By TOM NOLAN
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
JANUARY 20, 2010
In American popular culture, the private detective is a unique heroic figure: champion of last resort for the vulnerable client, a knight-errant for hire, bringing rough or poetic justice to cases unserved by more official powers that be.
Associated Press/G.P. Putnam's Sons, John Earle
In the past quarter century, it could be said, no writer of private-eye fiction was more popular or prolific than Robert B. Parker, who died Monday at the age of 77. His nearly 40 books involving the no-first-name Boston P.I. Spenser—starting in 1973 with "The Godwulf Manuscript" and ending, it would seem, with "The Professional," published three months ago—made the Massachusetts-born Mr. Parker a best-selling author and a household-name in all homes where mystery fiction was consumed.
Building on aspects developed by illustrious predecessors (aspects he studied as the author of a doctoral dissertation on the private eye in American fiction)—the bantering dialogue of Raymond Chandler, the concern for young people expressed by Ross Macdonald, the swift action of Dashiell Hammett, even the violence of Mickey Spillane—Mr. Parker created a hero and a series of books that revivified the P.I. genre, making it fresh and viable through the end of the 20th century and into the next.
Spenser brought his own quirks and special experience to the traditional private-detective role: He was a good cook and, for the most part, a one-woman man. His closest associate was an African-American "enforcer" with whom he felt much in common. And the self-educated Spenser, like his well-educated creator, was surprisingly well-read—often quoting from the likes of Frost, Auden, Shelley, Shakespeare, and such popular songwriters as Kris Kristofferson and Matt Dennis.
But Spenser's more fundamental nature was informed by that classic mixture of confidence, ability and courage—grace under pressure—that has characterized all American adventurer-investigators from James Fenimore Cooper's day through our own.
The Boston detective also had a rueful, self-deprecating streak to balance his brash self-confidence. Of his presence at a cocktail party of smartly dressed and glamorous young types, the ex-amateur boxer and ex-football player said of his sport-coated self: "I felt like a rhinoceros at a petting-zoo."
Spenser's equally athletic creator sometimes also expressed a similarly endearing side, once telling a roomful of librarians, booksellers and readers: "Please buy my book. I'm too old to get a real job."
But Mr. Parker—whose oeuvre also included series with a small-town sheriff, Jesse Stone, and a woman P.I. named Sunny Randall, as well as a handful of westerns and other novels—of course had a very real job, working five days a week turning out five pages a day. "It's like running a small business," he told fellow writer Stuart Kaminsky, adding: "'Writer's block? That's just another word for 'lazy.'"
"I like to make things," the fictional Spenser told a fictional interviewer in 2007. "I know how to do it." He had good carpentry skills, he said, and could build a house—as could (and had) Mr. Parker. No surprise then that the Spenser books were well-constructed, functional, and comfortable to spend time in.
Robert Urich as Spenser and Avery Brooks as Hawk
Spenser himself seemed comfortable in his own skin, and in his own life. Asked "Is there anything you wanted to accomplish that you haven't?" by a Harvard professor in that fictional interview written by Mr. Parker, the private eye answered: "No. I am everything I wanted to be. I've done everything I ever wanted to do. . . . I would be pleased to live this life and do what I do . . . forever. But I have no need to improve on it."
Mr. Parker gave a reader all that was needed. He could set a scene in a few spare sentences and make you see it, as in these lines—from a piece in the recently published anthology, "The Lineup"—that describe a Boston afternoon: "It was one of those days in late June. The temperature was about 78. There were maybe three white clouds in the sky. The quiet breeze that drifted in from the river smelled fresher than I knew it to be." Sense of place, overtones, undertones—the bare essentials, and just a bit more.
He wrote dialogue that at once informed, amused and gave a sense of character; and he conjured characters a reader wanted to spend more time with—especially Spenser, a fixed point in a footloose world, take him or leave him. A pragmatist whose ethics were situational. A tough and decent type who did what needed to be done in the service of a moral cause, affirming the worth of the individual regardless of race, sexual orientation, social status, age or occupation. He made timeless points that need to be remade every generation, in a society ever able to find ways to betray the public and private trust.
The books were addictive, entertaining, amusing—and, in their low-key way, moving. Critics prefer the earliest ones as being more substantive. Readers gobbled up the later ones for their sensibility, tone of voice, and point of view: that wised-up, can-do attitude, with no phonies allowed.
"I'd been in the infantry in Korea and met some pretty bad people," Mr. Parker told Mr. Kaminsky, "but many, maybe most of the people I met in university life were the worst people I'd ever met."
The Spenser chronicles were created to be read in the moment. Time alone knows whether they'll survive their creator. But one sign of how important a writer was to us is how death, in an instant, can turn a name-brand author from taken for granted to one of a kind. Right away, we miss Robert B. Parker.
Mr. Nolan is the editor of Ross Macdonald's "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator."
‘Spenser’ novelist Parker dead at 77
Prolific, funny, he reinvented genre
By Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe Staff January 20, 2010
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/
Robert B. Parker, whose spare, eloquent sentences turned the tough private investigator Spenser into one of Boston’s most recognizable fictional characters, suffered a heart attack at his desk in his Cambridge home Monday and died. He was 77.
Muscular and gruff like his creator, Spenser shared other traits with Mr. Parker. Behind the pugnacious exterior, both men liked to chase fine food with a cold beer. Both had a sharp wit and lived by a code of honor.
Over the course of three dozen Spenser novels, Mr. Parker introduced millions of readers to Boston, which was as much a character as his burly protagonist. To a predictable genre, he added a complex detective with a sensitive side. The wry dialogue between Spenser and longtime girlfriend Susan Silverman, who was schooled in the art of psychology, gave a modern twist to the repartee between the Nick and Nora characters created generations earlier by noted crime novelist Dashiell Hammett.“He was responsible for a seismic shift,’’ said best-selling writer Dennis Lehane, whose crime novels “Mystic River’’ and “Gone, Baby, Gone’’ were adapted into movies. “He suddenly made the private-eye novel sexy, in the coolest sense of that word. There’s private-eye fiction before Bob, and there’s private-eye fiction after him.’’
Joseph Finder, a Boston-based author of best-selling spy thrillers, said Mr. Parker “took the American hard-boiled private-eye novel that had been languishing for years, since James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, and revitalized it. He took a lot of the standard tropes - the tough guy, the lone wolf, the man of honor on the mean streets - and updated them so that his Spenser character became sort of an avatar of himself. He was actually a guy who cooked, who was incredibly devoted to one woman, the way Bob Parker was to Joan, his wife.’’
Publishing 65 books in 37 years, Mr. Parker was as prolific as he was well-read. He featured Spenser - “spelled with an ‘s,’ just like the English poet,’’ he said - in 37 novels. He also wrote 28 other books, including a series each for Jesse Stone, the police chief of fictional Paradise, Mass., and Sunny Randall, a female private investigator in Boston.
His latest book, “Split Image,’’ extending the Jesse Stone series, is due out next month, said his agent, Helen Brann of New York City.
Mr. Parker’s marquee character was turned into the TV series “Spenser for Hire,’’ starring Robert Urich. “Jesse Stone’’ became a TV movie vehicle for Tom Selleck, and “Appaloosa,’’ his 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 film directed by and starring Ed Harris, who filled a shelf with Mr. Parker’s books.
“Robert wrote about this friendship between these two guys that tickled me,’’ Harris said of “Appaloosa.’’ “It just felt right. It felt good.’’
Mr. Parker, he added, “was a national treasure. I loved him and I’ll miss him.’’
Brann, who represented Mr. Parker for 42 years, said he had a heart attack while his wife was away from the house. “She saw him early in the morning, went out for her exercise, came back an hour later, and he was gone,’’ Brann said. “He was at his desk, as he so often was.’’
Pounding out up to five pages a day, Mr. Parker kept a pace few could match. Pressed for his secret, he made it sound simple.
“The art of writing a mystery is just the art of writing fiction,’’ he told the Globe in 2007. “You create interesting characters and put them into interesting circumstances and figure out how to get them out of them. No one is usually surprised at the outcome of my books.’’
Perhaps, but readers around the world raced to devour novel after novel. Brann estimated that Mr. Parker sold more than 6 million volumes worldwide. His work was translated into 24 languages.
He was teaching English at Northeastern University when he began writing the novels featuring Spenser, whose first name is never revealed. Mr. Parker didn’t care for academia and made no secret of his animosity in his first book’s first sentence: “The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.’’
Ed Harris as Virgil Cole and Viggo Mortenson as Everett Hitch
In 1975, Globe reviewer Walter V. Robinson welcomed “God Save the Child,’’ Mr. Parker’s second effort: “Spenser is back, and none too soon to give the connoisseur of that rare combination of good detective fiction and good literature a chance to indulge himself.’’
Mr. Parker grew up in Springfield, where he and Joan Hall first met at a birthday party when they were 3. They met again years later at Colby College in Maine. He pursued her. She resisted, then relented. They married in 1956.
“He was very smart and he knew it, and I reveled in that,’’ she told the Globe in 1981. “He was the only man who didn’t bore me.’’
After serving in the Army, Mr. Parker worked in a variety of jobs before going to graduate school at Boston University, where he received a doctorate in English literature.
In the early 1980s, the couple separated, then got back together in an arrangement they publicly acknowledged was unusual, but worked for them. They bought a sprawling house in Cambridge and each lived in a private area.
Mr. Parker dedicated his books to his wife, and told the Globe in 1992 that “she has been the central factor in my life since I was a child. You wouldn’t understand me unless you understand me and her.’’
In addition to his wife, Mr. Parker leaves two sons, David of New York City and Daniel of Santa Monica, Calif. The family is planning a memorial service.
Despite the wealth and fame that came with TV, movies, and worldwide sales, Mr. Parker “was so dependable, such a regular guy,’’ said Kate Mattes, who ran Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge for 26 years. “He never put on airs or anything, and he certainly had the right to.’’
Mr. Parker, who sometimes likened himself to a carpenter who built books, helped others learn his trade.
“The debt’s huge and I was always upfront about that,’’ Lehane said. “My first book is so much Robert Parker in the first chapter that I’m surprised he didn’t sue me.’’
In Memoriam
Lively Literary Light Goes Out
By Larry Thornberry on 1.22.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
There was some very good news for conservatives out of Massachusetts this week. And some very bad news for fans of crime fiction of all philosophies out of the same state.
When my New England sources told me of a formation of pigs spotted over Ipswich Monday, I knew Scott Brown's chances were good. I greatly enjoyed the Pigs Fly party Tuesday night at a local watering hole put on by the Tampa Downtown Republican Club, a group of hearty patriots whose joy knew no bounds election night, though I fear several of them had trouble making a fist Wednesday morning. (There were so many things to toast that night that many of the members were themselves nearly toast before it was all put through.)
My own powers were somewhat under a cloud Wednesday a.m. when I read the sad news of the death in Cambridge of Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser series of P.I. novels as well as the Jesse Stone novels (yes, the ones from which some pretty good movies starring Tom Selleck as Stone were made). Parker was 77 and died suddenly of a heart attack while writing at his desk. His many fans, which include me, can take some solace in that there's hardly a better way for a writer to go out. He died with his boots on. (OK, Parker's taste probably ran to loafers, but you know what I mean.)Parker resurrected and modernized the literary private-eye tradition made popular in the years just before and just after World War II by such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald when he muscled his way onto the stage with The Godwulf Manuscript in 1973. Readers – there've been plenty over the years as Parker's books have sold tens of millions of copies – quickly learned that the tough but literate and funny Spenser (no first name is ever given) was a private-eye with a difference.
Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and MacDonald's Lew Archer were said to be of the "hard-boiled" tradition, cynical and damaged loners who worked the mean streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Spenser is more over-easy.
Parker's Boston detective is a worthy successor. He's as complex and as tough as those earlier guys. In fact he's an ex-boxer who once fought Jersey Joe Walcott. He's street smart and has no illusions about the world he lives and works in. But unlike with Spade et al., there's no world-weariness with Spenser, no angst. While Spenser's work carries us into the world's darkness, the darkness never overpowers us. The Spenser stories are not noir.
Spenser can beat up bad guys or even engage in gunplay when needed, though he leaves most of the shooting to his dodgy but lethal sidekick Hawk, one of the most charming thugs in all of literature. And he can wisecrack with the best of them (with Spenser, unlike with many other fictional private-eyes, the wisecracks are actually funny). But he also knows how to have a good time.
Spenser knows food and music and reads. He has a regular sweetie-pie (named Susan, who, it must be said in all fairness, can be irritating and way too precious sometimes) to whom he is faithful, and lots of friends. You could have a beer or watch a Red Sox game with Spenser (both Spenser and his creator are baseball savvy) without becoming depressed, as you almost certainly would if you tried the same thing with Philip Marlowe.
Parker's work is genre fare. But crime fiction, usually the biggest section in your local bookstore, is today's novel of manners. At its best it shows us how we live, and can even hint at how we should live. In crisp, lean, insistent, first-person prose that never lets a story lag, Parker deals intelligently with such matters as integrity, personal responsibility, courage, autonomy, fidelity, friendship, the place and meaning of work in our lives, and what it means to be a man or a woman in our post-everything world. There's a good deal more in Spenser than just the plot.
Mostly apolitical, Spenser takes women, even aggressive feminists, seriously, but has contempt for excesses of any movement and for bad behavior. In a description of the toney restaurant where he meets his client in Looking for Rachel Wallace (1980), Spenser says, "Downstairs is a room which used to be the Men's Bar until it was liberated one lunchtime by a group of humorless women who got into a shouting match with a priest."
In a line from Promised Land Spenser shows his conservative bona fides, though he may not have fancied the label. He says, "I'm sick of movements. I'm sick of people who think a new movement will take care of everything. I'm sick of people who put the cause ahead of the person."
In Promised Land (1976) Spenser nails people who've been consumed with ideology or with a cause. "Zealots were always hard. Zeal distorts them. Makes the normal impulses convolute. Makes people fearless and greedless and loveless and finally monstrous."
Just so. Spenser gets it. He's neither right-wing nor left-wing; he's the entire bird.
Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone
Some of the funniest scenes of any Spenser novel are where Spenser first interviews his potential clients. In Rachel Wallace Spenser is hired by a publisher to protect a radical feminist writer who's receiving death threats. In the interview the publisher says that while the writer wants protection she's against muscle and machismo and any form of thuggish behavior. It draws this from Spenser: "What you want, Mr. Ticknor, is someone feisty enough to get in the line of someone else's fire, and tough enough to get away with it. And you want him to look like Winnie the Pooh and act like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I'm not sure Rebecca's even got a gun permit."
Parker was an academic, sort of. At least he finished a Ph.D. in literature when he was almost 40 for the express purpose of getting a job as a college professor and therefore having plenty of time to write. Parker is scathing in his treatment of academe in his novels, several of which have university connections. His professors are conspicuous in their pomposity, shallowness, and affectation, curiously unhappy in their soft touch of a job.
Parker commented in the nineties that while carrying a "full load" of nine class hours plus preparation time, his academic job at Northeastern University in Boston had only kept him busy for nine and a half hours a week. For the rest, he locked himself in his faculty office where he worked on the early Spenser novels. After five novels were published he said goodbye to academe and never looked back.
Parker's success gave birth to many imitators but no equals. Spenser-esque lines can be encountered in the work of many contemporary crime writers. Dennis LeHane, author of Mystic River and other Boston-based novels, gives Parker credit for teaching him to be concise and funny on the page. Uber-successful crime writer Harlan Coben said that 90 percent of current writers of detective novels admit Parker has had an influence on their work while "the rest of us lie about it." (Full disclosure: after re-reading several chapters I'd put together in one of my unsuccessful attempts to write fiction, I discarded them on discovering they were just Spenser with palm trees.)
There are a few things in Parker's work that red-meat conservatives will likely find uncongenial. He thinks rather more highly of psychotherapy and psychotherapists than is called for. His wife, Joan, has a doctorate in some branch of the head trade, probably accounting for the excess talkiness in this area in Parker's work. Many readers of the Jesse Stone series wish Stone would just make up his damn mind whether he wants to be with his ex-wife or not. And the scenes where Stone himself talks with a psychologist about all of this can be skipped over.
But these misdemeanors are more than made up for by Parker's vigorous and witty defense of the manly virtues, basic decency, and the honorable life. So, should TAS readers spice up an evening or weekend day by reading a Spenser novel? In a frequently recurring line from Parker's novels that his regular readers will recognize as almost an inside joke, "We'd be fools not to."
RIP Bob Parker.
Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.
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