Episode Details

Jesse, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, and Trent Reynolds talk about The Seventh by Richard Stark

Talked about on today’s show:
sometimes published as The Split, the movie kinda sucks, it should be excellent, not one character actor in it, Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, Gene Hackman, the girls are fine, they fuckaround with the plot a lot, convincingly convinced, impossible to make Parker a character on film, watched the movie then finished the book, Parker is off the page a lot in those books, entire acts where he’s offscreen, they can’t get inside his head, the old narrator problem, voice over narration, talk to the guy sick in bed, she goes away and gets some tea, do you want lemon or sugar or cream or milk, Parker doesn’t know anything about tea, ignorant of vast swaths of humanity’s interest, pop up menu like The Terminator, he doesn’t operate like a normal human, at the end of the book we see something out of character: he laughs, emotionless or pissed off, he’s not a human, he’s some aspects or parts of human, trying to run people off the road, to test them for his crew?, the character lacks definition, they want to make Parker into a film so bad, it never works, The Sour Lemon Score, Harvey Keitel in City Of Industry (1997), one scene where they’re at a stoplight and cops pull up next to them, this little mechanism, professional and amateur, more than ten years, The Man With The Getaway Face, Ask The Parrot is better, one of the scores, The Black Ice Score, black panthers, The Score, somebody loves every book, no rhyme or reason to it, Slayground, fairly typical of the books, a heist of some kind, trouble dividing the money, thieves fall out, how did you find this book, the beginning, slow, badly prepared, the blurbs, this is amazing in pace, you can’t put it down, not sleep til u finished it, nobody knows what’s happening, the action crystalizes, false tracks, so much description, he has to describe everything, hands, the realist principle, a less good book if you took out the descriptions, a four and a half hour book, unputdownable, the time aspect, Parker thinking, time had been playing tricks like that, an hour took a week or more to be done with, the personality (despite it’s almost absence) underneath the opposition between amateur and pro, different stupidities, the pro vs. the amateur, another type of stupidity, a key, a meta level explaining other detective thrillers, richer in the second half, subtle about his philosophy, makes you want to read the books, super-formulaic, Westlake is writing a formula, he’s being playful, I guess for my seventh book, 1966, feels a little bit earlier, fins on the cars, middle sixties, the secret hidden philosophy or anxieties behind all of Westlake’s fiction, obsessed with insurance, Abe Klinger, a temporary condition that had lasted about twelve years, television was to blame, an insidious monster in living rooms, taxes getting worse every year, barely possible, except for the rotten box, kiddie matinee on Saturday, always a double feature, a nice friendly neighborhood theater, the public library, long suffering voices, in every Westlake Parker book, we get inside other character’s minds, they become sympathetic, reconciling all these modes of being, insurance is worry, it’s a concern, “detective” thriller, this has a mystery in it, failed, he writes crime fiction, closer to suspense than mystery, the light face and the dark face detective, present himself as an agent of change, The Risk Profession, a murder mystery about insurance, successful, the Dortmunder series, high 20s, built up the crew, Kifka, Abe Klinger, had he not been shot, sympathize with him, an amazing choice, wrote this just for money,