The second Parker novel: The Man With the Getaway Face (Pocket Books, 1963)

What is it?

Parker has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to get a new face. Now he has to fight to keep his identity hidden, while also planning and executing an armored car heist.

A treacherous waitress and a punch-drunk former boxer complicate those matters tremendously.

This is Volume 2 of Richard Stark’s “Parker” series of crime novels. It is also the second part of the unofficial Outfit Trilogy, the first three books in the series, in which Parker goes up against an organized crime syndicate.

It’s also the Parker novel with by far the longest title in the series.

It was written after Richard Stark’s (Donald Westlake’s) publisher asked him to keep the character around, and write more books featuring him. Westlake went back and changed his original ending of The Hunter so that Parker survives and continues on his mission to make the mobsters that are after him back off!

The middle part of what is essentially a three-part story arc, this is a critically important book for those wanting to get a better feel for how Parker operates. There’s a lot of what I call “Parker Business” in this one. He spends a lot of time on the road. He stashes money at cheap hotels and nice ones. He interacts with various characters around the country who provide him with various services. Stark also explains to us why Parker doesn’t just kill people willy-nilly.

Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962)

Quick and Dirty Summary

This novel consists of two unrelated sets of events that only intersect because of Parker’s involvement in both. Fortunately, both are a good bit of fun.

Parker pays a plastic surgeon to change his face, so the Outfit will no longer recognize him. Afterward, needing money, he reluctantly agrees to take part in a relatively low-paying armored car robbery.

The job was suggested to one of Parker’s occasional accomplices by Alma, a waitress at a diner, who sees the armored car stop there regularly. Upon meeting her, Parker immediately doesn’t like or trust her. He quietly investigates and realizes Alma plans to betray the rest of the string and take off with all the money for herself.

During the build-up to the heist, the plastic surgeon’s bodyguard, Stubbs, shows up. He tells Parker that the surgeon has been murdered by one of his recent clients – and Parker was one of them. Stubbs is traveling around the country, visiting each former client in turn, to find the killer. Parker convinces the guy, a former boxer who suffered some brain damage, of his innocence. But Parker also realizes that if the real killer (or someone else) murders Stubbs along the way, no one will report to his partner, back at the clinic, causing her to release damaging information about Parker’s new identity. It’s therefore in Parker’s interest to keep the guy alive. But he can’t have him running around loose. So Parker holds him prisoner in a dark and clammy fruit cellar for two weeks while they prepare to execute the heist.

Just after the heist’s conclusion, Parker discovers Stubbs has escaped. The rest of the story follows Stubbs – now sick from his time in the fruit cellar – on the trail of the real killer, and Parker on the trail of Stubbs.

The Objective

Parker’s first objective is to rob an armored car that stops at a diner regularly.

His second objective is to track down Stubbs, the bodyguard of the murdered surgeon who created his “getaway face.” This situation grows more complicated as the story progresses.

The Adversary

In the heist portion of the story, the adversary is Alma, the waitress who proposed the armored car robbery to Parker’s associate, Skim. A truly unlikable woman, Alma plans to betray the others and try to take all the money for herself.

In the rest of the novel, the adversary is Charles F. Wells, a wealthy man who may or may not have killed the plastic surgeon, thus sending Stubbs across the country on his mission. Wells barely appears in the book, but his brief moments on stage are memorable.

The String

Handy McKay makes his first appearance, but not his last.

Parker has worked with Skim before, and doesn’t seem to think much of him.

Alma the waitress begins as part of the string, but she has other plans.

Others of Note

Stubbs, a former boxer (and communist organizer – ?!) who suffered brain damage and now works as a bodyguard for a sort of outlaw plastic surgeon, is one of the more interesting and sympathetic characters Stark/Westlake ever created for a Parker novel. He’s not as dumb as he seems. You can’t help but kind of like him – even when he comes at Parker with a two-by-four!

Later in the story, Parker encounters a trio of colorful characters back at the clinic that he rightly describes this way: “You people are morons!”

Parker is more likable in part because he doesn’t just kill every person who annoys him, and Stark/Westlake addresses the reasons for that in this very book. That said, there are times you wish he’d just massacre a whole crew of annoying people. This is one of those times.

The Complication

There are two major complications: Alma, the waitress who wants to double-cross Parker’s string, and Stubbs, the bodyguard who first thinks Parker killed his employer. Parker has to deal with each of them in turn, and neither situation resolves quite the way you expect. Usually, the more frustrated Parker gets, the more fun his books are to read.

Adaptations

Darwyn Cooke adapted part of this novel into a 22-page bonus feature accompanying his full adaptations of books one and three, included in The Martini Edition, Volume 1.

Cooke’s short adaptation focuses almost entirely on the armored car robbery and Alma. The characters of Stubbs and Wells do not appear.

To my knowledge, this is the only time this novel has ever been even partially adapted into another medium.

How Parker is Parker here?

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

I am awarding this book 8 Parkers.

Parker is much more like the character we know here than he was in the first book. And we experience a lot of Parker’s legendary frustration when dealing with other people, because hardly anyone recognizes him as Parker after his plastic surgery at the beginning of this book. He is forced to explain over and over that it’s really him, and demonstrate knowledge only Parker would have.

Thankfully, by the end of this book, most of his associates know he looks different now, and he only has to do the whole “ask me something only Parker would know” bit a couple of times in the third book.

Other Notes

It’s remarkable how Stark can make even the most mundane actions riveting when Parker is doing them. In this book, for example, he inspects an old truck engine, and then drives up and down the East Coast, stopping at various little hotels for the night, and you absolutely cannot look away from any of it.

Quote

“He came in holding his arms like a man who’d taken a correspondence course in judo.”

Subjective Rating

7/10

Follows

Vol 1: The Hunter

Followed by

Vol 3: The Outfit

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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.