From the Gregg Press edition, copyright 1981
INTRODUCTION
Generally speaking, I don't think
writers know who they are; it's a disability--and an advantage--they share with
actors. And it's probably just as well, really. Self-knowledge can
lead to self-consciousness, and in a writer self-consciousness can only lead to
self-parody. Or silence.
Whereas actors receive an endless
supply of surrogate identities in the roles they're given to play, writers tend
to begin their search for identity in their predecessors. Every one of us
began by imitating the writers we loved to read. Those writers had made
their worlds so real and appealing for us that we tried to move in and live
there.
I was the right age at the right time
to be very heavily influenced by the arrival of Gold Medal books. These
were in the fictional form known as the novel; but not really--or so it seemed
at first. They were stripped down and lumpy and crude, like a beach
buggy. Half the time they seemed little more than 50,000-word short
stories; all that build-up, all those characters, all that preparation of
setting and emotions and scenes and relationships, just to end in a shootout in
a swamp. These yellow-spined paperbacks had compulsive strength, but
without beauty, like acid rock: but they were interesting.
And either the books got better
or my critical sense got worse. In any event, I began gradually to make
sense among the by-lines in this new garden, and to realize that here too there
were gradations from very good to very very very very bad. Once I'd
separated the writers from the bricklayers, everything was fine.
Gold Medal introduced me to
John D. MacDonald, Vin Packer, Chester Himes, David Goodis and, by far the most
important, Peter Rabe. (Rabe's Kill the Boss Goodbye [1956] is one
of the best books, with one of the worst titles, I've ever read.) The
understatement of violence, resulting from Rabe's modesty of character rather
than modesty of experience (which is why Hammett had it down pat and
Chandler could never quite make it work), was refined in these books to a
laconic hipness I could only admire from afar.
(And still do. I've never met
Rabe, and though I'd love to I'm not sure I should. What would I say to
him? What would the poor man be forced to say to me?)
Rabe was not my only teacher, nor did
I learn only from the tough crime novel. One of the early Gold Medals, a
beautiful western by Clifton Adams called The Desperado (1950), a novel
with that same compact, understated, almost reluctant treatment of violence,
first introduced me to the notion of the character adapting to his forced
separation from normal society. Peter Rabe, in book after book, refined
that idea.
I had discovered I was a writer when
I was eleven; the world took several years longer to reach the same
conclusion. By 1960, however, in my mid-'20s, I was at last a published
writer (with Random House and some magazines), I'd quit my final honest job, and
I was lunging shakily forward into my vocation. What I wanted to do was
gather up armloads of words the way we used to gather up armloads of snowballs
when I was a kid; every one with a small hard rock in the middle. I wanted
to explain, but more than that I wanted to affect. We all
know that feeling from having been called on the carpet in the principal's
office; as we start on that labyrinthine lie, as we tread out over that expanse
of thin ice, terrified but committed to self-preservation through prevarication,
we keep dropping in the suggestive detail, the pregnant inference, the
apparently ingenuous reference, the double-edged word, hoping that the
accumulation of technique will somehow overpower the fact that the principal has
the goods on us and we don't have a leg to stand on. That's when the use
of words creates a nervous thrill, and it was that nervous thrill I wanted to
recreate, both for me and my reader, in my choice of which words to wing at the
page, each one concealing its tiny hard rock. (Later, I learned that
comedy uses the same methods for even more disreputable motives, but I'm talking
now about my early days.)
In 1962, I was trying to write a
first-person novel in which no emotion would ever be stated; only the physical
side-effects of emotion would be described, as various high-tension things would
happen to and around the narrator. The book was eventually finished, and
published in hardcover by Random House as "361" (1962), but
halfway through its writing I'd stopped for a while, deflected by an idea for a
book I though of as a Gold Medal.
That's what I wanted, of course, to
have two publishers for my work, one for hardcover and one for
soft. It seemed to me a very professional thing to have a second position
to fall back to. Though I'd had a couple of books published by Random
House my life as a self-supporting writer was far from assured and I already
knew, unfortunately, that robbery was a tactic of last resort.
The idea of the book had come about
in a very mundane way; I walked across the George Washington Bridge. I'd
been visiting a friend about 30 mils upstate from New York, and had taken a bus
back to the city. However, I'd chosen the wrong bus, one that terminated
on the New Jersey side of the bridge instead of the New York side (where I could
catch my subway). So I walked across the bridge, surprised at how windy it
was out there (when barely windy at all anywhere else) and at how much the
apparently solid bridge shivered and swung from the wind and the pummeling of
the traffic. There was speed in the cars going by, vibration in the bridge
under my feet, tension in the whole atmosphere.
Riding downtown in the subway I
slowly began to evolve in my mind the character who was right for that
setting, whose own sped and solidity and tension matched that of the
bridge. People I knew came and went, but he quickly took on his own face,
his own hard-skeletoned way of walking; I saw him as looking something like Jack
Palance, and I wondered: Why is he walking across the bridge? Not because
he took the wrong bus. Because he's angry. Not hot angry; cold
angry. Because there are times when tools won't serve, not hammers or cars
or guns or telephones, when only the use of your own body will satisfy, the hard
touch of your own hands.
So I wrote the book, about this
sonofabitch called Parker, and in the course of the story I couldn't help
starting to like him, because he was so defined; I never had to brood
about what he'd do next. He always knew. And the suspended
experiment in unstated emotion in that first-person hardcover novel became
something slightly different in this third-person paperback. To some
extent, I suppose, I liked Parker for what he wouldn't tell me about himself.
I liked him, but I killed him
off. He was, after all, a villain, and he killed people, and I wanted
somebody to publish the book. In 1962, Hayes office mentality was still
very strong throughout the popular arts; bad guys didn't get away with it.
The most one could hope for was an "ironic" comeuppance. So at
the end of the book, Parker got shot down by the cops.
I also got shot down; Gold Medal
rejected the book. That was very depressing. It hadn't occurred to
me that Gold Medal wouldn't agree that I'd written a Gold Medal book. In
order to avoid contractual problems with Random House, who had an option on my
next book, I'd even put a Gold Medal pen-name on the script: Richard,
from Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death (1947), and Stark, because I
wanted a name/word that meant stripped-down, without decoration. I was all
dressed up, in other words, but my natural family didn't recognize me, so I had
nowhere to go.
Fortunately, agents are not given to
despair, and further submissions were made, and then an editor named Bucklyn
Moon, at Pocket Books, phoned me and said, "I like Parker. Is there
any way you could rewrite the books so that Parker gets away, and then give us
two or three books a year about him?"
My first reaction was excitement, of
course, but my second was worry, and my third was confusion. Did I want to
write a series? I'd never realistically though of doing one, never thought
of myself as that kind of writer (whatever I meant by that), but the idea
was very tempting once it had been broached. There was the money,
certainly, and money is always a very important consideration. Money is
the net, the support rope. Money is gravity. Money is the only thing
that keeps us from falling into the black vacuum between the stars.
But there was also Parker; the
character himself. One problem for me, in earlier consideration of doing a
series, had always been that my characters persisted in using themselves up in
the course of their very first story. Having solved their problems, having
cleared their name and conquered their enemies and won the girl and gotten
everything else they wanted (like a regular hero), having struggled that one
time all the way through to "The End," every one of them would clearly
settle down to normal lives forever.
But not so Parker. He burgeoned
with stories from the very beginning, and in fact it was the sixth book in the
series before I had to find a plot that didn't come directly from seeds planted
in The Hunter (1962). (Maybe that's why number six is the weakest
of the lot.)
As I said, in some subterranean way
Parker had come out of or been formed by that experiment in unstated emotion in "361",
and his habit of doing rather than reacting has made him for me
the ideal series character; since he won't tell me what he really wants, he can
never use himself up by becoming completely satisfied.
I don't mean to be hyperbolic when I
suggest my own creation is in some ways still mysterious to me. I record
his doings, and I know when what I put down is right, but I can't always explain
it, least of all to myself. Why does Parker wait in dark rooms? Why
is he so totally loyal without ever showing comradeliness? What is the
money for?
Going back to Buck Moon's suggestion,
I did hesitate for some time, unsure what might lay further down that
road. I was very aware of the dangers inherent in sequels; any number of
writers have returned to a well only to find it poisoned. (A sequel to The
Desperado, that early Gold Medal Western, was written and was so bad it
almost destroyed the original.) Nevertheless, finally, because of Parker,
and also because of the money (a motivation Parker would understand), and also
because of the implicit test of my skills (another nod from Parker), I told Buck
Moon I'd give it a shot.
The change in The Hunter was
so easy, so easy. It became at once evident that my earlier ending had
been false, that Parker wouldn't have permitted himself such a sleazy
finish. When I let him have his way with those cops, he was even quicker
and less emotional than usual; because I was watching, I suppose, and life was
starting. The look he gave me over his shoulder as he went through the
revolving door contained no gratitude, but on the other hand it didn't contain
scorn either. He isn't a wiseguy.
A few years after his birth, I
discussed Parker with a movie director for a (finally aborted) planned film from
one of the books, and this director claimed that Parker was really French, since
the difference between fictional French robbers and fictional American robbers
is that the French steal because that's what they do, while the Americans steal
to get money for their crippled niece's operation. English-language
villains (other than Iago) have to be explained, while French-language
villains are existential.
It was an interesting distinction
he'd found there, but I thought it at the time too narrow, and I still do, since
in every other respect Parker is as American as Dillinger. In fact, I
think he may have appeared now and again in the past, in war stories and police stories
and even Westerns, the silent, morally neutral fellow barely visible in a dark
corner of the setting, who suddenly and inexplicably helps the hero out of a tight
spot, than laconically fades into the shadows again, with no explanation asked
or given. That was romantic bunkum, of course; it would take more than a
hero in trouble to make him really take a hand. But the writers were aware
of him back there, and wanted to use him somehow. So did I , but
without embarrassing either of us.
Donald E. Westlake
New York City
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