–I’ve been meaning to give it a proper writeup for some time now, but I can’t find my (inscribed!) copy in order to deliver the reread and writeup it deserves. […]

Guest slot: Richard Stark, Harry Bennett, Parker book covers, and The Seventh

Today’s guest piece is by Nick Jones, AKA Louis XIV, who blogs about books (and sometimes comics) at Existential Ennui. You may be (should be!) familiar with him, because I’ve frequently linked both his book reviews and the great covers he digs up as he obsessively collects Stark and Westlake titles. In fact, I’ve linked […]