Comeback

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This novel represents a kind of star turn for Donald E. Westlake, kind of like in 1968, when Wilt Chamberlain decided to lead the NBA in assists instead of scoring, just to demonstrate total mastery of his world. Writing as Richard Stark, Westlake has rested his immensely popular, hilariously star-crossed thief, Dortmunder, to resurrect Parker, one of the coldest, hardest, most resolute SOBs ever to appear in noir. In Comeback, Parker teams up with two men and a woman to steal $400,000 in small bills from a sleazy televangelist's "Christian Crusade." The heist goes off perfectly--until one of the crew attempts to eliminate his partners to claim the whole score. Parker's innate calculation and mistrust save his life. His sense of criminal realpolitik requires him to hunt down and kill his traitorous former partner. Structurally, the novel resembles a Dortmunder caper; the well-laid plans of a highly professional criminal go awry, and the crook-hero must improvise a bookful of stratagems to finally possess what he set out to steal. But the similarity ends there. The voice, feel, and characterizations here are gritty and chillingly noir, as different from Westlake's comic novels as Miss Marple is from Mike Hammer. Wilt startled the NBA with his turn, and Westlake/Stark is likely to do the same--at least for those who know only the Dortmunder books. For the rest of us, he succeeds in demonstrating his total mastery of crime fiction. Thomas Gaughan