Another reason for the series ending was a change that had taken place in my own career, which had become schizophrenic in the nicest possible way. The tough guy novel I had written under the name of Richard Stark — The Hunter — had been liked and bought by an editor at Pocket Books named Bucklyn Moon, a fine man of whom I cannot say too much (but one thing of whom I must say is that I wish he were still with us), who had liked the lead character in that book, Parker, and asked me, “Do you think you could give us two or three books a year about him?” I thought I could. For several years, I did.
At the same time, the writing I was doing under my own name had taken a completely unexpected (by me) turn. Comedy had come in.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was never a comic. All through my life, in grammar school, in high school, in college, I was never the funniest kid in class. I was always, invariably, the funniest kid’s best friend. Out of college and in New York and beginning to make my career as a writer, I got to know a couple of funny writers and I was their best audience. I wasn’t the guy with the quick line; I was the guy who loved the quick line.
Well, I had a relationship with comedy, it seems, which I’d never dealt with or thought about. But comic elements started creeping into my stories in surprising and sometimes alarming ways. Even in “The Sound of Murder,” look at how many comic references, comic elements there are in a story which is in no way comic. Undoubtedly that was an unconscious part of my reaction to the coldness and humorlessness of both The Hunter and 361.
It was two and a half years after “The Sound of Murder” before the comic side was at last given its head. In the early spring of 1964 I started a mystery novel, intended to be published under my own name by Random House, about a young man who runs a bar in Brooklyn which is owned by the Mafia. They use it as a tax loss and to launder money, they occasionally use it as a package drop, and the young man has the job of running it because his uncle is connected with the Mob. At the beginning of the story, two mob hitmen enter the bar as the young man is about to close for the night, try to kill him, and miss.
This was intended to be an ordinary innocent-on-the-run story, in which the innocent can’t go to the police because of his uncle’s mob connection. The schnook-on-the-run story, as in The 39 Steps or Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Saboteur (in which Robert Cummings played the schnook, and not to be confused with Hitchcock’s Sabotage in which Sylvia Sidney played the schnook), has certain comic elements built into it, but it needn’t be a comic story, nor did I initially see my mob-nephew tale as a comic story.
But something went wrong. The conventions of the form prostrated themselves before me. Something manic glowed in the air, like St. Elmo’s Fire. Instead of the comic’s best friend — Shazam! — became the comic!
I finished that book in May of 1964 and called it The Dead Nephew. My editor at Random House — Lee Wright, the best editor I have ever known, though two others come close — hated that tide, and I hated every alternative she suggested, and she hated every other title I offered, and finally, exhausted, we leaned on our lances and gasped and agreed to call the thing The Fugitive Pigeon. It became the first of a run of comic novels which, so far as I know, has not yet come to an end.
Well, The Fugitive Pigeon was published in March of 1965 and “The Death of a Bum” appeared three months later, and by then I was deeply into being a comic novelist. And in those periods when I came to the surface for air I would turn into a coldly emotionless novelist named Richard Stark who wrote about a sumbitch named Parker. And Levine receded.
But he never entirely faded from view. From almost the beginning I had had that rough idea for a Levine story which I’d never written, and which I now realized was the logical story to follow “The Death of a Bum,” but the silence had lasted too long, my concentration was elsewhere, and in any event I had just about given up writing short stories and had certainly stopped writing novelettes. From that high of forty-six short stories and novelettes in 1959, by 1966 I was down to zero novelettes and only one short story (which was never published). Between 1967 and 1980 I wrote no novelettes at all and only seven short stories, most of which had been commissioned.
Some of Abe Levine’s sensibility, if nothing else, came out in a group of five novels I wrote in the late sixties and early in the seventies, using the pen-name, Tucker Coe, about an ex-cop named Mitch Tobin. But Tobin was not Levine, and death was not Tobin’s primary topic.
Abe Levine’s saga remained incomplete, and I knew it, and it gnawed at me from time to time. Once, in the late seventies, I tried to rework the stories into a novel, intending to plot out that final unwritten story as the last section of the book. (At that time, I thought it was a story about a burglar.) But, although I see an organic connection among the stories, they are certainly not a novel, nor could they be. They are separate self-contained stories, and putting them in novel drag only makes them look embarrassed and foolish. That novelizing project failed of its own futility, and I stopped work on it long before I got to the new material; so the final story remained unwritten.
It might have remained unwritten forever except for Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Press. In the spring of 1982, he and I were talking about another project I don’t seem to be working on, which is a book about Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Jasper didn’t do it). I told Otto about Levine, about the five stories I’d written and the one I hadn’t written, and he asked to read them. Having done so, he then said he would like to publish them as a collection, but they weren’t long enough to fill a book. “You’ll just have to write the other story,” he said.
Well, of course I didn’t have to write the other story. But the truth was, I wanted to write that story, it had been itching at me for a long, long time, but I had never had the right impetus at the right moment before. Did I have it now? Obviously, since you are holding the book in your hands, I did.
The last story.
I might be able to write just one more story about Levine, but I knew from the beginning that that would be it. I couldn’t possibly resurrect the character, dust him off, and run him through an endless series of novelettes, not now. But one story; yes.
There were problems, though, and the very first problem was time. The first five stories were all over twenty years old. The final story could not take place twenty years later in Levine’s life, even though it was doing so in his author’s. Should I rewrite the earlier stories, updating them, moving them through experiences they had never known; Vietnam, Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations, the changing public perceptions of policemen, all the rest of it? Should I rather attempt to write historical fiction, to write the final story as though it were being written in November of 1962 instead of November of 1982?
I’ve thought about the problem of updating before this, and generally speaking, I’m against it. I believe that television has made a deep change in our perception of time — at least of recent time — and that in some way all of the last fifty years exists simultaneously in our heads, some parts in better focus than others. Because of television and its re-runs and its reliance on old movies to fill the unrelenting hours, we all know Alan Ladd better than we would have otherwise. We all understand men in hats and women in shoulder pads, we comprehend both the miniskirt and the new look, automobiles of almost any era are familiar to us, and we are comfortable with the idea of a man making a nickel phone call. Train travel is not foreign to us, even though most Americans today have never in their lives ridden a train. Without our much realizing it — and without the academics yet having discovered it as a thesis topic — we have grown accustomed to adapting ourselves to the time of a story’s creation as well as to its characters and plot and themes.