Richard Stark

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Alan Grofield Books
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Thief-heroes in crime fiction tend to be along the lines of Raffles, gentleman-adventurer created in the early 1900s by E. W. Hornung: witty, debonair, and playful. Richard Stark's master thief Parker is none of those things. He's a thug, pure and simple. His robberies are as direct as a punch in the nose, and he doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he get what he wants.

Stark is, of course, a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, who under his own name has written a string of thrillers in a somewhat lighter tone (in one, the ill-fated Dortmunder gang bases their plan on a (nonexistent) Parker novel!). The Parker series began just as the era of paperback originals was winding down, but though the series has continued into it's fifth decade, it still has more in common with the novels of Jim Thompson and Charles Williams than it does with contemporary crime novels.

Stark has also written a number of novels about Alan Grofield, a thief/actor who appeared in a couple of Parker novels before getting his own gig. This series is considerably lighter - what wouldn't be?

In addition to the novels, the Parker books have been made into a number of movies, one great (Point Blank), one pretty good (Payback), plus a few others.