Richard Stark and Evil (Content Warning: Everything)

     This is a post for my Ad Astra campaign, kind of. Not really. You can read it if you're in the campaign, or you can choose not to. This is just my definition of evil.

Richard Stark

    Some of our best works of fiction are by people who are fictions themselves. Mark Twain never existed, nor Lewis Carroll, nor George Orwell, George Elliot, Richard Bachman, or Richard Stark.

    Richard Stark was the pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake to write the character Parker. I don't know why he used a pseudonym. Probably because he didn't want to get any of Parker on his hands.

    (This post will contain minor spoilers for the first three Parker novels: The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit.) 

    Parker is never given a first name, because he doesn't need one. He doesn't have any friends to call him by it. He had a wife. He killed her (more or less.) He has no past, except banks he's robbed, armored cars he's stolen. He has no siblings and, evidently, no parents. He states in The Outfit that he has no friends. Everything about him happens in the books. There is no backstory.

    The very first thing we see Parker do in the very first novel is use an assumed name to steal a large amount of money in the following fashion: He fakes a driver's license with the name Edward Johnson (drawing the state stamp in blue pen) then walks into a bank. He says he has a special account, name of Edward Johnson, but can't remember his number. The bank says they have no special account under that name. So Parker keeps trying banks till he finds one with an Edward Johnson account. Then he fakes the signature, shows the fake license, and leaves.

    In any other crime novel, Parker would have set this up ahead of time. This would be Parker's own money he'd squirreled away from some past job, hidden in an account under an assumed name. Because in any other novel, the criminal is intelligent, and has intelligent plans. Parker has no plans. In this novel, Edward Johnson is out four thousand bucks.

    So, surely Edward Johnson screwed him over? Nope. He doesn't know the guy.

    Although there are many novels about thieves, it is rare that they actually, you know, steal anything. Not in the way we use the word when we're angry. "You stole my goddamn wallet!" Thief protagonists always take money from banks, casinos, armored cars. Always from big, insured organizations who end up passing the cost along to the taxpayers. That, or they're conspiring to steal back something that was stolen in the first place. Have you ever seen Danny Ocean steal a wallet? Parker's first act in the novel is to rob a random, innocent man of four thousand dollars. He never gives the money back. He never finds out who the man is. We never get the slightest indication that Parker knows or cares whom he stole from. Have you ever read a book where the hero behaves like this? Not just at the beginning, but at the end?

    The next scene after this is Parker beating his wife.

    The entire main plot of the first Parker novel consists of an act of a premeditated murder. Parker tried to betray his partner in crime, Mal, but Mal betrayed Parker first, and ended up putting him on a prison farm for eight months. Now Parker is out. Out of prison, and out for blood.

    Parker has no redeeming qualities of any kind, especially not in the first book. In the later books he is at least loyal, professional, sometimes polite, and doesn't betray his associates. But he never develops empathy, mercy, or a conscience. He is not dashing, nor does he have a James Bond charm. He is not fighting an evil greater than himself. He is not trying to get back at the world for something that was done to him. Absolutely everything he does, and everything he says. is for his own benefit. 

    He is not ontologically aligned with some outer darkness. He is not an agent of hell angling to give his masters the upper hand over heaven. He just doesn't care about other people, in a way that is difficult for a psychologically normal person to appreciate.

    When you're reading the book, its a little hard to believe what you are reading. Protagonists are not supposed to act like this, your brain insists. In one scene, Parker needs to get into an apartment in order to watch his enemy from the window. He knocks on the door and a woman answers. The Danny Ocean solution is to fasttalk her about how you're the plumber and you need to see her toilet. Parker punches her on the chin and she goes down. Another example: At the beginning of The Outfit, someone sends an assassin to kill Parker. Parker hits the man on the head hard enough to cause cranial hemorrhaging, and the guy looks pretty bad. Parker kicks him out the door. "Go find somewhere else to die," he says.

    Everyone in the books is like this. We never meet anyone who is nice to other people for the hell of it, who donates to charity, who shows mercy, who is loyal without the expectation of reward. (actually, we meet one or two people like that. Most of them are killers.) The nihilistic reality of evil in the novels is that evil is not a consequence of any grand scheme. It is the immediate consequence of everyone acting in their own best interest. No one in the novels has an ideology. There are husbands (who use women for sex) and wives (who use men for money) and girlfriends (who use men for sex) and people working the same job (who invariably betray one another.) Parker's wife betrays him. Mal betrays him. Parker can get back at Mal because Mal's friends betray him. Parker survives not because he is a righteous man in a world of villains but because he is capable of a more efficient brand of depravity and violence than everyone else. 

    I can't think of a scene in one of these books where Parker talks to a human being without threatening to kill them.

Evil

    Fantasy Literature, and Dungeons & Dragons, tend to have a naive view of evil. 

    Evil is a side in a cosmic conflict. It is a color in a huge game of chess. Evil is the bad guys. Evil is the other team in the soccer game, its the other guys battleships, its the goblins who you have to reduce to 0 HP before you can reach the next reward.

    That's fine. If you want to write a book, or run a game that way, that's one way to do it. There are two sides. Good over here, Evil over there, we want good stuff, they want evil stuff.

    But, well...

    The Lord of the Rings is a novel about that kind of evil. So, the big payoff is that this guy is trying to take over the world. Tolkein was writing in the 1950s. In England. So, after Hitler. After Stalin. After Mao. That means he has no excuse. Is this our standard of evil monsters in this hobby, in this century? Sauron is barely as evil as Napoleon. We like Napoleon. French people are proud of Napoleon. We like people who try to take over the world. We like Julius Caesar. We like Alexander the Great. Genghis Khan has a certain charisma.

    So all that Sauron stuff is fine. If you want your players to like the villains.

    But do you want their blood to boil? Do you want them to hate the villains? Fear the villains? Do you want real heroism (where the player is afraid and fights evil despite fear?) Do you want real aggression (where the players desperately want the villains dead?)

    You need real evil. Stark, staring evil. The monsters need to be looking out for number one. They need to act like Parker.

    Why does Parker negotiate? To get something out of you. Here's how he does it. He breaks your arm. Then he says "If you tell me where Mal is, I'll break your other arm. If you don't, I'll shoot you." Parker begins most negotiations with death threats. 

    Do the orcs take prisoners? Great. When the PCs show up to negotiate, he slits one of their throats. "Now you know I'm serious. If you say anything I don't like, I kill another one."

    Did the goblins agree to grant the players mercy if they gave over certain goods, or certain concessions? That's great. But why did they do that? Because it benefited the players? No! Because it benefited the goblins! Because they wanted to get out of that fight just like the players did, for their own personal safety. Next time they have the players at a disadvantage, in a situation they can kill them with minimal risk, they will take it.

    If you're one of the five people on the internet who hasn't heard of the "psychopath test," here it is. A woman is at her mother's funeral, and she meets a charming young man. She doesn't recognize him, but she and he totally hit it off. She thinks she's in love. But after the funeral, she realizes she doesn't know the man's name, or address, or telephone number. How might she arrange to meet this young man again?

    Think about it for a bit. If you're a psychologically normal human being, you should be having some trouble right now. 

    Ready for the answer? Highlight it.

    Kill one of her relatives. Maybe he'll be at their funeral, too.

    You need to train yourself to see the basic, brutal solution to the problem. Not the complicated one that takes on a thousand extra constraints by ascribing to some moral code, like "don't kill people who haven't done anything to you." Think of what Parker would do. Think of what you would do if other people weren't real, if they were like plants, or machines.

    Richard Stark can do it, and he's not even real. So give it a try.