The Score by Richard Stark (Pocket Books, 1964), reprinted as Killtown by Berkley Books in 1973
What is it?
Volume 5 of Richard Stark’s Parkerseries of crime novels. This volume arguably features the greatest single heist Parker ever gets involved with. He and an unusually large team of accomplices robs an entire town, all in one night.
It’s also the first time in the series s a heist is not just a side story but the main point of the entire book, from the planning and the execution to the complication and the aftermath. We see a bit of that with the armored car robbery in The Man with the Getaway Face, but that’s the plot of only the first half of that book, and it’s nothing quite like the scale on display here.
Weird Tales, June 1923, front and back coversThe fourth issue of Weird Tales, dated June 1923, keeps the same format as the issue previous — starting with the large bedsheet size, about 9 inches by 12. The trade dress of the cover is the same, with the same logo. The design of the cover, with a splash of red in which one story is advertised in black writing, is the same. Unfortunately, the actual cover art, by regular Weird Tales artist William Heitman, isn’t very good.
There’s a lady, there’s an ape, and the latter seems to have surprised the former in her room. The majority of Weird Tales readers were likely able to place the image at once as a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” which is reprinted this issue. The problem is that it’s not a particularly evocative image, and the poses of the characters seem odd at first glance and make less sense the more you look at them.
A newsboy in the 1920s.
This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?
And what might you hear? Cars, of course, and maybe the buzz of conversation around you. But perhaps you’ll hear the voice of a boy on a streetcorner, holding up a newspaper and crying out a still-famous phrase: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For this is a time when newsboys are still a feature of urban life.
Volume 4 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. It is also the first book in the series in which Parker goes on an entirely new heist, unrelated to the previous books. There is, however, a connection back to Bett Harrow, one of the supporting characters in the third book.
What that means is, we now have proof of concept. Parker doesn’t only work in one big, multi-part revenge story, as with the first three books. He’s also great in a more episodic sort of format where he finds a job, puts together a team and goes on a mission. This will remain the pattern for most of the succeeding novels.
The new format Weird Tales adopted for its third issue reached right into the table of contents, which dropped from two pages to one, with of necessity a more cramped layout. One extremely short story isn’t listed, but the magazine makes sure to promote “Nineteen Thrilling Short Stories” along with “Two Complete Novelettes.” That’s actually an increase over the last issue, which had sixteen short stories and two novelettes. So, having discussed the format in a previous post, let’s now look closely at this issue’s fiction.
And it is necessary with this issue to talk about race in Weird Tales, starting with the first story in the magazine (so this post will include quotations and mentions of period racism). “The Moon Terror,” by A.G. Birch, is promoted by a cover blurb; it’s 30,000 words long, 20,000 of which appear in this issue, with the conclusion in the next month’s magazine. It’s a textbook example of Yellow Peril racism, in which sinister East Asians menace white people and the Western world. In this case, the villains are a secret Chinese society who threaten the planet as a whole with increasingly powerful earthquakes.
A postcard showing an early-20th century Horne & Hardart automatThis is the fifth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background for discussing the early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?
Let’s say you get hungry as you walk along, and think about getting some food later. Maybe you see a restaurant, and a grocery store near it. What kind of food will you be able to buy in the store? And what sort of a restaurant are you looking at? There are a lot of potential answers to that second question, but I want to focus on one admittedly unusual possibility. If you’re in the right city, especially New York or Philadelphia, maybe you have the chance to pop into an automat. And in New York, you might even spot a future Weird Tales writer drinking the hot chocolate.
The third Parker novel: The Outfit (Pocket Books, 1967)
What is it?
Volume 3 of Richard Stark’s Parker series of crime novels. It is also the third part of the unofficial Outfit Trilogy, the first three books in the series, in which Parker goes up against an organized crime syndicate.
Quick and Dirty Summary
After surviving an assassination attempt by a killer hired by the Outfit, Parker decides it’s time to settle matters with organized crime once and for all.
Weird Tales, May 1923, front and back coversThe third issue of Weird Tales saw the magazine experiment with a significant change in presentation. The first two issues had been a standard pulp size, about 6 inches by 9; the May 1923 issue went to the bedsheet format, a bit more than 9 inches by 12, while cutting the number of pages from 192 to 120. Open the issue, or look through a pdf file, and further changes become apparent.
The layout’s gone to three columns of text instead of two. There are two reprints in the issue, one of them printed at a reduced type size, presumably to fit the space available. And the magazine boasts interior artwork for the first time, with nine stories getting uncredited illustrations; black-and-white line drawings, usually with heavy hatching and cross-hatching.
The artist was presumably this issue’s cover artist, William Heitman, who seems to have done all the interior artwork in Weird Tales’ first year. Heitman’s two-colour cover image is simple, bordering on crude, but conveys a mood. The blurb on the cover is for A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” though there’s nothing in the story like the picture, for reasons which we’ll come to later on in this post. The colour scheme of the cover’s similar to the last issue, with solid red and black, but the logo’s the third in three issues — though the magazine’s subhead, “The Unique Magazine,” has remained consistent.
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
Eddie Muller is known as the Czar of Noir. He founded the Film Noir Foundation and he hosts Noir Alley, on Turner Classic Movies. He’s written a couple respected non-fiction books about Noir and cinema.
In 2002, Austin hosted the big mystery convention, Bouchercon. I was living there and stopped in for a day. I met Eddie, who hadn’t yet started appearing on TCM opposite Robert Osborne. He was there with his just published first novel, The Distance.
Eddie’s father was a popular, long-time sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner for over 40 years. He was known as ‘Mr Boxer.’ Eddie would also go to work in the newspaper business himself.
That background is all relevant, because for the book, Eddie drew heavily on his dad’s career, and his own life around the newspaper industry. The Distance features Mister Boxing, Billy Nichols, a local sports reporter who is a legitimate celebrity, working for William Randolph Heart’s The Examiner. Set around the post-WW II San Francisco boxing scene, the workings of the newspaper and the reporter’s life add great depth to the book.
The flag of the United States of America, with 48 stars at top and with 50 at bottom.
This post is the fourth in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things will you see?
You might, for example, see a flagpole with an American flag on it. It is a flag with a regular grid of stars in the corner, six rows of eight stars apiece, representing the 48 states of the Union. The United States in 1923 is a different place from what it will become a hundred years later, with a population that is distributed differently, different territories, a different self-image and different ideas about the nature of its peoples.
