"Absolutely No Puritan Ethic"

"In those days, the accepted wisdom was that women bought hardback books and men bought paperbacks, so Westlake decided to go after the 'machos.' And because he'd mined his humor and charm in his early Random House novels, he decided to change his style completely: 'I wanted the language to be very stripped down and bleak, no adverbs … very stark. That's how I chose the pseudonym's last name: Stark. The first name I took from Richard Widmark, a hero of mine.'
"Thus, the Parker series was born in 1962 with 'The Hunter.'"

Taylor Hackford in the Los Angeles Times writes about making the first movie to feature, with permission, Donald E. Westlake's Parker character.