This is the opening line of The Hunter by Richard Stark, which is a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, a giant of American crime fiction.
I had picked up a copy at the recommendation of my friend Seth Harwood. It’s one heck of a book. I was not disappointed.
Stark gives the reader very little in the way of description or exposition. The prose throughout the book is smart and tough. In fact, Stark’s description of Parker is one of the longest in the novel.
“His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. His hair was brown and dry and dead, blowing around his head like a poor toupee about to fly loose. His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless. His suit coat fluttered behind him, and his arms swung easily as he walked.
―Richard Stark, The Hunter
The meat of his prose is lean, and the story is hard-boiled. There is a lot of violence and very little morality. I’ve given more context and texture to Adrian Tannhauser than Parker receives from Stark but there is more power in his prose than mine. To my way of understanding writing, it shouldn’t work. But work it does, and gloriously so. There’s a lot for me to learn here. I need to think about that.
Also, I’m not sure if this is true but there are echoes of Richard Stark in the works of Elmore Leonard. Leonard’s conversation flows a bit more towards both my liking and creative sensibilities but Leonard needed Stark’s foundation of Hemingway-esque staccato, spare sentences to build on to create his own style. And a writer’s style is certainly formed by the books that they have read.
In his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King draws a very thick line between the art of being a writer and a dedicated reader.
“You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true. If I had a nickel for every person who ever told me he/she wanted to become a writer but ‘didn’t have time to read,’ I could buy myself a pretty good steak dinner. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
―Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Goodness knows that I am an avid reader and have been such for as long as I can remember. I am the sum of all of the writers who have left an imprint on me: Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry, Norman Maclean, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, and others have all helped to shape and form the way I choose words, construct sentences, and build paragraphs.
Now I have found Richard Stark and his stories about Parker. I’ll be reading more of him and possibly picking up a few more tools to add to my writer’s toolbox.
Leave a Reply