Earlier this year I wrote admiringly in this space about “Dirty Money,” the latest thriller from Richard Stark, the pseudonym that comic crime novelist Donald E. Westlake adopts when writing about Parker, a professional burglar with a heart of flint who will do anything to anybody in order to get what he wants:

I wouldn’t care to speculate about what it is in Westlake’s psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.

Back then I pointed out that most of the twenty-four Parker novels are out of print–the earlier ones were published as paperback originals that are now hard to find–and that certain titles in the series, “Butcher’s Moon” foremost among them, fetch alarmingly stiff prices on the used-book market. So I’m delighted to advise readers in need of tough-minded vacation fare that the University of Chicago Press has decided to publish a uniform edition of the first 17 Parker novels, and that the first three volumes are now available.

“The Hunter” (208 pp., $14 paper), “The Man with the Getaway Face” (224 pp., $14 paper) and “The Outfit” (224 pp., $14 paper) can and should be read in sequence as a trilogy–I would have published them in an omnibus volume–rather than separately. In these hard, laconic novels, published in 1962 and 1963, we first make the acquaintance of Parker, who has broken out of a California jail and made his way to New York City to settle a score with a woman who sold him out and left him for dead. We never learn much more about his personal history than that, nor should we, for Parker is a man devoid of introspection who lives exclusively in the present moment, never looking back and thinking ahead only far enough to plan his next crime. He is, I suppose, a sociopath, if you go in for labels like that, and it is the frightening charm of the novels in which he figures that you quickly find yourself cheering him on in his relentless quest to redistribute the wealth of America into his own bottomless pockets by any means necessary, up to and very much including murder.

The early Parker novels are somewhat coarser in literary tone than the ones that came later, but they are still of a piece with the rest of the series. Once you start reading them, my guess is that you’ll find it impossible to stop, for Stark/Westlake is a virtuoso craftsman who knows how to seize and hold the reader’s attention. Each Parker novel, for instance, opens in medias res with a sentence that begins with the word “when”:

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.

How can you quit there?

“The Hunter,” “The Man with the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit” are handsomely designed, tightly bound trade-paperback volumes that have been freshly set from new type rather than reprinted from older editions. All of this strongly suggests that the University of Chicago Press is in it for the long haul, which is a good thing, since the uniform Parker is a multi-year project whose subsequent installments are to be published at unspecified intervals. Be patient.