Review: The Mourner

The Mourner by Richard Stark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somebody was reading too much Hammett back in 1963.

Ok, maybe not. It’s pretty tough to read too much Hammett (seeing how there was so little of it and all of it very good to great). It is not, I can certainly attest, all that hard to read too much Parker.

I have, indeed done that, as I have now knocked out the first four of the series in the last four days. (I feel like my tween self plowing through the Hardy Boys.)

In any case, I sense a real fatigue in this one. Stark relegates the great premise of these books to the background – instead of one-man Parker going up the too-civilized-for-its-own-good syndicate, he has to do a job for an ex-girlfriend who has an incriminating gun he needs to recover.

I can almost feel Stark (Westlake) searching for a plot and then thinking, aha!, as he imagines rewriting The Maltese Falcon.

The result is something that’s the equivalent of a garage-band cover of an earlier hit. We get a “fat man.” We get a middle-European fellow with an accent and a surprising resiliency. We get a stolen medieval statuette that no one – excepting one footnote-loving scholar – recognizes as valuable. And we get a femme fatale who’s convinced she can manipulate our detective hero.

I sort of enjoyed this, mostly because – like all Parker novels it seems – it flies past. They really go down quickly, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

It’s also fun to see Stark playing with the tropes from The Maltese Falcon. There is a modest cleverness to it that does not immediately fit next to the tough-guy stuff of Parker in general.

As I reach the end of it, though, I find I do not especially want to reach for the next one. It’s a little like having eaten too many Oreo’s.

In other words, I’ve had too much Parker. (For now at least.)



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