So I’m trolling through the blogs at work today during one of the inevitable blue bars of boredom. I see this.
Robert Parker, he of Spenser fame, is dead at 77.
There are very few notable deaths that hit you hard. This was one of them.
Back in high school, a friend of mine regaled me with his experiences reading crime fiction. He told me about Chandler, of course, and some guy named Ross McDonald, who sadly wasn’t writing anymore due to Alzheimer’s, and Ross Thomas. But one author he told me I had to read was Robert B. Parker and his Spenser novels.
At that point, he’d just put out A Catskill Eagle, which, suffice it to say, was not typical of Parker’s work before or since. But he didn’t hand me that one. He handed me Parker’s debut, The Godwulf Manuscript. I was hooked.
I read Promised Land, Mortal Stakes, and God Save the Child in short order. I was hooked.
Much is made of that opening salvo of five novels by Parker. And up through A Savage Place, where Spenser stupidly has an affair with a client who is promptly killed, he did more than any writer to humanize the private eye in an era where the archetype should have shriveled up and died in the malaise of post-sixties cynicism. Did we really need heroes in that era?
Well, we did, and Parker delivered. In the beginning, Spenser questioned his own motives, had a degree of culture, and walked the macho walk without being a macho idiot. Hawk might have been the psycho sidekick, but there was a method to his madness, all business. You never knew if he’d turn on Spenser. And Susan? Susan was Spenser’s conscience.
All this was before Parker entered his later phase. Many people criticize his work from the late eighties on, but there is only one explanation why Parker kept Spenser going: He wanted to, and they let him. How’s that for making a living doing what you love?
I met Parker once in 2004 when he went on tour for one of the early Jesse Stone novels. Stone and some of the standalones he’d written in his later years were praised for a return to that early Parker everyone fell in love with. But the rest? People bought them. Even when they drifted into self-parody, it was Parker having fun, and readers having fun along with him. And if you were a naysayer – to which I’ve occasionally pleaded guilty – it’s a big library and a big bookstore, kiddo. Plenty of other people didn’t mind.
But it all goes back to The Godwulf Manuscript. That was the hook for me. It made me reconsider my early ambition to write science fiction and switch to crime. And it showed me the private eye could be something more than a parody of Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer.
Edged in Blue 