About this episode
The episode discusses Donald Westlake's novel The Seventh and its film adaptation The Split, focusing on the heist and character dynamics.
Left burned and cleaned out after the events of The Jugger, Parker is forced to start fresh with a group of six other professional heisters targeting the cash receipts from a big weekend football game. The score itself goes off without a hitch, but a meddling amateur manages to make off with the entire boodle, including Parker's seventh of a cut! One of the legit best books of the entire series, The Seventh boasts some of author Donald Westlake's best precision plotting and most colorful characters. We typically sneer at Parker taking unnecessary risks or making bad decisions, but his bad judgment in this book is so astoundingly lopsided it's fun to just slide along as the floor falls apart beneath him. The Seventh is The Pink Smoke's eighth episode covering Westlake's Parker novels (what?! how did that happen?), and we have a great time discussing both the book and its 1968 film adaptation The Split.
People in this episode
Host: The Pink Smoke
Topics covered
- heist
- literature
- film adaptation
- Donald Westlake
- Parker novels
Keywords
- heist
- Parker
- Donald Westlake
- The Seventh
- The Split
- football game
- plotting
- characters
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The Seventh, The Split
More episodes of The Pink Smoke podcast
- Ep 166 The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones · April 15, 2026 · 2h 53m
- Ep 165 Jim McBride's Lost Screenplays · March 30, 2026 · 56 min
- Ep 164 The Jugger · February 9, 2026 · 1h 55m
- Ep 163 The Maya and Science Fiction · January 6, 2026 · 1h 26m
- Parker Doesn't Say 'Merry Christmas': A 2025 Holiday Special · December 25, 2025 · 2h 25m
- Ep 162 The Score · December 16, 2025 · 1h 29m
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