STARK CONTRASTS

by Rob Lopresti

If a book is written in third person, who is the narrator? Nobody? Or is it supposed to be the author?

I tend to think it is intended to be no one, an empty neutral personality. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t they all sound more or less the same? Consider these two omniscient narrators.

“When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.”

“The bottom two floors (of the bank building) were all machinery and metal ladders, like the bowels of a great ocean-going passenger liner– which in many ways is what a skyscraper is, massive and self-contained and compartmentalized, except that the skyscraper is always moored in the same place, and of course it’s standing on end, and come to think of it, skyscrapers don’t float, and maybe they aren’t anything like each other at all. Forget the whole thing.”

The first quote is the opening line of Firebreak by Richard Stark. The second bit of madness comes from Good Behavior by Donald E. Westlake. Clearly these two gentlemen have completely different ideas as to what an omniscient narrator is supposed to sound like.

Except, as some of you know, Richard Stark and Donald Westlake were the same person. This gives you a sample of the range of this one man’s narrative voice.

Parker speaks up

All of Stark’s novels are about the arch-thief known only as Parker (or his associate Grofield). What makes Parker fascinating, I think, is two things: First, he is endlessly competent (meaning mostly that he doesn’t hesitate or do the wrong thing… when one of his partners shoots another partner, which seems to be an occupational hazard, Parker is out the window before anyone has a chance to re-aim) and second, because he has highly developed professional scruples — and no morals whatsoever. You can read more about him here.

But Stark’s flat and dazzling prose is another big attraction, to the point where William Denton has kindly provided a list of those amazing first lines. If you look at them closely you will see that in the early days playful Westlake slipped one witty prankish line past the grim eye of Stark. I suspect they both regretted it in the morning.

The big Tiny

As elegantly terse as Stark can be, Westlake (in his comic novels) can be wildly inventive. For example, here are a few of his descriptions of one of his recurring characters, Tiny Bulcher, beginning with his first appearance in the fourth Dortmunder novel.

“And sitting at the table was a monster in semi-human form…. Tiny had the voice of a frog in an oil drum, but less musical….Tiny, hulking on the little chair, his great meaty shoulders bulging inside his cheap brown suit, a shelf of forehead bone shadowing his eyes, looked mostly like something to scare children into going to bed.” Nobody’s Perfect

“Tiny Bulcher…was a kind of mastodon in clothes, a sort of lowland Abominable Snowman, a creature made from the parts rejected by Dr. Frankenstein…” Good Behavior

“…a bullet head on an ICBM body, lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King King were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being.” Drowned Hopes

“A man mountain, with a body like an oil truck and a head like an unexploded bomb, he mostly looked like a fairy tale character that eats villages.” Bad News

“His head was like a rocket’s nose cone, with nasty curled-up ears on the sides. His body appeared to be the size and softness of a Hummer, in broad brown slacks and a green polo shirt, as though he were trying to disguise himself as a golf course.” Watch Your Back!

Obviously one of the delights of the Dortmunder books is descriptions of characters like Tiny (not that there is anyone else much like him). One wonders what would happen if, say, Tiny and Parker ever met. As far as I know that has never happened, but there are people in one firm of detectives who have run into both Tiny and Parker – and they are in books not written by Donald Westlake or Richard Stark. Maybe I’ll write about them sometime.

One last point. At least five of the Dortmunder books have been made into movies and none of them, in my opinion, were very good. I think part of the problem is that so much of the humor in these books is in the narration, and that doesn’t translate into the screen. But they do make wonderful reading, don’t they?