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The Anti‐Organization man: D onald E. Westlake's Parker novels

2024; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jacc.13581

1542-734X

Robert Lance Snyder,

Management and Organizational Studies

What chiefly distinguishes Westlake, under whatever name, is his passion for process and mechanics […]. Parker appears to have eliminated everything from his program [except] machine logic, but this is merely protective coloration. He is a romantic vestige, a free-market anarchist whose independent status is becoming a thing of the past. So reads an insightful observation from a New York Review of Books piece cited on the plaudits page of several of the 24 Parker novels written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym of Richard Stark and republished by the University of Chicago Press.1 The series originally appeared from 1962 to 1974 and resumed, after a hiatus, from 1997 until its author's death in 2008. An inaugural installment titled The Hunter (1962) opens with a roadside glimpse of its antihero as viewed by "office men" and "office women" commuting into New York City while he is walking across the George Washington Bridge at 8:00 a.m. "Big and shaggy, with flat square shoulders and arms too long in sleeves too short" (2008a [1962], p. 3), he strikes passersby who notice him as a down-on-his-luck vagrant: "His hands, swinging curve-fingered at his sides, looked like they were molded of brown clay by a sculptor who thought big and liked veins. […] His face was a chipped chunk of concrete, with eyes of flawed onyx. His mouth was a quick stroke, bloodless" (2008a [1962], p. 4).2 The significant fact about Parker, however, is not that many other characters regard him as an atavistic Cro-Magnon reincarnation. Westlake's series profiles him instead as a highly intentional and inveterately anti-organization man during an era of American culture renowned for its ethos of conformity and subservience to the tacit expectations of corporatism. Wholly an outsider to that sphere, Parker as Luc Sante recognizes is "a romantic vestige, a free-market anarchist" (1985). When Alan Grofield, first introduced as an accomplice in The Score (2009e [1964]), meets Parker again for another heist job in The Handle (1966), he describes Parker as a "Robin Hood in the age of mechanization" (2009a [1966], p. 47). The only error in that representation is that, unlike the legendary outlaw, the professional thief known simply as Parker does not altruistically steal from the rich to give to the poor. There was the crazy, ghost-ridden world of his grandmother and his dead parents. There was the isolated, best-not-remembered world in which he had been a paratrooper. There was the matter-of-fact, opaque-glass-brick-partitioned world of places like the United Broadcasting Company and the Schanenhauser Foundation. And there was the entirely separate world populated by Betsy and Janey and Barbara and Pete, the only one of the four worlds worth a damn. (Wilson, 2002 [1955], p. 22) Although Rath wears a gray flannel suit in compliance with the dress code of New York City's business establishment at the time, he soon discovers that this realm "inhibits [his] attempts to live a fully integrated life" (Mueller, 2013, p. 4). In the novel's second half, thanks largely to his wife's pluck, Rath is able to achieve some balance among the compartmentalized sectors of his life, subtended as they are by time, place, and circumstance, but even so Wilson's parable of the 1950s suggests the idea of a necessary compromise between collectivism and individualism.4 About a third of the way into his treatise, in a short chapter titled "The 'Well-Rounded' Man," Whyte pauses to consider the fictional example of Tom Rath. Wilson's protagonist, he decides, epitomizes a newly emergent generation's blithe premise that "the goals of the individual and the goals of the organization will work out to be one and the same" (2002 [1956], p. 129). Having "an implicit faith that The Organization will be as interested in making use of their best qualities as they are themselves," young men like Rath "don't see why they shouldn't have the good life and good money both. There doesn't have to be any choice between the two" (2002 [1956], pp. 130,132). It helps, of course, that Rath has an understanding boss in network president Ralph Hopkins and a recently deceased grandmother whose estate overlooking Long Island Sound can be subdivided into a profitable housing development. Whyte's larger argument is that the ideology of the Organization Man had shifted well away from a foundational Protestant ethic, one that valued the intrinsic worth of hard work and thrift, and toward a social ethic that after the New Deal promoted "a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in 'belongingness' as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness" (Whyte, 2002 [1956], p. 7). In the process of that paradigm shift emerged rampant consumerism, Big Business, and the erosion of genuine autonomy. Parker's unwavering commitment to efficiency, albeit in his role as a professional thief, would seem to align him with those in the corporate sector who specialize in risk management, but the incommensurate difference is that Westlake's loner knows that "all business is crime" (Sante, 1985, p. 19). The Man with the Getaway Face (1963) does mention that Parker under an alias "owned a couple of parking lots and gas stations around the country to satisfy the curiosity of the Internal Revenue beagles," but partly as an income-tax dodge he "let the managers siphon off the profits in return for not asking him to take an active part in the business" (2008b [1963], p. 14). Another Parker novel, The Jugger (1965), records a perception by undertaker Bernard Gliffe, who is complicit with corrupt police Captain Abner Younger in Sagamore, Nebraska, that "he had to be a businessman of some kind. The way he looked, big and square and hard, it had to be a tough and competitive business; used cars maybe, or jukeboxes" (2009b [1965], p. 18).5 Ultimately the key to Parker's series-long survival, as Richard Rayner has suggested, is his "endless adaptivity," but at the same time he maintains a strict set of moral prerogatives (Rayner, 2008). "Parker abhors waste, sloth, frivolity, inconstancy, double-dealing, and reckless endangerment as much as any Puritan," posits Sante. "He hates dishonesty with a passion […]. He is a craftsman who takes pride in his work" (2009, p. vi). That gyroscopic devotion to efficiency coupled with ruthless retaliation when betrayed is a lesson he learned in Westlake's initial triad of novels. The Hunter memorably dramatizes the last point in its account of Parker's double-cross by both Mal Resnick, his duplicitous associate in a $93,400 munitions caper, and Parker's wife Lynn, as a result of which under a cover name he spent half a year on a prison farm before escaping by killing a guard. The novel begins explosively with a nearly destitute Parker barging into Lynn's Manhattan apartment and demanding to know Resnick's whereabouts. When she explains that Mal moved out 3 months ago but continues to pay the rent in cash by way of a messenger, the revenge-minded Parker decides to wait there for 4 days until the next payment is delivered. By the next morning, however, a remorseful Lynn, whom Resnick had threatened to kill in California unless she shot her husband, has committed suicide by an overdose of prescription painkillers. Temporarily at a loss because "He hated her and he loved her, and he'd never felt either emotion for anyone before" (2008a [1962], p. 24), Parker disposes of her corpse in Central Park and bides his time before tracking down Mal Resnick. At this juncture Westlake's narrative redirects attention to an underworld network that calls itself the Outfit, which has 12,000 employees nationwide as mentioned in the novel of the same title (101). By way of background The Hunter includes the detail that 4 years earlier Resnick had "blown a syndicate connection" when he bungled a heroin transaction (2008a [1962], p. 43). In order to reingratiate himself, Mal repaid the Outfit $80,000 from the munitions job, including Parker's share of $45,000, in return for which he is taken back into the organization as a mid-level manager of liquor sales. Upon learning from lackeys that the man he betrayed in California is on his trail, Resnick seeks an interview with one of the two syndicate bosses in New York City. Westlake's rendering of the consultation masterfully parodies the pretensions and posturing of a corporate hierarchy. Ensconced in a towering office building's Suite 706, the frosted-glass door of which bears the inscription "Frederick Carter, Investments," the mogul is said to be "an impressive man": "Sitting behind a massive mahogany desk, he brought to mind visions of Wall Street and high finance, rails and steel and banking. Law books and economic treatises filled the glass-doored bookshelves" (2008a [1962], p. 78). When Mal meets with him to seek the Outfit's help in finding Parker, the executive makes a tent of his fingertips and peering over them immediately ticks off possible ways of handling the situation. "'First, we could give you the assistance you ask for. Second, we could ignore the problem and let you handle it yourself, as best you may. Third, if it seemed that there actually was a danger to the smooth operation of our organization, we could have you replaced.'" Before opting for the second of these alternatives, Carter stresses that its advantage to Resnick is that if he succeeds in resolving the issue on his own "'you would leave no doubt in anyone's mind that you were the kind of man we want, the kind of man who could go places in our organization'" (2008a [1962], p. 79). With that decision reached, the businessman advises Mal to move out of the Oakwood Arms, the Outfit's residential hotel, "until this matter is settled one way or the other" (2008a [1962], p. 84). Predictably his deferential petitioner complies. All right, Parker, allow me to give you the facts of life. The organization is not unreasonable. It pays its debts, works within acceptable business ethics, and does its best to run at a profit. Except for the fact that it works outside the law, it conforms as closely as possible to the corporate concept. In other words, if you had come to me with a legitimate corporate debt, you would have no trouble. But you are asking us to reimburse you for a personal debt contracted by a former employee. No corporation in the world would agree to that, Parker, and I'm sure our organization wouldn't either. (2008a [1962], pp. 158–59) Exasperated by this pretension and upon learning that Justin Fairfax, the Outfit's other "regional manager," is currently in Florida, Parker says: "All right, then who runs the whole thing? […] One man, Carter. You go up high enough, you always come to one man" (2008a [1962], p. 159). That person is 56-year-old Arthur Bronson, currently in Las Vegas, and while on the phone with him Parker bluntly pledges, "'Either I get paid, or Carter is dead'" (2008a [1962], p. 161). When Bronson spurns the ultimatum, Parker puts the receiver down for a moment, wrests a hidden gun away from Carter, and shoots him. On the line again the outraged CEO blusters that "'No lone man can buck the organization'" (2008a [1962], p. 162), in response to which Parker promises that he will be visiting Bronson soon. He wasn't sure himself any more how much was a tough front to impress the organization and how much was himself. He knew he was hard, he knew that he worried less about emotion than other people. But he'd never enjoyed the idea of a killing. And now he wasn't sure himself whether he'd just been putting a scare into Fairfax or if he'd really meant it. (2008a [1962], p. 171) The upshot is that he knows the former identity he had constructed for himself is blown and, his fingerprints now being on file in Washington, DC, he must have his appearance altered via plastic surgery, as did his friend Joe Sheer before he retired 3 years ago. With that metamorphosis then becomes possible a return to the former pattern of Parker's existence. The Man with the Getaway Face is a notable continuation of the saga for at least a couple of reasons. For one thing, after recuperating from his facial reconstruction at a sanitarium near Lincoln, Nebraska, and fabricating a new identity as Charles Willis, Parker enters warily into a plan with trusted ally Handy McKay and a less reliable associate named Skimm to pull off an armored-car holdup in New Jersey initially conceived by Skimm's barmaid girlfriend Alma. Amid the fraught planning for the heist, Parker is surprised to realize, apparently for the first time, that "there were always the same people in every job" (2008b [1963], p. 57), including one like Alma who has to be watched closely for signs of duplicity. Now approximately 38 years old,6 Westlake's career criminal is beginning to recognize a typology among those with whom circumstances, including financial exigency, forge intermittent alliances. The other thing that comes to the fore in this second novel of the series is the readiness of a civilian class to aid and abet when an illicit profit is to be made. Besides plastic surgeon Dr. Adler, whose services cost Parker nearly $18,000, licensed private investigator James Lawson in Jersey City is more than willing to arrange three untraceable handguns and two tractor-trailer trucks for the upcoming robbery. Anticipating this leitmotif that looms large in the subsequent narratives, The Hunter mentions an elderly lawyer named Bleak "whose financial interests, aside from law practice and munitions trading, included real estate, stock speculation[,] and a piece of an airplane manufacturing concern" (2008a [1962], pp. 45–46). The clear implication of these early examples is that self-interest incentivizes virtually everyone in the economic system of postwar America. A scene in The Green Eagle Score (1967) reinforces this idea. When a young psychiatric patient named Roger St. Cloud manages to abscond with $380,000 in three suitcases of cash stolen by Parker's crew from an Air Force base in upstate New York, the deranged St. Cloud finds himself cornered by police in a gun battle. As the standoff continues, their quarry begins to fling the money out an upstairs window, at which point a crowd of onlookers breaks from behind barriers and scrabbles on their hands and knees, "clutching handfuls of money," as the shooter methodically picks them off one by one (2010b [1967], p. 151). The funnies call it the syndicate. The goons and hustlers call it the Outfit. You call it the organization. I hope you people have fun with your words. But I don't care if you call yourselves the Red Cross[. Y]ou owe me forty-five thousand dollars[,] and you'll pay me back whether you like it or not. (2008a [1962], p. 158) There's you people with your organization, and there's us. We don't have any organization, but we're professionals. We know each other. We stick with each other. Do you know what I'm talking about? […] You'd never find us. We aren't organized[;] we're just a guy here and there that know each other. You're organized, so you're easy to find. (2008a [1962], p. 166) As Parker conceives it, those in his line of work constitute a loosely federated, egalitarian guild, in contrast to the hierarchical and corporate structure of the Outfit where decision-making power is consolidated in the upper echelon. Accordingly, when Arthur Bronson, the Outfit's kingpin, initially balks at paying Parker the $45,000 he thinks his due, Westlake's aggrieved protagonist writes dozens of letters to his fellow freelancers urging them to ignore an unwritten rule against targeting the syndicate's revenue-producing operations. When that initiative results in over a million dollars of losses to the Outfit, Parker kills Bronson and calls off the vendetta, having previously brokered a rapprochement with Walter Karns as Bronson's successor. Clearly the guild system of committed alliances prevails over the pyramidal rigidity of the modern criminal conglomerate. Succeeding installments in the series, however, often revolve around peripeteias or setbacks that suggest how a former gulf between vested economic interests and free-ranging opportunists is narrowing. A rare passage of historical contextualization for Westlake found in The Man with the Getaway Face offers a clue to this later development by mentioning that in 1946, the year between World War II and the Cold War, money was tight at the top as the nation adjusted to a peacetime economy but loose at the bottom given the GI Bill's provisions and upsurges in manufacturing (2008b [1963], pp. 141–42). Not all of the Parker novels after The Outfit revolve around unforeseeable contingencies with which he must grapple, but many do. The Mourner (1963) establishes a baseline by mentioning that "For eighteen years, Parker had lived the way he wanted, to a pattern he liked. He was a heavy gun, in one or two institutional robberies a year—a bank, or a payroll, or an armored car—just often enough to keep the finances fat" (2009c [1963], p. 34). That modus operandi begins to erode in The Score, though, when with 11 trusted accomplices he sacks an entire town—Copper Canyon, North Dakota—only to run afoul of its formerly ousted chief of police who fingered the job. Adversity increases in The Seventh when a young woman named Ellen Marie Canady is brutally murdered during Parker's brief absence from her apartment and suitcases containing $134,000 from college-football gate receipts he appropriated with six partners are taken in turn by an unknown interloper. In order to track down the culprit, Parker must form a mutually wary pact of convenience with Detective William Dougherty and ironically solve a crime he did not commit. The series' iconic mainstay thus finds that he is being thrust into a paradoxically inverted role to make ends meet. Published in the same year, The Handle compounds the challenges faced by Westlake's freelance thief when, commissioned by Walter Karns as the Outfit's new boss to pillage and raze an unsanctioned gambling casino called Cockaigne in the Gulf of Mexico, Parker succeeds but barely survives. The Jugger explains that its central character robs from organizations rather than from individuals, not out of humanity but simply because the former have more money than the latter (2009b [1965], p. 51). Parker, according to David Bordwell, "has the values of a conscientious workman: precision, efficiency, tenacity" (2023, p. 344), but in an economy increasingly less reliant on cash transactions Parker finds himself often trying to retrieve past caches of hard currency. Slayground (1971), an eerily claustrophobic tale the title of which puns on the idea of a former playground now become the site of a struggle for survival, captures this predicament well. After a successful armored-car heist that nets $73,000, Parker is obliged to seek refuge nearby in fenced Fun Island Amusement Park, which has closed for the winter. Reconnoitering its various mechanized attractions including Desert Island and Marooned! that suggest Parker's new predicament, he stashes the satchel of greenbacks before finding himself the target of an intensive siege by the minions, including cops on the take, of a local mob boss named Adolf Lozini. The phantasmagoric setting, detailed for the most part as Parker explores it at night, literalizes the idea of noir, of course, but beyond that it captures the increasingly delimited milieu in which, practicing his trade of grand larceny, Parker must go to ground in order to survive emergent challenges to his freedom of operation. Butcher's Moon (1974), the last and by far the longest of the early novels, reprises Westlake's original triad of narratives by pitting Parker and his cronies against a corrupt power structure in the prosperous Midwest city of Tyler. After a streak of bad luck, most recently a failed jewelry-store robbery, Parker enlists Alan Grofield to recover the $73,000 that 2 years ago he hid at nearby Fun Island theme park, but upon finding the stash gone they commence a campaign of attrition against Lonzini's revenue-producing subsidiaries. Before long Parker discovers that neither Lonzini nor his underlings are responsible for the loss, Lonzini being caught up in a coup linked to an upcoming election between two crooked mayoral candidates. Deciding that such political complication means all-out war, Westlake's frustrated loner calls in several associates from previous jobs, including Handy McKay, Stan Devers, and Ed Mackey, to visit apocalyptic vengeance on the mobsters. The usually emotionless Parker's impulse to "burn this city to the ground" surprises McKay (2011 [1974], p. 216),7 but in the end each freebooter's take comes to $25,117 before they rescue a wounded Grofield from his captors. So described, Butcher's Moon celebrates the initiative of an independent coalition in countering a rigidly hierarchical criminal establishment while also recognizing the murderous lengths to which Parker and his band of independent cronies must go to realize even a relatively modest profit for their efforts. The non-operational side of the Parker saga, one that humanizes the automaton he seems while on a job, involves Claire, a young widow of approximately Parker's age first introduced in The Rare Coin Score (2009d [1967]). After she buys a secluded house for them both in northwest New Jersey, as Deadly Edge (2010a [1971]) recounts, she is menaced by a pair of sadistic drug addicts but rescued by Parker at the last moment. "Claire's house," as it repeatedly is called, does not figure as the inviolable domestic sanctuary of "home" so often projected in 1950s fiction and film, but Parker nonetheless comes to regard it as an important outpost of his peripatetic work life. Slayground, published in the same year as Deadly Edge, records that "He liked knowing this house was here, in an isolated corner of New Jersey, with Claire in it waiting for him. A completely different life, with no threads attaching it to the life he lived on the outside. It was a different kind of thing having that, and he enjoyed it" (2010c [1971], p. 12). Inscribed on the house's mailbox, we later learn, is the name Willis, Parker's cover identity 2 years before he met Claire (2010c [1971], p. 181), suggesting both her commitment to Westlake's freelancer and the subterfuge of what passes for normalcy. No less highly regarded a novelist than John Banville has asserted that the Parker novels "are among the most poised and polished fictions of their time and, in fact, of any time." The foundation for his sweeping claim is that Westlake's serial antihero is "the ultimate professional […] at his most inventive when at his most desperate" (Banville, 2007/2008). One question that this plaudit raises is why such a depiction should be of absorbing interest to readers in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. My hunch is that in the last 70 years or so we have become so accustomed to wave after wave of what Whyte first dubbed "groupthink" that the idea of a consummate professional who has little to no tolerance for the posturing and orthodoxies of the corporate mentality proves irresistibly compelling. In a Fortune magazine article of 1952 Whyte defined his neologism as follows: "We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity—it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity—an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well" (Whyte, 1952, p. 114). The latter, as I hope to have demonstrated, is the stance of those Outfit functionaries like Frederick Carter who have adopted the mentality and mannerisms of their counterparts in the world of legitimate business. When a rough-edged individual like Parker, impatient with double-talk, invades their sphere of mimetic corporatism, these poseurs soon yield to a more primitive code of retribution that he represents. Timothy Peltason, author of a probing Yale Review essay on Westlake's antihero, writes: "For all the time that we spend in his company, Parker remains opaque to us, even to the narrator […]. The Parker novels, like Parker himself, find their power as much in what they withhold as in what they deliver" (Peltason, 2014, p. 74). That impression of a hidden reserve or potentiality—call it integrity for lack of a better word—has gone far "to secure Westlake's standing in the noir-chic world of contemporary fiction and film" (Peltason, 2014, p. 76). Precisely because Parker remains unchanged and impenetrable throughout the series named after him, he cannot be assimilated into a prevenient tradition of moralized masculinity in American literature. First and last, he can only be construed as quintessentially an anti-organization man. "The other thing," [McKay] said, "is revenge. I've never seen you do anything but play the hand you were dealt. Now all of a sudden you want a bunch of people dead." Parker got to his feet. […] "I don't care," he said. "I don't care if it's like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I'm going around in circles, I'm not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? […] And I don't want to talk about it any more. I want to do it. You're in, Handy, or you're out." (2011 [1974], p. 216).