The Handle: A Parker Novel

By Richard Stark and Lucy Sante

An action-packed crime novel starring Parker, the heister starring in the forthcoming Shane Black film Play Dirty!

Richard Stark's Parker novels are the hardest of hard-boiled, classic crime novels where the heists are huge, the body counts are high, and the bad guys usually win. 

The Parker novels have been a huge influence on countless writers and filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, Colson Whitehead, Lucy Sante, John Banville, and many more. Their stripped-down language and hard-as-nails amorality create an unforgettable world where the next score could be the big one, but your next mistake could also be your last. There's nothing else like them.
 
In The Handle, Parker is enlisted by the mob to knock off an island casino guarded by speedboats and heavies, forty miles from the Texas coast. Working with his trusted colleague Alan Grofield, but dealing with double-crosses and double-dealings by others from the word go, Parker knows the line between success and failure on this score would be exactly the length of the barrel of a .38.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226772837

Book preview

ONE

1

When the engine stopped, Parker came up on deck for a look around. The mainland was nearly out of sight now, just a gray smudge on the horizon between the dark blue of the water and the lighter blue of the sky.

The man who called himself Yancy was sitting in one of the two chairs astern, and the man whose name Parker didn’t know was standing at the controls. They both wore white trousers, navy blue jackets and yachting caps and sunglasses, but they both had the faces and voices and hands of New York or Chicago hoods.

Yancy raised the hand with the glass in it and motioned forward. There it is, he said.

Parker turned and looked out past the spray-flecked windshield, over the top of the rest of the boat, and out over the water to the island. It was still about half a mile away, and all he could make out was a mound of jungle greenery bulging up out of the water over there.

Get in closer, he said. I can’t see anything from here.

The one at the wheel said, We don’t want to take chances.

Yancy said, He’s right. Move in closer.

The guy at the wheel didn’t like it, but he had nothing more to say. He just frowned behind his sunglasses, shrugged his shoulders, and started the engine.

Yancy waved the hand with the bottle in it. Come on and sit down. Why stay below all the time?

Parker had gone down into the cabin before they’d left the dock and had stayed there until just now. He had no fear of water, but he didn’t like boats and he didn’t like the ocean. Coming out away from land like this was like sticking yourself in a cage; there was no way out. From a practical point of view he was stuck on this boat, imprisoned on it, till it touched land again. So long as he stayed down below in the cabin, a place that looked like half the motel rooms in the southwest, he wasn’t so aware of the caged feeling, but up here, surrounded by the flat blue water of the Gulf of Mexico, he was reminded of it all the

Reviews for The Handle

[alanteder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Parker and the Island Casino
Review of the Blackstone Audio Inc. audiobook edition (December, 2011) of the Pocket Books paperback (1967)

Richard Stark was one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific crime author Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008), who wrote over 100 books. The Stark pseudonym was used primarily for the Parker novels, an antihero criminal who is usually betrayed or ensnared in some manner and who spends each book getting revenge or escaping the circumstances.

In The Handle, Parker is hired by his old adversaries The Outfit to rob and destroy an off-shore casino that is taking away their gambling business. Parker enlists various allies for the job, including parttime actor Alan Grofield (making his 2nd Parker appearance). Of course the job goes bad and everyone is hard-pressed to get out alive. In the end, Parker gets Grofield to a Mexican hospital to recover and that sets the scene for Grofield's own spin-off series which starts with The Damsel (1967).

Narrator Stephen R. Thorne does a good job in all voices in this audiobook edition.

I had never previously read the Stark/Parker novels but became curious when they came up in my recent reading of The Writer's Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives (Sept. 2020) by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager. Here is a (perhaps surprising) excerpt from their discussion with author Amor Towles:Nancy: Do you read Lee Child?
Amor: I know Lee. I had never read his books until I met him, but now I read them whenever they come out. I think some of the decisions he makes are ingenious.
Jeff: Have you read the Parker books by Donald Westlake [writing as Richard Stark]?
Amor: I think the Parker books are an extraordinary series.
Jeff: They feel like a big influence on Reacher, right down to the name. Both Reacher and Parker have a singular focus on the task in front of them.
Amor: But Parker is amoral. Reacher is just dangerous.
Jeff: Right. Reacher doesn't have a conventional morality, but he has his own morality. Parker will do anything he has to do to achieve his goal.
Amor: But to your point, Westlake's staccato style with its great twists at the end the end of the paragraphs, and his mesmerizing central character - these attributes are clearly shared by the Reacher books.
The 24 Parker books are almost all available for free on Audible Plus, except for #21 & #22 which aren't available at all.

Trivia and Links
There is a brief plot summary of The Handle and of all the Parker books and adaptations at The Violent World of Parker website.

Although the 2011 Blackstone Audio Inc. audiobook edition shares the same cover art as the University of Chicago Press 2009 reprint, it does not include the Foreword by author Luc Sante.

[davewilde-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the beginning of Richard Stark’s “The Damsel,” Alan Grofield is laid up in a Mexico City hotel with a suitcase full of money and bullet wounds across his body. “The Handle” is the story of how he got there. With Parker and a few others, Grofield robbed a casino on a private island (ostensibly under the Cuban flag) off the coast of Texas. Strangely enough, Parker was engaged to pull this caper by the very Outfit that once had him in its sights. Can’t have a competitor operating, can you?

“The Handle” is a slang term referring to the loot one gets when robbing an establishment. Like all Parker novels, this story is told in sparse prose that shows how ruthless and singleminded Parker is when compiling his team of crack experts and when executing the robbery itself. It is a well-told story and includes some great scenes of mayhem and destruction, on and off the island. There are, as always, numerous things that seem to crop up when planning the perfect caper, but Parker deals with them in his way.

There are great characters that appear in this novel as well, including Grofield, who first made an appearance in the Score, and Salsa, who also appeared in that novel. Crystal is the dame the Outfit sent to pump Parker for information and she is quite interesting. The reader first meets her as Parker and her are preparing to board a boat to go to the casino for recon. Crystal just can’t stop blabbing on and on and, as Parker tries to tune her out, he realizes that she is scared of the boat ride and it’s the only way she can deal with it. The biography of the villain of the piece (or victim, if you will, since he was the one being robbed by Parker and company) is Baron and his biography is a fascinating piece all by itself, including instances of international espionage and boundary disputes. The action in this Parker novel is ongoing and intense and it is just a terrific read.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“One thing I know. Some nights, the handle in that place is a quarter million bucks.”

Parker is back, and this time he’s taking on an island! An island names Cockaigne, off the coast of Texas. And he's doing it on behalf of the Outfit? Makes for strange bedfellows indeed... But throw in ol’ Alan Grofield, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a caper!

But, like most Parker books, it’s a bit of a rocky ride, especially for Alan! “For the fifth time tonight, for the fifth time in his life, Grofield had been shot. This one, he was afraid, this one was was much worse than the other four.” Yeesh. It's a short, quick read, but fun and exciting! In my opinion, you can never go wrong with a Parker novel!

[jimmaclachlan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Another good adventure with plenty of twists & turns. There were a few things that didn't sit all that well, such as (Grofield & the bed/mattress w/o Baron noticing, Grofield walking so far in the desert wounded, Baron not carrying a gun with the money...) but overall it was a lot of fun.

While I have the next 4 books in audio book format, I think I'll take a break & listen to a different author for a while.