THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE - RICHARD STARK

Another of those one day reads. I thought I’d read all of the Parker novels available in the SPL system (though hardly all of them, there are dozens and I believe some are out of print) but new ones keep coming up. I’m hardly complaining, I’d like to read all of them at some point but they aren’t the sorts of books that make you obsessed with reading it all right away. There aren’t really cliffhangers or any sort of over-arching story. The closest we get to this is the shifting relationship Parker has with the more organized, corporate criminal world called the “outfit” or the “syndicate”. They’re constantly trying to hem Parker in or violating his rigid thief’s code, which requires the plastic surgery referenced in the title. So the books feature the ageless Parker, moving through the mid-century criminal underworld with machine-like efficiency, using all sorts of great mid-century criminal slang like, “the finger” or “the boodle”. Parker is so single-minded and ruthless; the books always go the same way. There’s a job (armored car in this case) and a group of criminals brought together to do the job, and Parker always has a bad feeling about it because no one is as professional as him, then there’s a double-cross and it’s looking bad but Parker always pulls it out. He kills whoever he needs to and outsmarts the rest and moves back down to Florida to live at a resort under a different name in a sort of reptilian languor until he runs out of money and has to pull another job. He’s so single-minded it’s hypnotic you’re pulled quickly through the book and you never have to wonder about what Parker is thinking. Here’s Parker explaining his feelings about his dead wife (who he was going to murder, for betrayal, before she killed herself), “She was the only person he didn’t feel simply about. With everyone in the world, the situation was simple. They were in and he worked with them, or they were out and he ignored them or they were trouble and he took care of them…He didn’t want that to happen again, ever, to feel about anyone that way.” There’s always a part in these books where the main character switches for a chapter or two and we follow a secondary character around and, typically, learn their life story. Normally, or at least in the other Parker novels I’ve read, this person is a high-up criminal who Parker is coming to kill. Typically, they reflect on the changes in the criminal underworld since the end of Prohibition (not an uninteresting topic to be sure). This time Stark changes it up and we get the perspective and history of a man who was a communist party goon in the ’30’s who was beaten and given brain damage by scabs and now works as a low-level criminal enforcer. There’s enough stuff like that, specific weird details, coupled with the pleasing sameness and brevity (they really take an hour or so a piece, they’re great plane books) which make me want to, over the course of my life, finish the series. I suppose I should make a list of which one’s I’ve read. 54 new faces.