alissa m.

Lucky find in a little seaside bookstore today! 📚

Probs something like Sour Lemon Score, Butcher's Moon, Green Eagle, Dame, and Mourner. But I adore them all!

This one's in my top 5 Starks!

I just finished reading The Last Tycoon so here's what I've read this year so far.

Happy birthday, Lee Marvin

Happy birthday to cult film icon Jack Palance, who was also Donald Westlake's inspiration for Parker's physical appearance! Here he is pictured in the lesser known Second Chance & Flight to Tangier, plus an illustration by Darwyn Cooke from his Parker portfolio + our favorite quote from Westlake.

Deeply saddened to hear the news about Robert Duvall. To us Richard Stark fans, he'll certainly be best remembered for his turn as Parker/Earl Macklin in John Flynn's The Outfit (1973) -- a tightrope walker's performance, balanced between cold determination and heartbreaking humanity.

Robert Duvall, the legendary character actor who specialized in playing rugged, complicated men, has died. He was 95. 🕊️

www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv...

Happy Valentine's Day to my love @lilyslabo.bsky.social & also to Parker enthusiasts worldwide 💗

happy valentine’s day!!!!! 💖😊

i think we should start making them mandatory reading worldwide

it's always fascinating to me that Lemons Never Lie is the most popular of the Grofield novels & quite a number of people don't seem to have read the first three at all. it does explain quite a lot of misconceptions about Grofield though, I hope to dive into this in a longer piece some time soon

thinking about this again.

Emailed!

I'm awake! What's up? :)

One of life's great pleasures is co-writing with my lovely & always insightful partner everywhere @lilyslabo.bsky.social 💗

In 1969, Richard Stark wrote The Blackbird, a twist-filled novel of international spy intrigue, told from the viewpoint of Parker's frequent partner in crime, Alan Grofield. Two years later, out of The Blackbird came Slayground, the 17th novel in the series. The two share a first chapter: a job goes wrong, one man ends up dead, and our two protagonists are separated. Slayground lays out the other side of the story: Parker ends up trapped in an amusement park with the Outfit trying to track him down. Like the majority of Parker novels, Slayground deals most heavily in subtext. Stark's output had always had an undercurrent of experimentation, the books remain so tight and exciting to this very day for this exact reason, but the nature of his literary experiments had changed over time. The early half of the series tends towards genre changes (The Jugger features Parker trying to solve a mystery, The Seventh is a revenge thriller, The Handle plays with notions of James Bond-esque espionage), while the latter half constructs a relatively simple premise around one central theme (The Green Eagle Score is about psychology, The Sour Lemon Score explores identity, and so on). Slayground's central theme is aging, and the passing of time. The narrative is punctuated by deep melancholy notes of nostalgia, unlike its less claustrophobic companion The Blackbird or the other Parker stories Stark had previously written. If anything, it's not Hammett's unsentimental approach that comes to mind but the solitude and sadness of Raymond Chandler's work - as much as Westlake had repeatedly denied any influence on Parker from the latter author. This characteristic comes into play right away in the second chapter, when were treated to the classic Stark rewind as Parker recalls buying the heist plan from Dent, a retired old man who'd once been in this line of work.

We just posted our review of Slayground by Richard Stark on Tough Business! Check out our thoughts on the novel’s rarely-discussed themes at the link below, as well as our cover gallery of international editions!

toughbusiness.neocities.org/slayground

grofield's pinky makes me crazy insane btw

Stunning, magnificent art from my wife & my favorite artist in the world. The way you always capture this amazing intimacy & closeness never fails to blow me away. Wow!

one quiet evening in 1975

currently reading

tab hunter's favorite role. insane

since everyone’s talking about westerns i would like to suggest gunman’s walk be part of the conversation

“THE BIG KNIFE” (1955) dir. Robert Aldrich

Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase, Everett Sloane

🎬 United Artists

the big knife is required viewing for being a reader of tough business by the way

the little quiet moment at the end of slayground is one of my favorite moments in the entire series

Such a pleasure getting to chat with Mr. Brubaker about Parker & Grofield, and the fantastic little story appearing in the Martini Edition!

"I feel such admiration for Westlake and Darwyn's work" - An Exclusive Interview with Ed Brubaker

For our first interview of the year, the team at Tough Business had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Eisner Award-winning comic book writer Ed Brubaker about crime fiction, his friendship with Darwyn Cooke, and all things Parker. We spoke to Ed's frequent collaborator, Sean Phillips, a while back about their Alan Grofield story appearing in Richard Stark's Parker: The Martini Edition - Last Call — and Ed kindly filled in some of the blanks for us. Check out the full interview below for a look behind the scenes of the first original Parker story, as well as a hint at what's in store in Five Gears in Reverse, the latest installment of the acclaimed Criminal comic book series. 1) How were you first introduced to Richard Stark's Parker novels? Was the Grofield solo series a later discovery? My dad had some of the Parker books when I was a kid. He collected a lot of different kinds of books including old pulp paperbacks, mostly detective or spy fiction but he also had a few Parkers. I think I loved the covers and they were very easy to read, and Parker is such a fun character. But other than when Point Blank came out on video and people finally wrote about that movie and how amazing it is, I hadn't really thought about the books until I was doing Catwoman with Darwyn Cooke. Darwyn was really into them, among other old books and movies and comics we talked about all the time. After that I started hunting them all down and got addicted. I even managed to find a hardback of Butcher's Moon.

Our first interview of the year is up on Tough Business— this time featuring Eisner-winning comic writer Ed Brubaker!

This one’s a companion piece to last year’s interview with @seanphillips.bsky.social, and we’re so excited about it!

Read it here: toughbusiness.neocities.org/edbrubakerin...