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