The Man with the Getaway Face (1963)

This is the second book in the long-running Parker series by Donald E. Westlake (who wrote them under the pen name, Richard Stark).

Westlake holds an interesting place in the history of crime fiction. While he clearly grew out of the hardboiled genre, he breaks with some of the foundational tropes. His central protagonist, Parker, is not a private detective. He is a professional criminal. This gives a new spin on the genre that had previously been rooted in detective stories. And yet, Westlake doesn’t go so far in the other direction that I would call his crime novels noir either. Yes, Parker is a professional thief, not an investigator like Sam Spade or Marlowe, but he is an antihero. He’s rough and gruff. He’s self-centered. He won’t think twice about killing someone if they get in his way, but he won’t do that unnecessarily. Some people get spared if he can get what he wants without taking them out. And unlike noir, Parker is not on a fatalistic downward spiral. He faces all sorts of interesting challenges, and he typically overcomes them. Where a noir protagonist usually winds up in an even worse position by the end of the story, Parker comes out on top, lives to tell another tale, and carries on with his next adventure (most often, his next job). Yet the world Parker lives in is very much noir. In other words, Westlake’s novels are not stereotypical hardboiled crime and not quite noir, but have a strong flavor from both.

The Man with the Getaway Face picks right up from the first book, The Hunter. Parker, who is on the run from the Outfit (the Mafia), gets plastic surgery to conceal his identity. He then gets a lead for a new heist. There is an armored car that follows a regular pattern. Parker and a small crew start making plans to roll it and split the loot. A few things go wrong, and how he works through these incidents is the meat of the narrative. I won’t spoil with the details.

There are some interesting side characters in the book. Of special note is a guy named Stubbs. Once an ideologue of the Communist Party, he was beaten one too many times, and is now a bit of a simpleton. Think Lennie from Of Mice and Men, but not that extreme.

There is also Alma, a waitress at a diner who plays a role in setting up the job. And the rest of the crew that Parker works with.

The pacing was well done. Like the first Parker book, this was a quick read. Westlake employs punchy dialogue, just enough description to keep the characters clear, and shows a real sense of the geography of the locations the characters move through.

I’ve grown attached to the series. I’m invested in reading all 24 books. Not one-after-the-other, but definitely between reading other stuff. Westlake is one of the best post-Hammett, post-Chandler crime authors, and the Parker books are the centerpiece of his writing career. I had a lot of fun reading this, and look forward to the next one.