Hunter Black Page 19 - He Knows Not The Seeds He Sows

So...when I first wrote this scene, I was still riding high off of my reading of Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter, the first Parker novel by Richard Stark/Donald Westlake. I wanted to show what a bad-ass prick Hunter could be.

I showed this to one of my best friends, who just so happens to be one of the smartest people I know. He's taught me as much or more about writing than anyone else I can think of -- and he's one of those people you can trust to be honest when you need him to be.

Hunter's betraying Vermis Riid here, there's no getting around it. He's not killing him for any other reason than to cover his tracks. That's not what Parker does. Parker kills when he has to, or when he wants payback. My sympathetic hero wasn't so sympathetic anymore...and the damage was done. There was no time to fix this.

There was no getting around it. I realized now that I was going to have to teach Hunter a lesson if I wanted the readers to stick with him. We've never had but so big a readership, and it's possible that this scene is part of the reason why, coming as early as it does. It's character defining, and that definition isn't really one I wanted my hero to have.

Lesson learned.