Mystery Review: The Hunter was a new kind of novel, and whether that was a good thing is open to debate. This was the introduction of the mononymic Parker: hard-boiled, ruthless, amoral, a professional thief who lives well on the proceeds of a few big capers a year. He's not a detective. He's a bad guy, a strong arm robber who doesn't necessarily enjoy killing but doesn't avoid it either. Typically his story is of one bad guy wronged by other bad guys. The Hunter was made into the movies Point Blank (1967) and Payback (1999), both of which are excellent (the first has a sterling reputation; I'm unsure why the second gets so much grief). The novel has almost no extraneous detail, virtually all the writing is either dialog or description of people interacting. Little is wasted on pondering and description and the book reads like a runaway freight. If a field is described it's because Parker has to crawl through it. Here we get the violent end of Spillane melded into the Jim Thompson school of rough trade with just a touch of Simenon. I don't know if Parker is an anti-hero but he's certainly the protagonist as bad guy while he seeks revenge on the accomplices who betrayed him. At the end of The Hunter Parker is traveling to Omaha to get plastic surgery to change his appearance. The author was Donald E. Westlake under the oddly appropriate pseudonym Richard Stark, as the writing is uniquely severe and bare. He wrote 23 more installments of the Parker saga. Maybe it's not okay for the reader to be rooting for the bad guy to get away with it, but it sure is transgressively enjoyable and engrossing. [4★]
