The Score.

Littlefield leaned closer to him. “You’re a young man, you can still learn. Pay attention to this. You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.”

Donald Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark, produced a series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief known as Parker, a series that began with the book The Hunter (later adapted for the screen as Point Blank and Payback). The University of Chicago Press has reprinted the first twenty Parker novels (out of 24), including The Score, which is currently available as a free eBook through amazon and is also free on BN.com, with the promotion running through the end of September.

The crime at the heart of The Score is certainly ambitious – Parker finds himself drafted to join a group that intends to knock over an entire town in North Dakota, led by the unreliable Edgars, who devised the plan because he knows the town’s layout and when they could maximize their payout. Stark spends about two thirds of the novel on the setup, with Parker leading the effort to assemble the ideal team and handling some of the logistics, including an interesting scene where he goes to purchase weapons from a blind arms dealer who stores the goods in boxes for children’s toys. The bickering starts from the moment Parker, who has little to no tolerance for bullshit, meets Edgars, and while it never explodes into a complete meltdown, the undercurrent is always there and threatens to undermine the solidarity of the team in an effort where one screw-up will sink the entire operation.

The real appeal of the novel is in the interplay between the characters, mostly between Parker and the others. Parker’s experience and limited tolerance for frivolity makes him the ideal field general for the operation, but he’s also forced to delegate as the group takes over the town almost building by building. Three group members eventually deviate from the plan in one way or another, forcing Parker to adapt on the fly, and his reaction to one of those three was one of the few big surprises in the book. But Westlake’s knack for clipped, quick dialogue keeps everything moving even through that first two-thirds of the novel where nothing actually happens beyond the planning; even the masters in the hard-boiled field, Hammett and Chandler, would typically drop a body or two and have their protagonist get a blackjack to the dome before the halfway point, although both had the brighter, more literary prose that they could have dispensed with those plot devices and still kept me riveted.

I am enough of a fan of heist stories that I knocked out The Score inside of forty-eight hours, and appreciated reading one that’s the antithesis of the overly stylized heist motif popularized by Ocean’s Eleven. I could have done with a little more explanation of the big twist from the mouth of the character responsible, although Stark does provide the basic back story, and Parker’s sudden decision to go soft on one of his partners in the heist, although not terribly consequential, felt oddly out of character. Parker’s simple, direct, no-nonsense approach is the real appeal of the novel for me, even with those quirks, a rare example of a likeable protagonist who’s actually the bad guy.

Next up: Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection. Ruhlman’s Ratio remains an essential, often-used item on my cookbook shelf. (Shelves, really. Three so far.)