In the acknowledgments of Gary Phillips’s new novel, The Haul, he name-checks a pair of books by Donald E. Westlake: The Seventh and Deadly Edge. These novels from the late ’60s and early ’70s seem like a strange source of inspiration for a contemporary story about ripping off a billionaire tech bro’s secret lair hidden underneath a state-of-the-art basketball arena. Westlake penned these books under the pseudonym Richard Stark, the name the mystery writer used for his hard-boiled stories about a professional thief named Parker: a no-nonsense antihero who meticulously plots his robberies down to the last detail and executes them with ruthless precision.
The popularity of this character—there are 24 novels and eight screen adaptations—speaks to the timeless appeal of someone who is smart, tireless, and dependable in a world that rewards the stupid, lazy, and corrupt. Everyone from Lee Marvin to Mark Wahlberg has taken a turn playing Parker, including football hero turned actor Jim Brown in a screen adaptation of The Seventh called The Split in 1968.
No matter how many Parker novels you’ve read, you never learn more about the man than what he allows his criminal associates to know about him. “There are very few instances where there’s a look into Parker’s psyche and his interior landscape,” Phillips says over Zoom when I ask him about the acknowledgments. “He’s really very much defined by external actions and what he says or what he doesn’t say.”
Phillips’s The Haul takes a different approach to its main character. The novel opens with a crime witnessed by a teenage boy in foster care in South Los Angeles who goes by the handle OC. When we catch up with him 30 years later, OC has transformed into the master thief O’Conner, making The Haul both an exploration of a contemporary crime and an excavation of his past. O’Conner’s associations from those early days made him who he is, but they also threaten to unravel a caper he has so carefully plotted.
Driven by a curiosity as to how someone ends up like Parker, Phillips has his protagonist reflect on his past:
Years later, when he had the wherewithal, he hadn’t tried to find his mother or father. They sure as shit hadn’t looked for him. No going back. He wasn’t going to be anchored by the past.
You won’t find that kind of depth in a Parker novel. Another difference between O’Conner and Parker is that O’Conner and his gang aren’t young men anymore. When the novel moves to the present, he’s in his late 40s, and his body is no longer the reliable tool it once was. Also, he’s been out of the game for a minute, spending more time on the pickleball court than planning his next score, a choice that adds to his uncertainty. For Phillips, O’Conner is like a boxer who comes out of retirement. “Sometimes you come back and you can’t box,” Phillips says. “You can’t get punched in the head one more time, it’s no good. But sometimes the old man still has a few strokes left, so I think for O’Conner, that was the challenge.”
What makes The Haul so arresting is its mix of old tropes and fresh twists. There are familiar scenes in the category of “getting the gang back together” as O’Conner recruits former associates for the job, but the “inside man” here is a woman whose work was stolen by her billionaire boss; he paid her a fraction of what she should have gotten. Does O’Conner care that justice is served and the tech bro gets his comeuppance?
Not really. Money is his motivation. That doesn’t mean he isn’t loyal to his team, though. “If you’re in the crew,” Phillips explains, “he’s gonna stick by you. Now, if you betray him, if you double-cross him, all bets are off. But as long as you do your job and you’ve been a stand-up member of the crew, he’s got your back.”
In Westlake’s The Seventh, the heist goes smoothly, but trouble arises when it’s time to divvy up the score. Phillips’s plot is similar, but he complicates the situation with rival gangsters, some of whom are members of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. There’s no such thing as a perfect crime when there are so many people looking to profit off the work of others.
This isn’t the first time O’Conner has appeared in Phillips’s work. He’s the subject of the author’s 2012 novel, The Warlord of Willow Ridge, and several short stories, and he appeared in the crime anthology Culprits: The Heist Was Just the Beginning. So will there be another O’Conner novel in the future?
Yes, but not right away. “I’ve got some other stuff I got to get to,” Phillips says, likely meaning his popular Ivan Monk series, “but I can’t stay away from this cat. I gotta get back to him. I like this guy too much. We all dig the antihero now.”•
Jim Ruland is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and writes the weekly Substack Message from the Underworld. His new novel, Mightier Than the Sword, will be published by Rare Bird in October 2026.
