Tue 11 Jan 2022
A GOLD MEDAL Mystery Review: RICHARD STARK – The Black Ice Score.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
RICHARD STARK – The Black Ice Score. Parker #11. Gold Medal #D1949; paperback original, 1968. Cover by Robert McGinnis. Berkley, paperback, 1973; Avon, paperback, 1985. University of Chicago Press, trade paperback, 2010.
Professional thief non-pereil Parker is caught up in a three-way tangle in The Black Ice Score. The head of a small African country is trying to escape from that country with a good portion of that country’s treasury before he is caught and hanged from the nearest tree, and in that regard he has sent the funds ahead encapsulated in a fortune in diamonds. Faction two wants the diamonds to help maintain the country’s legal government, while faction three wants the jewels to help overthrow the country’s legal government.
Then there is a scavenger trying to horn in on his own, hoping to enrich himself with some of the leftover spoils. Parker is persuaded to work with faction number two, hiring himself out as advisor only regarding as to how the well-guarded jewels may be stolen from faction number one.
This is a heist novel, in other words.
There is, unfortunately, to my mind, little here that deviates from most heist novels. There is the planning, the carrying out of the plan, dealing with what goes wrong with the planning – no plan in a heist novel ever goes off according to plan – and the tidying up at the end.
Mitigating against the fact that the framework of the overall story line is almost completely etched in stone, is that Stark (aka Donald Westlake) was very nearly the most hard-boiled writers of his era, and Parker is very nearly most hard-boiled of characters. Not a word is wasted throughout the story, including in any of the dialogue.
A steady diet of Richard Stark stories is not for me, but as spaced out timewise as I read them, they always go down extremely well.
January 11th, 2022 at 9:03 pm
The thing about Parker is that he is never a hero, just the one character in the book we might possibly identify with because most of the others are so much worse.
A steady diet of Parker and Stark might prove too much. I tend to pace them out and enjoy the skill and the terse style as a treat.
It’s not a good series to try and read one after the other.
January 11th, 2022 at 10:03 pm
I was a big fan of Parker years ago. I bought SOUR LEMON SCORE fresh off the rack in 1969 and went looking for the rest. BLACK ICE SCORE was still in print from GM, and THE SEVENTH from Pocket Books; I ordered them from the publishers. That was back in the day when you could still get copies of books that were still available from the publishers’ back lists. It took me three more years to collect the remaining GM and Pocket titles from used-book stores and junk shops. Westlake later did a comic variation on BLACK ICE SCORE as THE HOT ROCK.
January 11th, 2022 at 10:55 pm
Parker is badass.
Dortmunder (either in ‘Hot Rock’ or in ‘Bank Shot’) is well-done light caper comedy. Especially when (as in the former) William Goldman handles the adaptation. It’s a hoot, even if it doesn’t match the book as much as it could have.
January 12th, 2022 at 8:39 am
David Vineyard, I made a steady diet of the Parker books back in ’68, when Gold Medal put out a raft of them, and I followed up with all the older ones I could scrounge from the ratty used book stores on the bad side of town.
They did not make me sociopathic (opinions to the contrary notwithstanding) but close friends noted an increased tendency to quote from Lee Marvin movies.
January 12th, 2022 at 12:05 pm
Best part was the books that he wrote in the 2000’s still had the same feel as the earlier books.
January 12th, 2022 at 10:17 pm
Dan, I never suggested the books would harm anyone. Frankly I think people are sociopaths to begin with when books send them over the edge. Anyone led into crime by reading a Parker novel was just looking for an excuse as far as I’m concerned.
But for me I need something a bit tamer between bouts of Parker and Stark only because reading too many in a row start to show some of the minor repetitive business that is unavoidable when writing about a character with no interior life. I personally appreciate them more if I don’t read them one after the other. It’s more like having a wine and cheese course between entries than any critique of the entree, too much of a good thing.
Anytime you read very many books by a single writer one after the other you will see some repetition and a few flaws (read about three Agatha Christie novels in a row and you are likely to spot something that will predict who the killer is in most of her books no matter how clever her mysteries — and no, I won’t give it away and ruin it for anyone).
With some writers it doesn’t matter, but for me with Stark the seams start to show if I read them too close together where if I take a break and come back everything is fresh again. That is true of any number of writers I count among the best as well as my favorites.
I fully admit it may be writers read a little different than others only because we are likely to look for techniques and similarities trying to learn what makes some writers so good.