The Damsel Read online

  to LARRY, in lieu of

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

  Copyright © 1967 by Richard Stark

  Foreword © 2012 by Sarah Weinman

  All rights reserved.

  University of Chicago Press edition 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77036-9 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77036-2 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77037-6 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stark, Richard, 1933–2008.

  The damsel : an Alan Grofield novel / Richard Stark ; with a new foreword by Sarah Weinman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77036-9 (paperback : alkaline paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-77036-2 (paperback : alkaline paper)

  I. Title.

  PS 3573.E9D36 2012

  813’.54—DC23

  2011032944

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  The Damsel

  An Alan Grofield Novel

  Richard Stark

  WITH A NEW FOREWORD

  BY SARAH WEINMAN

  The University of Chicago Press

  PRAISE FOR THE DAMSEL

  & RICHARD STARK

  “Grofield is a fun character; his adventures reach a new high in excitement.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “An unconventionally but effectively constructed novel, ranging from the hardest-boiled action-objectivity to character-introspection in depth. The theme is assassination; the setting is Mexico, especially Acapulco.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Ingenious thriller about a shot actor and an escaping girl.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  “Nobody does the noir thriller better than Richard Stark. . . . His lean style and hard-edged characters, not exactly likable, but always compelling, provide a welcome return to the hard-bitten days of yore.”

  San Diego Union Tribune

  “Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”

  Washington Post Book World

  “Whatever Stark writes, I read. He’s a stylist, a pro, and I thoroughly enjoy his attitude.”

  ELMORE LEONARD

  “Stark is a mystery connoisseur’s delight. His plot delivers twists and turns. . . . A tremendously skillful, smart writer.”

  Time Out New York

  “Stark is one of the true masters of the mystery genre . . . crime fiction at its best.”

  Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “No one can turn a phrase like Westlake.”

  Detroit News and Free Press

  “A high proof thriller.”

  The New York Times

  “A pleasure . . . Westlake’s ability to construct an action story filled with unforeseen twists and quadruple-crosses is unparalleled.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  GROFIELD NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

  The Damsel

  The Dame

  The Blackbird

  The Sour Lemon Score

  PARKER NOVELS BY RICHARD STARK

  The Hunter (Payback)

  The Man with the Getaway Face

  The Outfit

  The Mourner

  The Score

  The Jugger

  The Seventh

  The Handle

  The Rare Coin Score

  The Green Eagle Score

  The Black Ice Score

  The Sour Lemon Score

  Deadly Edge

  Slayground

  Plunder Squad

  Butcher’s Moon

  Comeback

  Backflash

  Flashfire

  Firebreak

  Breakout

  Nobody Runs Forever

  Ask the Parrot

  Dirty Money

  Information about the complete list of Richard Stark books published by the University of Chicago Press—and electronic editions of them—can be found on our website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  FOREWORD

  IF YOU ARE brand new to the works of Richard Stark, my advice would be to put down this book for a while and acquaint yourself first with the many other noir crime novels featuring Stark’s main man Parker, that merciless and iconic antihero. Once you’re finished working your way through those small masterpieces, you’ll be ready to tackle these three entertaining tales (as well as a fourth) starring Parker’s quick-witted, dapper companion in heisting, Alan Grofield.

  Grofield, who first appeared in The Score (1964), isn’t exactly Watson to Parker’s Holmes—the very idea is discombobulating—but like Conan Doyle’s go-to narrator, Grofield himself leads a double professional life. “I’m an actor,” he explains in The Damsel (1967), “and it’s impossible to make ends meet these days as an actor in the legitimate theater. Unless you’re willing to peddle your integrity to the movie and television people, there’s nothing to it. . . . Do you realize that in my peak year so far I earned a measly thirty-seven hundred dollars from acting?”

  For Alan Grofield, you see, has principles, at least applied to artistic pursuits. No movies or television. His greatest love is the theater, and he channels this love by way of summer stock, operating a small troupe in the Midwest. Is it a living? Hardly. Which is why he turns to more illicit means of funding his theatrical enterprises. Early on in The Dame (1969), Grofield describes his origin story in criminal enterprise: he started off nervous his first time, since this whole heist business seemed so alien to his day-to-day life. But two jobs later, he’d graduated from amateur to pro, and by the time we meet him in The Score, Grofield is well-seasoned to the point where a hard man like Parker, wary and distrustful in the best of times, doesn’t think twice about turning to him for the tightest of tight spots.

  Alan Grofield appeared in print a grand total of eight times—four times as Parker’s adjunct, and four times on his own. As a sidekick, Grofield’s bon vivant nature emerged in snippets, but he never overshadowed Parker. If anything, Stark seemed to underplay Grofield such that he lit up the page almost by accident—his wit, skirt chasing, and Shakespeare quotes offering a welcome break from Parker’s tough, stoic worldview. On his own, however, Grofield is both more present and more enigmatic, almost as if Westlake viewed him as a perpetual experiment.

  Grofield was a lab rat for Westlake, who liked to experiment with tone—veering, somewhat wildly, between dark violence, witty banter, and absurdist humor—and plot. (Westlake commented that Lemons Never Lie [1971] was a way for him to experiment with a narrative arc featu
ring multiple bounces moving higher and higher, instead of the more common parabolic plot curve.) At the same time, the Grofield novels provide a transition between the hard-edged Parker series and the more avuncular, humor-laden books Westlake published under his own name.

  * * *

  The Damsel opens when a girl climbs in Grofield’s fifth-floor hotel window. He’s in Mexico, coming back from the near-dead after events described in The Handle (a Parker novel from 1966), with a bag of money he hasn’t, on account of his infirm status, gotten around to spending. His first spoken line in The Damsel is typical of Grofield’s wit and weakness for women:” If you’re my fairy godmother, I want my back scratched.” After pages of witty banter, Grofield will see his itch relieved, and much more, from young Main Line lass Elly Fitzgerald. What emerges is a mix of romantic comedy and adventure that echoed Westlake’s earliest ventures into humorous crime novels like The Fugitive Pigeon (1965) and The Spy in the Ointment (1966), published just a year before the first Grofield novel.

  In The Damsel, Westlake takes some time out from traveling Mexican highways filled with action-centered plotting to enjoy a little social satire. Here the author, under the cover of Grofield’s critical eye, astutely zeroes in on the community class system of the charming Mexican city San Miguel de Allende, comparing it to Greenwich Village, of all places:

  Along Macdougal and Eighth Streets the same faces could be found in all the tourist traps: the tourists themselves, looking embarrassed and irritable, and the unwashed, shaven youngsters living around here while going through their artistic phase, looking both older and younger than their years. Both the tourists and the youngsters were self-conscious, and neither could cover it all the way.

  But here there was a third kind of person, too. Around San Miguel there was a colony of retired people from the State, living on pensions. A thousand dollars a year was damn good money on the local economy, so these retired people could live in a climate as good as Florida or California, but at a fraction of the price. Their presence somehow made both the tourists and the youngsters look even more foolish than usual, as though somehow or other they’d been exposed as frauds. (58)

  Greenwich Village was a location Westlake knew well; he lived there for decades, keeping an apartment in the neighborhood even after he moved upstate. But comparing such seemingly disparate places allows the author to zero in on specific types, see through their chosen facades for the ridiculousness underneath and show how human behavior remains static, even common, no matter where one is. This section is a classic example of Westlake’s economy with sentences; so little says so much about so many people.

  Observation and travelogue take twin top billing in The Dame, perhaps because Westlake doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the plot, a cross between a locked-room mystery and a strung-out caper. From the very first, Grofield wonders what exactly he’s doing there. The book opens with “Grofield, not knowing what it was all about”; a little later he thinks, “here he was in the middle of somebody else’s story. To take a simile from his second profession, he had been miscast” (38). It should come as no surprise that one character cries out accusingly at Grofield, “God damn it, all you want to do is die a smart-ass!” (177). The net result is that, despite acts of bravery and saving people’s lives, Grofield’s character flaws seem unduly magnified, albeit in the way that makes the reader stay for the wild ride until the end.

  Even Grofield’s afterthought of a love interest can’t escape from comic flourish on the part of the author, thanks to her very name, Pat Chelm: her surname is a pejorative term amongst Jews, used to denote the most foolish of a town full of fools, whose antics are so steeped in stupidity that to mock them is to do them a service. What kind of private joke Stark was engaging here is anyone’s guess, but one possible clue lies in how oddly, and badly, women are treated in the Grofield novels. One must make allowances for prefeminist attitudes, but Grofield’s cavalier and sometimes contempt-laden relationships with women strike a more off-key note than, say, Parker’s. Parker is cruel to everyone, regardless of gender; he can objectify a CEO or a mob boss as easily as a dame. Grofield’s attitude towards women is somehow less palatable. In The Dame, for example, he ridicules Pat Chelm while she’s making a painful confession:

  “I had an abortion. I was seventeen.”

  She meant Look-how-young-I-was, but Grofield didn’t take it that way. “You’re twenty-two now, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it time you got over it?” (122)

  The lackadaisical loopiness of The Dame gives way to something a little harsher in The Blackbird. Its opening chapter is more or less the same as the Parker masterpiece Slayground (the scheduling quirks of publishing meant that even though the books may have been written roughly around the same time, The Blackbird was published in 1969, two years before Slayground). But here Stark follows Grofield’s path up north to Quebec City’s sumptuous Chateau Frontenac Hotel and a province jittery with dissident behavior. Stark didn’t spell it out—the setting, despite political overtones, seems more rooted in past vacationing by the author—but the province, and eventually the country, would be gripped by the actions of a breakaway group called the FLQ that advocated, violently, for Quebec’s separation from the rest of the English-speaking country.

  He is, however, fairly resourceful in The Blackbird. Finding himself locked in a basement, Grofield escapes through common sense and some degree of ingenuity, as Stark describes in typically matter-of-fact fashion, with the help of available tools and a good sense of spatial memory. He also digs deep to find his inner Parker, a surprising turn made more so, because Grofield spent the past two and a half books not taking himself terribly seriously—and as a result, the reader, lulled into relaxation, is shocked out of it.

  Grofield’s recaptured killer instinct serves him well in Lemons Never Lie (1971), which brings him back to his original, Parker-level noir roots. Further experiments in comedic tone and literary playfulness emerged thereafter under the Westlake name—for example, one of the Dortmunder novels, Jimmy the Kid, even patterned its plot after a fictional Parker novel. Ironically, in introducing Dortmunder, Westlake pulled one last rabbit out of his hat with respect to Grofield, using his name as the alter for one of Dortmunder’s cronies in crime, the “charming ladies’ man” Alan Greenwood. (Trent Reynolds, who maintains the Violent World of Parker fan website, looks on Greenwood’s appropriation of “Grofield” as a parody of the original. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it’s another nice touch of self-reference from a writer who clearly enjoyed it.)

  Grofield would appear only one more time, in Butcher’s Moon, which seemed to put the Stark pseudonym on ice for good. Grofield had served his purpose as a means of distinguishing between Westlake and Stark; it was as if the actor, having adopted so many different guises in playing both theatrical and criminal roles, represented Westlake’s own experiments with multiple styles. Consider, too, that after 1974, Westlake used fewer pseudonyms—just Samuel Holt in the 1980s and Judson Jack Carmichael in the 1990s—than earlier in his career, when Westlake published as Tucker Coe, Alan Marsh, and Curt Clark, among many other names. Dortmunder provided the final break between the comedic Westlake and the noirish Stark, but Grofield, unwittingly, helped force the Stark pseudonym underground for more than twenty years until his (and Parker’s) triumphant return in the late 1990s, never to leave until Westlake himself shuffled off of this mortal coil.

  Sarah Weinman

  PART ONE

  1

  GROFIELD OPENED his right eye, and there was a girl climbing in the window. He closed that eye, opened the left, and she was still there. Gray skirt, blue sweater, blond hair, and long tanned legs straddling the windowsill.

  But this room was on the fifth floor of the hotel. There was nothing outside that window but air and a poor view of Mexico City.

  Grofield’s room was in semidarkness, because he’d been taking an after-lunch snooze. The girl obvi
ously thought the place was empty, and once she was inside she headed straight for the door.

  Grofield lifted his head and said, “If you’re my fairy godmother, I want my back scratched.”

  She jumped a foot, landed like a cat, and backed away to the far wall, staring at him. In the dimness her eyes looked as white as stars, gleaming with panic.

  Grofield hadn’t expected that big a reaction. He tried to calm her, reassure her, saying, “I mean it. I’m stuck in this bed and my back itches like crazy. If you’ve got a minute while you’re passing through, you could scratch it for me.”

  She said, “Are you one of them?” Her voice was scratchy with panic.

  “That depends. Sometimes I’m one of them and other times it doesn’t seem worth the effort. I haven’t been one of them lately because I haven’t been well.”

  The glitter was slowly fading from her eyes. In a more human voice she said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Be damned if I know. Are we supposed to be talking about something?” He tried to sit up, but the wound in his back gave him a twinge. He grimaced and shook his head. “It gets worse,” he said. “Before it gets better, it gets worse.”

  She came one hesitant step away from the wall. “You’re hurt?”

  “Nothing, mon capitaine, a flesh wound merely. If only some Florence Nightingale would scratch my back, my recovery would be complete.”

  “I’ll trust you,” she said, taking another step closer to the bed. “God knows, I have to trust somebody.”

  “You wouldn’t talk like that if I had full use of my faculties.”

  All at once she looked at the ceiling, as though afraid it might fall, and then again at Grofield. “Will you help me?”

  “Will you scratch my back?”

  Impatience was now replacing her departed panic. “This is serious!” she said. “A matter of life and death!”