The Hunter (1962) is a crime thriller novel, written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym Richard Stark. It was the basis for three feature films, John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), which starred Lee Marvin, Ringo Lam's Full Contact (1993), which starred Chow Yun-fat, and Payback (1999) which starred Mel Gibson. The book was adapted as a graphic novel by artist Darwyn Cooke in 2009.
The plot concerns a criminal, Parker (or Walker in Point Blank, Gou Fei in Full Contact and Porter in Payback), who, having been betrayed, shot, and left for dead by his partner and wife, embarks on a relentless quest to retrieve his money and wreak revenge.
The novel was written as a stand-alone crime novel, but when Westlake turned it in, his editor told him that if Westlake would rewrite the ending so that Parker escaped, he would be willing to publish up to three books a year about Parker.[1] Though Westlake wasn't able to keep up that level of productivity, he did go on to write 23 more Parker novels over the next 46 years.
The Hunter was re-issued by the University of Chicago Press in August 2008.
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