What is it?

Volume 7 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels.

The title applies in two ways.

The string Parker joins for the heist is made up of seven criminals, with each of them expecting to receive a seventh of the take. (There’s a clever twist on this at the end, as well.)

[Click the images for Parker-sized versions.]

And obviously it’s also the seventh novel in the series. Westlake/Stark did us all a favor by making it easy to remember where this particular volume falls in order, among the other 23.

Quick and Dirty Summary

As the story begins, Parker and six accomplices have successfully robbed a football stadium during a big game–one of his more unusual heist targets of the entire series. Afterward, Parker is holed up with a young woman, allowing the urges he always suppresses during a heist to come to the surface again. He steps out for just ten minutes for cigarettes, and returns to the apartment to find the girl impaled by a sword and all the money from the heist gone. And then the cops rush in, thinking he did it.

Parker spends the rest of the novel attempting to track down the real killer and retrieve the money from the stadium robbery. He also has to contend with the other six robbers, several of whom at least partially blame him for losing the money. Plus there’s a weird little guy in a Mackinaw, lurking about.

The Objective

The goal of the heist was the cash take from a big football game. But this comes off smoothly–so smoothly that we only see it in flashback. The real objective of the story is Parker’s search for the “amateur” who murdered the girl he was staying with, and who stole all the money from the stadium robbery. And meanwhile the amateur is trying to kill Parker.

The Adversary

The amateur is one of the stranger antagonists in the series. We barely get his name and know very little about him in terms of the outside world, but we are given a lot of internal psychological information about how he thinks, what he wants, how he justifies his actions, and so on. He’s big and strong enough to stab a woman with a decorative sword and pin her to the wall, but scared enough to take off running in terror whenever Parker shoots at him.

A secondary adversary is police detective Dougherty, a low-ranking member of the force whom Parker braces for information, and who then develops a sort of personal vendetta against him.

A tertiary adversary is Little Bob Negli, a loudmouthed pipsqueak of a hood who increasingly believes Parker has taken their cash, and who vows revenge.

The String

Six other robbers join Parker’s string for the stadium heist, notably including Dan Kifka, the huge, blond Viking-esque cab driver and health food freak (and his pert little cheerleader girlfriend, Janey). We also meet the overbearing Little Bob Negli and his partner in crime, Arnie Feccio, among others.

Others of Note

There are a number of delightful scenes where Parker is trying to have a serious conversation with a flu-wracked and bedridden Dan Kifka, only to have Kifka’s new girlfriend repeatedly intrude. It doesn’t help Parker (though it certainly entertains the reader!) that the girl, Janey, keeps coming to the door to let Parker in while wearing a sweater. No, that’s it – just a sweater. And she keeps pulling it down in front, but of course that only pulls it up in the back. Yeah, you can see where this is going. Poor Dan. He’s never getting enough rest to get over this flu.

Little Bob Negli is another in a long line of very strong personalities Parker has to contend with while on a job In this case, the annoyance continues for days after the heist is over, because they have to continue working together in order to find the lost loot. Negli is small but loud and belligerent, and it’s pretty clear he and Parker are going to come to blows – or worse – before it’s over.

The Complication

Everything was going great until Parker decided he needed more cigarettes. He wasn’t out of the apartment for ten minutes, but that was enough time for the amateur to kill poor Ellie and call the cops on Parker.

Now he’s got to contend with the Law, the amateur, and his own string – some of whom are beginning to think he simply took all the money for himself and made the rest of it up.

Adaptations

Darwyn Cooke adapted just the final portion of this book into a 12-page graphic novelette. Cooke summarizes the main portion of the story quickly and then plays out Parker’s final encounter with the amateur.

It is included in the individual volume of his adaptation of Slayground, as well as in Parker: The Martini Edition: The Last Call omnibus, the second of two oversized volumes collecting his complete Parker work.

How Parker is Parker here?

(With a 1 being he bakes cookies with Claire, and a 10 being Slayground):

I am awarding this book 6 Parkers.

Parker is in character, but spends a lot of this book running around dodging bullets from a character the author himself describes as an “amateur.”

Only in the final scenes do we see Parker back in form as the predator he can be.

That’s probably why Darwyn Cooke only adapted that portion of the book into a graphic mini-novel.

Other Notes

At its core, this is a very simple cat-and-mouse story, with Parker trying to find out who’s taking shots at him (and who killed his girl), and the amateur trying to kill Parker first.

But Westlake/Stark brings a few interesting literary tricks to the table for this one.

He begins the story after Parker’s job is successfully over. Then comes the murder and the robbery of the take from their heist. Then we flash back to the heist itself, before coming back around to Parker trying to track down the killer and retrieve the loot. Along the way we get some interesting psychoanalysis of the killer (aka the amateur), as well as a police detective assigned to the case. As the story jumps around, the focus continues to shift across the fairly wide cast of characters, each the hero in his or her own story.

One other note of interest: A supporting character is very definitively killed in this book, only to turn up alive again in a later volume in the series. Whoops!

Quote

It was as though he’d stabbed her from the rear observation platform of a train that was now rushing away up the track, and he could look out and see her way back there, receding, receding, getting smaller and smaller, less and less important, less and less real. Time was rushing on now, like that rushing train, hurtling him away.

That’s what death is; getting your heel caught in a crack of time.

Subjective Rating

7/10 (See what I did there? But it’s a fair rating for this one. Pretty good, but not great.)

Follows

Volume 6: The Jugger

Followed by

Volume 8: The Handle

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Van Allen Plexico is a multi-award-winning author, member of the SFWA, and a Pulp Grandmaster. Among his many novels are the Harper & Salsa crime series, set in the Sixties and carrying something of the flavor of the Parker books, beginning with the 2018 Pulp Factory Award-Winning Best Novel of the Year, VEGAS HEIST. See all of his work at www.plexico.net.