Dortmunder, Parker, and Blades in the Dark

Hi folks, long time no write. Kind of a lot going on here in the USA, as you may be aware….

I suddenly had a little literary epiphany, and I thought it’d make a good post for this blog. We’re going back to Westlake/Stark (i.e., Dortmunder and Parker), but more broadly to the whole noir genre, from Hammett onward. (Cue wobbly screen dissolve….)

First of all, context.

Some friends and I are planning to play a role-playing game called Blades in the Dark, by John Harper, which is essentially a Victorian-steampunk-fantasy take on noir. Player-characters are criminals of one kind or another, and play, in a given session, mostly focuses around “the job” at hand. I figure that this will be fun, and may also help me with my currently-stuck Parker-meets-fantasy novel project.

To get the hang of how this game works—there are some rules-system oddities—I listened to some podcast gaming, which is a thing now. I usually find them very dull, but it’s a good way to get the hang of a freeform gaming system.

Now I ran across a couple of relatively long-running Blades podcasts in which the players are smooth and focused, and they and the GM all understand the rules well, so I listened for a while. Slowly, something started to feel seriously off. I thought about it, I reread some Parker (and a little Dortmunder), and eventually it hit me:

In both of these podcasts, a lot of the major and minor characters care about each other.

I don’t mean romantic love or lust; I mean that they have honest, decent, friendly, caring feelings for one another. When X goes off into a creepy part of town, their occasional contact Y worries a bit and hopes they’ll be okay. You know, like normal human beings who’d be really upset to hear that a reasonably close acquaintance or office-mate had been run over by a bus.

This is all wrong.

And in a flash, it hit me: this is part of how Westlake (=Stark) gets away with the Parker trick (i.e., getting us to root for a sociopath), and how he makes Dormunder so damn funny.

Think about noir classics, film and book. Among principal characters (mostly men), caring is presented as weakness: “Dave went soft after he fell for that dame.” As for the dame herself, maybe she does love Dave dearly and hopes he’ll be okay… and then again maybe she’s just using him the way he uses all women prior to her… and maybe they’re using each other. Thus the femme fatale.

“We need a good driver for this.” “How about Wilkes?” “Dead.” “Really? How?” “Tripped on a kerb running for a Chevy at a bank thing. Guard shot him right in the back. Damn shame.” “Huh. So who’s around, then?” People who talk like this are interested but they don’t care.

Of course, we also know that people aren’t really like this. These characters try very, very hard to be tough, to cover up and suppress emotion, etc. And when we meet a guy who really does seem like a decent guy, chances are he’s for the shredder: their world will cut him down and destroy him.

That’s the genre. These people are damaged, and in the end their weaknesses—what normal people (like we readers and viewers) see as signs of human decency—will destroy them.

So what about Dortmunder?

Poor John Dortmunder. The thing is, he’s not a real tough guy. He sort of thinks he is, but he’s not. He does have friends, though he denies it. Why does he even speak to Andy Kelp any more? Because, in the end, Andy’s his friend, and he can’t just cut him off.

This is why Drowned Hopes works so well. The basic setup is that Dortmunder has to plan, again and again, different ways of getting the loot of a big long-past heist. Problem #1, the loot was buried outside a small town, but in the intervening years a dam has been built and the loot is now underneath a lake. Problem #2, the guy who put it there will, if Dortmunder can’t come up with a plan that works, dynamite the dam… killing pretty much everybody in the thriving new town beneath it. Because that guy is a total psycho. So Dortmunder can’t walk away from this crazy job—because he’s actually a decent person.

Which brings us to Parker.

The weird thing about the Stark books is that Parker is a complete monster, without a single redeeming quality to speak of. He’s a sociopath. And yet every single time, through 24 books, we cheer for Parker. That’s amazing: straight anti-heroes like this are rare to begin with, and they’re amazingly difficult to sustain. But Parker never really changes. How does Stark (Westlake) get us to cheer for a monster?

Because Parker is the epitome of his genre. We know the tropes, we’ve read books like this. Parker has no weaknesses. He’s not a junkie, a gambling addict, a sex-maniac, a sadist, or anything like that. He doesn’t really care about women (eventually he picks up Claire, but that’s complicated and mostly out-of-scope for these books, and it’s not at all clear that his feelings for her are classifiable in our sorts of terms). He wants money, because he likes to live comfortably, but he’s not going to risk everything clawing after that last $100 bill. So Parker has no weaknesses, and is the perfect noir-criminal character, perfect in the sense that he’s the very, very best.

But of course, the others in the string (whichever string) aren’t. They’re normal noir characters. They’re flawed. (Flawed meaning, of course, human.) And those flaws get them in trouble, screwing up the job, and when that happens, things go bad for Parker. At which point Parker makes them not a problem any more, by the most straightforward and efficient methods he can find.

Why do we cheer for Parker? Because we like noir heist books and movies (if we didn’t, why would we be reading a Parker book?), and in them we always hope that just this once, the dreadfully flawed protagonist won’t destroy himself, that he’ll get away with it without doing that dumb, utterly human thing we know he’s going to do. Well, Parker is the guy we’ve been waiting for.

And when we finish a Parker book and step back, something horrible hits us, because we’ve been caught again. Stark has again tricked us into rooting for the sociopath.

Thanks for reading!