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"When the angel opened the door, Parker stepped first past the threshold into the darkness...." This opener of COMEBACK plunges readers into the fast-paced and dangerous underworld of "mechanics": professional criminals whose honor extends only as far as it's useful.
The set-up is simple: four crooks team up to rob a televangelist whose traveling crusade is playing the stadium of a small midwestern city. With the help of an inside man, the job's a cinch, and it nearly goes off without a hitch, netting these mechanics over $400,000 in small, unmarked bills. But as soon as this criminal team makes its ingenious getaway, the betrayals begin.
As the crooks maneuver to see who can get away both alive and flush with loot, the police circle ever closer to nabbing them. And the plot thickens when some hapless punks decide to elbow in on the score while the televangelist's own ex-military "security chief" begins to follow some leads of his own. Throw in a definitely on-edge detective and a libidinous and buxom choir-leader, and you've got one hell of a hard-boiled stew. And just when you think Parker's soup is cooked, the pot is tipped and our hero is spilled into the fire.
But Parker is no shrinking violet. At one point as he is surrounded and unarmed, a character says to him, "By God, you're sure of yourself." Parker's response is non-verbal but refreshingly direct. In an age where the flawed and self-doubting hero has become such a cliche, it's a kick to follow the exploits of a man whose only reservations regard his chances of survival, not his motives.
Donald E. Westlake is a prolific writer best known for his comic caper novels, but COMEBACK is written under an old nom-de-plume, Richard Stark. Westlake (or Stark, if you prefer) has constructed a taut and entertaining piece of pulp that manages to utilize the conventions of crime fiction without becoming wholly conventional. And the setting for the book's climactic confrontation between Parker and his nemesis is, literally, a cliffhanger.
True, it's not Joyce or Faulkner, but, on its own pulpy terms, COMEBACK is just as masterful. And we all need a little roughage in our diets.
--- Reviewed by J. J. Wylie
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