Added to the cover gallery: A Portuguese edition of The Mourner

Title translation: The Statuette

Parker Mega Score finale: Richard Stark in British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

NB: A version of this post also appears at Existential Ennui.

If you missed the announcement on Existential Ennui on Friday, some (relatively) exciting news: I’ve established a brand new Existential Ennui permanent page:

British Thriller Book Cover Design of the 1970s and 1980s

A companion page to Beautiful British Book Jacket […]

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 […]

Review: Richard Stark’s Parker: Book Two–The Outfit by Darwyn Cooke

Update: This review is a first draft. The current version is here.

The sheer brutality of The Hunter was unsustainable for a series, and Richard Stark didn’t attempt it. Rather, he took the character and universe of The Hunter and used them for more complex tales of amorality. This isn’t to say that there […]

“The Missing Mourners of Dijon” by Fernand Auberjonois

You may recall my background piece on The Mourner, entitled “Meet the Mourners,” from a few weeks back. Well, reader Christopher Tassava was kind enough to dig up the original Horizon article described in that piece–the one that inspired the novel! It’s embedded below.

To celebrate, above is a vastly upgraded image of the […]

Meet the mourners

(I am indebted to Book Glutton, who is responsible for much of the research in this post.)

[Parker] motioned them in. Bett came in first, and her father followed, clutching the book protectively to his chest. It was a large, slender book with a red binding and a picture on […]

The Mourner page rewritten

I have expanded and almost completely rewritten the page on The Mourner. To celebrate, here’s this Finnish cover of The Mourner from 1984. According to Google Translate, the title means “Avenger,” the blurb is “Underworld lone wolf is back!,” and the banner is likely something to do with violence. As always, translation help is […]

Lineup changes to Darwyn Cooke’s Parker series

[Darwyn Cooke] explains that while the original plan was to adapt the first four books, he found himself hungry to adapt two later books in the series, volumes that would “lend themselves to graphic adaptation in unique and exciting ways.” He decided to cut “The Mourner,” which he describes as […]

Latest U of C reprints released early

The official release date for the second batch of University of Chicago Parker reprints (The Mourner, The Score, and The Jugger) is May 1, but according to Amazon, they are shipping already.

Batch number three (scheduled for August, which I guess means June or July) […]

U of C Reprints: The Mourner

Scheduled for May 2009, with a foreword by John Banville.