The Parker Novels

[mercop14]

Hey everyone . I recently picked up the novel Backflash by Donald Westlake at the library. It is a book in the Parker series and I was wondering if I would be able to understand it with out reading the books before it, or if its like the dark tower series and the books are meant to be read in order. Thanks.

[Sarcade]

Hiya --

Short answer: I'd try and get the others. If you can't (and some of the much earlier Parkers like Butcher's Moon and The Rare Coin Score are hellishly expensive and/or extremely difficult to come by), then at least start with Comeback, the book just before Backflash.

Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake) wrote the first eighteen-or-so Parker novels up to and including Butcher's Moon before abruptly running out of things to say about his protagonist. That lasted a decade or so before he finally had the germ of a new Parker idea and started the sequence over, recommencing with Comeback. From this point on, the books kind of bleed into each other, with one picking up immediately from the end of the latter and so on: some of them even end on cliffhangers.

They are all extremely good: very clever and very brutal and, as you probably know, certainly the part-inspiration of elements of Stephen King's The Dark Half and a nod towards his Richard Bachman pseudonym. It's well worth trying to find the earlier novels secondhand as well if you can: they try to reprint them periodically but always seem to peter out about halfway through the series.

Thus (deep breath) summing up: either begin with Comeback, for the 'new', more modern series of Parker adventures, or if you possibly can, start at the very beginning with The Hunter (also known as Payback, made into a Mel Gibson film not terribly many years ago) and work your way through the whole lot.

(Hope I haven't confused you too much: Parker chronology is quite a confusing subject! The author deals with it quite well in his own introduction to Comeback, though )

[mercop14]

Thanks for the advice I appreciate it. I think I saw that they recently republished the first for for not to much i'm not sure if it was the parker series or not I'll have to check. If its another series I'm thinking of I'll start with comeback which they have at my library. Thanks again for the info.