Paperback 240: The Sour Lemon Score / Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) (Gold Medal R2037)

Paperback 240: Gold Medal R2037 (PBO, 1969)

Title: The Sour Lemon Score
Author: Richard Stark (pseud. of Donald Westlake)
Cover artist: Robert McGinnis

Yours for: $39


Best things about this cover:

• I appear to have hit a super sweet pocket in my collection — an original Parker novel with a McGinnis bondage cover!? Wow... book's got some minor scuffing, but is otherwise in gorgeous, barely read condition.
• Is that look in her eyes fear? Or maybe the man with the gun is the good guy, and what she's really thinking is, "Uh ... little help, Captain Handsome-pose?"
• Actually, she's not tied up — she's a puppeteer who is operating her marionettes remotely via a (really) complicated system of pulleys and levers. You can tell she is backstage at an old theater, as she is clearly reclining on the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Best things about this back cover:

• Look, real blurbs from actual, marginally credible news sources!
• HA ha — love the "(back)" part of the second Boucher blurb. "Oh ... paperback ... I see. How modern."
• If you have never read Westlake, you could do worse than to start with the Parker novels. They were all recently reissued by Chicago Univ. Press (see here), and this summer, you can check out Darwyn Cooke's comic adaptation of the first Parker novel, "Hunter" (preview available here), a first edition of which is also in my paperback collection ... somewhere.
  
• See Man Booker-prize-winning author John Banville rhapsodize about the Parker novels here.

Page 123~

The thumb out there jabbed and jabbed at the bell. She couldn't ignore it, no matter what.

~RP

Paperback 178: The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution / Donald Westlake (Ballantine 3307)

Paperback 178: Ballantine 3307 (1st ptg, 1973)

Title: The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution
Author: Donald Westlake
Cover artist: photo cover

Yours for: $22


Best things about this cover:

• "The Curious Crap I Found In My Closet"
• This is in contention for the single ugliest cover in my collection. Exhibit A: Mustard. Exhibit B: a mass of objects pulled in one lump from the bottom of some (crazy) lady's storage chest. Case closed.
• Somehow the wig makes the whole object lump much, much worse. Who thought this was artful!?
  
• And yet, while ugly, this is also a very memorable cover. Indelibility: The Up-Side of Ugly.
• That is a stubbed out cigar in the middle of the rubber mask's forehead. There's also a wig, a diamond necklace, three guns, and a blue thing (gum wrapper?)

Best things about this back cover:

• "a-burgling"

Page 123~

From "Never Shake a Family Tree"

"Ah," he said. "Forgive my telephoning, please, Mrs. Buckley. We have never met, but I noticed your entry in the current issue of Genealogical Exchange -"

~RP

Paperback 103: Jimmy the Kid / Donald E. Westlake (Ballantine 24650)

Paperback 103: Ballantine 24650 (1st ptg, 1976)
Title: Jimmy the Kid
Author: Donald E. Westlake
Cover artist: Robert Grossman (if I'm reading that signature correctly)

Yours for: $17


Best things about this cover:

• Originality. My collection pretty much stops in the late 60s, but there's another ten years in there where cover art / design still shows some creativity and sparkle. I love this cover, in that I can imagine the characters of all the people just by the way they are drawn. I want to know more about them. I want to know why Mickey lost his eye. I want to know why Ronald Reagan and Shelley Duvall are about to knock over an amusement park concession stand. I want to know what Woody Allen is reading. I want to know.
• Donald Westlake is a sensational writer with great comic timing, but his books have never been made into good movies, which seems not only a shame, but a surprise. His books are vivid, action-packed, and they read like scripts. The guy wrote the Oscar-nominated script for "The Grifters," so he knows dialogue. I just don't understand why Hollywood has (mostly) either ignored or botched him. Actually, "The Hot Rock" was pretty good, and "Point Blank" was great, but those are both 35+ years ago now.

PAGE 123~

(It was during that statement of the woman's that the head FBI man had extended toward Harrington a slip of paper containing the penciled words, "Tell her to prove it.")
"Um. Prove it."
"What?"
"I said, prove it."
"Prove what? That I'm gonna call you again?"
(During which, the head FBI man had been with great exaggeration mouthing the sentence, "That they have the kid!")

~RP