FORGOTTEN BOOK: DIRTY MONEY

Dirty Money by "Richard Stark" (Donald E. Westlake)  (2008)

The is the final novel that Westlake wrote about master criminal Parker and the last to be published in his lifetime.

Theft is Parker's business and he takes his business very seriously.  He tends to be fairly straightforward in his dealings.  He's a man of his word and will not cheat anyone who throws in with him, but he is unforgiving with anyone who tries to take his hard-earned loot from him, or with anyone who tries to double-cross him.  You do not want to get on Parker's bad side.

Dirty Money  is a sequel to an earlier book, Nobody Runs Forever.  In that novel, Parker and two allies used antitank weapons to waylay a convoy of four trucks transporting a bank's complete assets, records as well as cash.  They made off with  little over two million dollars.  As sometimes happens, things go wrong and the search for the robbers is intense.  With so many law officer descending on the area, Parker and his cohorts cannot move the cash out of the area, storing it in an abandoned church among boxes of old hymnals, and waiting for the proper time to retrieve the cash.  then one of the robbers, Nick Dalesia, did something stupid:  he paid for some food he had ordered with a $20 bill from the robbery, not knowing the serial numbers of the stolen bills had all be recorded.  Dalesia was arrested but managed to escape the next day, doing something else that was very stupid:  he killed a US marshal.  Now the police are pulling out all the stops to catch Dalesia, the other two robbers, and recover the cash.

Dalesia is on his own.  He has not given up Parker or the other robber, McWhirter.  But he needs cash -- and lots of it -- to avoid the police traps and go to ground permanently.  Parker and McWhirter are afraid that Dalesia will lead the cops to the cash.  But the cash belongs to Parker and McWhirter.  It is theirs!  Dalesia forfeited any claim to a share of the loot by being stupid and getting caught and by being even more stupid by killing a federal agent.  But how can they get the money without anyone knowing bout it?

To complicate things, the cops has descriptions of both Parker and McWhirter, although at first the e-fits of the pair could have been of anyone.  But more witnesses came through and there is now a highly recognizable poster of Parker circulated throughout the countryside.

And to make things worse, the scent of money has drawn not only some hard-core independent gangsters, but also a prominent mob-connected business.  It seems like everyone wants Parker's money.

And interesting cat and mouse game among a number of very deadly players, as well as an audacious plan to retrieve the stolen money.   Through it all, Parker is being Parker, and focusing on the end game, coolly and dispassionately.

I should note that the book, and the series, ends with a last line that epitomizes the entire tone of the series.  (And to point out just one Easter egg:  one of the aliases Parker uses in this book is "John B. Allen," which happens to the pseudonym  Westlake used to pen a quickie paperback biography of Elizabeth Taylor.)

Highly recommended.

Westlake (1933-2008) Westlake was a much honored writer of crime and detective novels, creating not only Partker, but his comic counterpart John Dortmunder.  (The final Dortmunder book was published just a few months after Westlake's death.)    Eight films have been based on Parker novels; and at least eight films have been based on Dortmunder novels.  Westlake was nominated for an Academy Award for penning the 1990 film The Grifters.   He was a three-time Edgar Award winner, managing to win in three different categories -- Best Novel, Best Sort Story, and Best Screenplay.  In 1993, he was named an MWA Grand Master.  It's hard to go wrong with a Westlake story.