The Man With the Getaway Face

The Hunter (1962) ended with Parker about to get plastic surgery in order to change his appearance and elude an Outfit bounty on his head. The Man with the Getaway Face picks up post-surgery (“Only the eyes were familiar, flawed onyx, cold and hard”) as Parker, desperate for money, decides to participate in the robbery of an armored car in New Jersey. The ensuing theft — the planning, the execution, and the complicated double-cross — is one of the best pure heist sequences in the entire series. And Stark’s hard-boiled lines have never been better: “Lawson was a man you could trust, so long as you never told him anything.”