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A Grandmaster of the genre adds another new twist to an oft-honored, long running series.
One gets the feeling that there is a nondescript building somewhere in the West Village that contains three floors of guys chained to typewriters, banging out ideas that are eventually published under the names "Donald Westlake" or "Richard Stark." I mean, how else can you explain this guy? He is a perennial Grandmaster, publishing at least one book a year as Donald Westlake and one book a year under his dark nom de plume Richard Stark. He never repeats himself, never disappoints his readers and presents either new, innovative variations on established themes or new themes in a genre that, by rights, should have exhausted itself long ago. And so it is with BREAKOUT, Richard Stark's latest and best Parker novel.
Parker is a bad guy. He is the ultimate pragmatist, amoral, a shortest distance between two points kind of guy. Parker is always figuring The Angle. He makes mistakes but doesn't dwell on them. His life and chosen profession don't permit him to do so. Said chosen profession normally involves breaking into places that contain valuable things and taking those valuables with him. So it is that BREAKOUT deals almost entirely with Parker having to break OUT of places. First it's a jail, then it's a downtown mall, then it's a metropolitan airport. The familiar themes are here --- bad luck, unreliable partners --- but Stark, as always, puts new twists on them.
BREAKOUT begins with a heist gone awry that results in Parker being confined to Stoneveldt, a holding prison which has never experienced a successful escape. It is not telling a tale out of school to relate that Stoneveldt --- love that name --- does not hold Parker for long. There is a price, however. Parker becomes reluctantly involved in a jewel heist that seems to be foolproof. It's not of course and he soon finds himself trapped in a building from which escape seems impossible. And, from the beginning of BREAKOUT to its conclusion, Parker doesn't so much escape from a situation as leap from one frying pan into another.
Part of what makes BREAKOUT and the other novels in the Parker series so compelling is Parker's ability to play the cards he is dealt, even when they are accidentally dropped, face-up, on the table.
The story itself is so well told that it alone would be worth the price of admission. But with Stark there are layers on layers, little inside jokes, elements of his talent that he throws in as a reward to see if you're awake and paying attention --- extra credit, if you will. One of these is very minor and has to do with book titles. For the last five books or so, Stark has been linking titles. He's been using compound words, using the last half of the compound word of one title as the first half of the compound word for the title of the next book. Accordingly, COMEBACK begat BACKFLASH, BACKFLASH begat FLASHFIRE, FLASHFIRE begat FIREBREAK and FIREBREAK begat BREAKOUT. Next might be OUTRAGE or OUTCLASSED --- probably not. It will be something so good that you'll never think of it and so immediately obvious that you'll wonder why you didn't.
But the title game is just a parlor trick compared to what Stark does in the body of BREAKOUT. BREAKOUT is divided into four sections. Stark takes the section and relegates Parker to a secondary character in his own book, focusing instead on a minor character in each of the chapters in this section. Stark isn't fooling around here for grins and giggles --- every word of what happens is important --- but in the space of a little less than 80 pages he accomplishes what it took Thornton Wilder a full novel to do in THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. And he does it without losing the narrative thread or dropping any of the other balls that one has in the air when writing a novel. I had the feeling that Stark did it this way as a means of exercising his creative muscles, as a way of challenging his abilities, the way an Olympian weightlifter will throw a couple of extra quarters on the bar when he already holds the gold. I had to stop and read Part Two of BREAKOUT over again, twice, just to get a feeling for how the job was done.
After writing 24 books in the series, Stark could have phoned in BREAKOUT and it is doubtful that anyone would have been the wiser. He instead continues to keep the series new and fresh while keeping it true to its original premise. BREAKOUT, at its core, is a quiet masterpiece from an author who seems incapable of writing anything but.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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