NAUGHTY, BUT ALSO NICE

By John Skow

Bad guys misbehave regularly in crime novels. That's what bad guys do. But for the most part their villainies--tying nice girls to railroad tracks, playing poker with an extra ace--are elaborate setups, abominations staged by the author to make the good guys look good in the last chapter. This, of course, is what good guys do; they look good. And the bad guys go to jail or perdition.

To one energetic writer, however, this has always seemed a woeful waste of criminal talent. For some three decades Donald E. Westlake has operated a kind of literary halfway house for the morally rotten, propping up an entire repertory company of safecrackers, bank robbers, funny-money artists and miscellaneous boodlers after their inevitable job-related mishaps and sending them forth to steal again in novel after novel. His best-known wrongdoer is an amusing burglar named Dortmunder, whose fumble-thumbed approach to grand larceny is that of a tax accountant trying to bolt together a backyard barbecue. The unstated, slyly effective joke of the Dortmunder series (The Hot Rock; What's the Worst That Could Happen?) is that everyone in the hero's extensive social set is staid, sober, contented, BarcaLounger middle-class and thoroughly crooked.

Still, most readers of airport paperbacks, the kind of good, sturdy trash that will see you through four hours at O'Hare, would say of Westlake, "Sure, clever fellow, writes detective stories." He doesn't, however. In the long list of his 60-some novels, the author recalls no detectives, no "police procedurals," as cop stories are called in the trade, no lawyer novels. Why? Mildly, but definitely, Westlake gives a surprising answer: "Authority is doing fine. They don't need my help." Spy novels, then? "No, they were never right for me. Those guys are working for the Man."

The conversation stirs because in his latest crime novel, Comeback (Mysterious Press; 292 pages; $18), Westlake has reached high on his shelf to blow the dust off a memorable badman. About 35 years ago, at the beginning of his career, he turned in a manuscript starring an armed robber named Parker. That was it; if Parker had a first name, you didn't want to get close enough to know it. He was tough, mean and distinctly unfunny; a sullen bad guy who drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes and cuffed both men and women around. Parker got caught at the end of the novel, but an editor spotted a likely series hero and persuaded Westlake to rescue him. The result was a string of 16 violent, moody and unrelievedly antisocial Parker adventures, which Westlake signed "Richard Stark," mostly because his own name was too closely tied to lighter-than-air capers of the Dortmunder kind.

And then, in 1974, Parker went into a kind of hibernation. "I lost the voice" is how Westlake puts it. That voice, at any rate. He continued to write novels at a brisk trot, winning three Edgar Awards and occasionally lurching cheerfully off track with an unclassifiable detour, like Kahawa, which he claims is Swahili for "We couldn't think of a title." It's a caper tale, set in 1982, darker than Dortmunder, lighter than Parker, about some likable bandits who steal a trainload of coffee from Idi Amin, in Uganda.

But in Comeback, the irredeemable badman Parker returns, tougher than ever. His old target was the Mafia (you don't want even a bad-guy hero brutalizing widows and orphans). This time the cash cow is a sleazy televangelist. The holdup goes like grease, netting several garbage bags full of bucks donated by the pious, when suddenly...

The narration is hard and spare, with twitching jaw muscles. It ends at just the right moment, after an accomplice named George has turned treacherous, and Parker has dealt with this matter, and another colleague, who is loyal, asks, "You seen George?" and Parker says merely, "Yes." Cut, fade to black. Another Parker, to be published next year, is in the can, and the first volumes of the series, The Hunter and The Man with the Getaway Face, are due to be reprinted. They deserve to be, though Comeback is a grittier, better book. And the other 14 prehistoric Parkers? For now, rummage through used-book stores and the quarter-a-book shelves at the Salvation Army. Evil lurks; you could get lucky.