Saturday, June 13, 2009

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

6 comments:

Veronika said...

"My name is Parker and I am here to score"

The headboard metal looks very rickety. Seems to me she can be free with one good tug - unless she doesn't really want to...

His pants are blending into the background... it is quite a clever trick, to make the viewers eye "subconsciously" complete the picture. In this cover you get both entertainment and intellectual stimulation in one fell swoop!

Dirt Diggler said...

" 'Heeeeere's Parker!...' He shoots, he scores! He 'scores again!' --- Have you ever vicariously seen such 'hard-hitting Parker smashes' in all your pathetic vapid lives?!"


(Me neither.)

Anonymous said...

To me, the man I'm going to assume is the all-scoring "Parker" looks like a young Burt Lancaster, which, hey, I could certainly go for.

DemetriosX said...

I love the juxtaposition of Whipped with the tied-up woman. I refuse to believe that wasn't on purpose.

JamiSings said...

The more I look at the woman, the more I think it's actually one of those Real Dolls. You know, the sex dolls that are suppose to look like real people?

Ms Avery said...

So, if "The Rare Coin Score" was presumably about people smuggling rare coins... I have to assume "The Sour Lemon Score" was a lot less interesting.

And what other kind of lemon is there?