F.R.'s Reviews > The Mourner

Reading my review from 2010 below before I re-read ‘The Mourner’, I was struck by one of my observations – suggesting that Stark clearly liked Menlo so much he gave him a quarter of the novel. Now surely all Parker novels are structured in four acts, with the third one given over to things that are going on around Parker; and it’s not uncommon for the third section to be given over entirely to a completely different character, with the corresponding section of ‘The Hunter’ given over to Mel Resnik. Therefore, it can’t have been that much of a surprise to my younger self that part of this book is handed to Parker’s antagonist du jour. So what on Earth was I talking about? But then I read the book again and saw exactly what I meant. In Augustus Menlo we don’t have a normal run of the mill character for Parker to overcome, we have one whom Richard Stark clearly loves and adores.

When the book focuses on Manlo, it doesn’t just look at the now and his motivations of the instant, it gives us his life story. What we have here is a beautiful mini-novel, of a straight-laced European policeman, who is comfortably if boredly married and content to live out his life following rules – until that is temptation is thrown in his way and he cracks triumphantly. There really is enough material here for Manlo to have a book just to himself. He’s a wonderful character – huge, exotic, European, a charmer, a beautiful talker with a smooth façade that hides a passionate yet corrupt heart. In short he’s the greatest character Sydney Greenstreet never played.

The fact that Manlo arrives and totally dominates even his chapters with Parker makes for an odd juxtaposition. He’s such a big character, such a stagey character that he doesn’t quite fit in to Parker’s world and Parker doesn’t fit into his. And yet Stark does make it work – you have these characters who ostensibly speak different languages, one who is American hard man taciturn which the other is poetically loquacious, who are steeped in different political philosophies (a kind of capitalism versus a kind of communism), Yet deep down they recognise in each other the same strain of dishonestly which means they know each other but can’t possibly trust each other.

If memory serves this is the last book for some time where the repercussions of a previous book are played out – with the story kicked into life by the theft of Parker’s gun in ‘The Outfit’ (which was itself brutally grabbing at loose ends from ‘The Hunter’). Parker is pressured into stealing a medieval statue from the home of a diplomat, but things very rapidly go wrong when other interested parties show their heads. It doesn’t work seamlessly, but Stark here does have two fantastic characters in Parker and Manlo and the results are compulsive.



Review from January 2010
Interestingly the last Dortmunder novel I read ('Don't Ask') featured representatives of an Eastern European government behaving in a duplicitous fashion. As does this Parker novel. The two books were published thirty years apart, but there was clearly something in the idea that Westlake/Stark enjoyed.

Perhaps it’s that in Augustus Manlo – the loquacious torturer and hatchet man in the midst of surrendering to avarice – Stark created a character much richer than the normal hapless type who attempts to betray Parker. He is almost a twentieth century Dickensian grotesque, and Stark likes him so much he gives him an entire quarter of the book.

When Parker and Handy McKay are persuaded to steal a statue, things soon go hay-wire with the crosses and double-crosses piling on top of each other. Published in 1963, this is a fresh and entertaining read which contains little that would date it (apart from one reference to the Second World War which would put Parker in his dotage for the later novels). Indeed, with only a few changes this would still work today, and if I was an enterprising film producer looking to put Parker back on the big screen this is certainly one I’d consider.

(Also, it has one of the great Parker opening lines: “When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.”)