In Pursuit of Spenser (11 page)

So I navigated my own course—like Parker, in Westerns and modern-day suspense stories—sans Parker, until 1992, when the editors of the
New York Times Books Review
asked me to review
Double Deuce
for publication. I was delighted to find myself rekindling my romance with Spenser. The dialogue, which had always been razor-sharp and widely praised, was better than ever, and the descriptions of places and people were superior, contrary to Parker’s own observation that “no writer likes to write description.” Parker might not have liked it, but he had become one of the best at it. Perhaps he always was, and I had just forgotten during the long hiatus. In any case I bought his next and the next on my own and found again the old pleasure. It was like catching up with an old friend after many years and picking up exactly where we had left off.

Part of this renaissance may have had to do with the fact that Parker had found other things to write about in the interim. The Jesse Stone series, and later his authentic historical
Westerns, had provided a chance to rest and recuperate from the day-to-day ordeal of finding a new adventure worthy of his most famous creation. My own writing remains fresh, at least in my eyes, because I write different kinds of books. My daily shift is most diverting when I can go straight from Amos Walker to a Western, and from a Western to historical crime novels. I refer to this phenomenon as literary crop rotation, allowing one field to lie fallow and recoup its nutrients while working another. It’s a sad business when someone recommends a writer, adding, “Read his early work. It’s his best.” In a perfect world, an artist should get better with each project, but even a Rembrandt can lose his appeal when he produces one self-portrait after another instead of trying something new.

Insofar as I can glean a colleague’s theories on life based on his writings—always a dangerous assumption—I suspect Parker and I maintain the identical view that the world truly is good and evil, black and white. This is an unpopular conviction in these murky times; but I’ve found that if you study a situation long enough, you’ll see the dividing line. While the conclusions you draw may be the precise opposite of another’s having applied the same process, each is clearly separate. It’s the people who insist that gray areas exist that you need to watch out for. The concept itself is evil. Spenser certainly knows the difference. So, in his way, does Hawk, although the approach he takes frequently places him on the side of the damned. The end never justifies the means. If the means don’t justify themselves regardless of the result, good has not been served.

Spenser first appeared in 1973. The timing is significant. When the private eye of fiction made his debut, Prohibition was the law of the land. A major war had been fought to preserve a way of life that was destroyed by the war itself.
The great engines of destruction had for the first time been turned wholesale upon civilians. Newspaper readers learned of foreign slaughter in the telegraph columns and of civil war in their own cities on the front page. An ordinary citizen was fined or jailed for having a bottle of liquor in his pocket by a judge who was having lunch that day with a bootlegger. The police, our last lines of defense against crime, accepted bribes to look the other way while the laws of the republic were shattered. The president of the United States accepted alcohol deliveries through the back door of the White House. A crook who ought to be breaking into houses at night and hiding out when the sun was up rode in an armor-plated Cadillac in broad daylight, wearing a two-hundred-dollar suit. As the drunken 1920s awakened to the hangover of the Great Depression, the American Dream vanished, along with the jobs of millions, to reappear in the private holdings of greedy bankers and corrupt politicians. Readers, moviegoers, and radio audiences turned for distraction not to the symbols of official law enforcement, but to some small-time crusader as poor and as fed up as they were, determined to hurl a monkey wrench into the infernal machine.

In the second year of Watergate, with the bloodbath of Vietnam subsiding to expose a humiliating defeat for America, the country was once again ready for just such a hero. Enter Spenser in
The Godwulf Manuscript
: “I went to college once. I don’t wear my hat indoors. And if a clue comes along and bites me on the ankle I grab it. I am not, however, an Oxford don. Now, is there something you’d like me to detect . . .?”

No posturing there. No political doublespeak, no patience for lecturing and persiflage. And the very name, two simple syllables, no messing around with even a given name, rings with the epic poetry of the era of knighthood and holy quests. The man’s business cards show a pair of crossed swords, for
Pete’s sake! Rarely since a youthful John Wayne strode from the Sonoran Desert into the center frame of
Stagecoach
had America seen a man who so emphatically announced himself as a hero at first sight.

Well, that may be laying it on a bit thick, but there is more of Wayne in the character than of Humphrey Bogart, the private eye icon on film. Spenser is a big man who works out with weights, dishes up his own grub (albeit gourmet style), and wastes little time putting belligerent living obstacles in their place—usually the floor. He has battered his way out of impossible situations with nothing more than his fists and on one occasion nothing larger than a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, which can be mistaken for a novelty cigarette lighter. Nearly as often, however, he fails and is injured severely. But Superman without Kryptonite would be a one-note character. Admire him as one likes, and wish to be him as one prefers, the reader never identifies with him as thoroughly as when he’s taking a beating.

Despite its crusty exterior, the private eye story is pure romance. The investigators who advertise online and in the yellow pages spend most of their time interviewing witnesses to traffic accidents, turning over dusty pages in libraries and county records offices, and calculating billable hours before presenting statements to their clients. (The notorious day rate plus expenses, like the fast-draw at high noon, is a literary invention.) Their clients are usually lawyers. They avoid such sleuthing staples as climbing fire escapes and picking locks and, should their efforts uncover official business like murder, they report it to the police and then get out of their way, thus sparing themselves that lecture about losing their license. Although every detective who’s practiced for a number of years has encountered adventures enough to fill a book, it takes a hero to satisfy the requirements of a series.

Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton operative, and Joe Gores, also once a licensed private detective, knew all this, and gave the Continental Op and the DKA Agency a solid foundation of day-to-day routine investigative work for their characters to step off from into uncharted territory. Similarly, Spenser’s treks begin with a simple missing-person case, an item of stolen property, bodyguard duty—then turn into something far less prosaic. But the fate of the human animal is always the first concern. (Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, we must remember, was nothing more than an elaborate red herring to divert the reader from Miles Archer’s murder.)

• •

Parker based his doctoral thesis on the works of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald, drawing a straight line between the frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the seedy world of Philip Marlowe. Yet, as his own series progressed, the differences between Marlowe and Spenser piled up until there was no confusing the two. Following tradition, Marlowe is a loner. After a brief dalliance with Brenda Loring (no relation to Chandler’s Linda Loring; but my suspicion is that his decision to drop her had not a little to do with the uncomfortable parallel. Our narrow area of endeavor often opens itself to charges of undue influence), Spenser formed a lasting romantic attachment with Susan Silverman. Marlowe keeps his emotions to himself, lest he appear vulnerable to the enemy; Spenser doesn’t hesitate to open up to Susan and Hawk, lest the pressures of his work crack him apart. Marlowe distrusts women; Spenser respects them. (For a time, feminism provided a major theme for the series.) Marlowe’s acerbic sense of humor is the only thing that prevents him from succumbing to depression; Spenser’s wisecracks expose him as a smart-aleck. Not everything is to everyone’s taste.
Some readers think Susan Silverman is a shrew. But no one gets any of these characters mixed up.

The point of the above is that Parker staked out his own territory, paying homage to the pioneers who had preceded him but announcing his independence of them. My own favorite guilty pleasure is
Early Autumn
, in which Spenser revolts against a bitterly divorcing couple’s desertion of their child by taking the boy in hand and teaching him self-reliance. As the youth develops into an estimable young man exclusive of his parents’ neglect, the story echoes Louis L’Amour’s
Hondo
far more than any influence in the specialized world of conventional urban milieu of Parker’s predecessors; it encroaches upon the turf of J.D. Salinger and other masters of American literature. Ross Macdonald, too, aspired to this connection with the American mainstream. One finishes
Early Autumn
with the same sense of satiation found at the end of Macdonald’s
The Galton Case
: that one has digested a substantial work of literature and been transcended by it.

This expansion on the part of genre fiction beyond the bounds of category—the nerve to annex social commentary to the business of fighting injustice—rang the death knell for the mainstream novel. Once its walls were breached, it had no course but retreat. Popular entertainment (that condescending label assigned to everything outside mainstream) already had numbers on its side. Once social commentary came into the mix, the sky was the limit.

Parker’s sense of place rivals that of the great literary masters. Boston is at least as important to the Spenser series as Spenser is. For me, whenever the trail leads him out of town, the story becomes generic. It’s clear that Parker is intimate with his setting, as Chandler was with Los Angeles and Ross Macdonald was with all of California. The West Coast plays a prominent role in so much detective fiction (a calculated
one, in some cases; old-time Hollywood preferred to buy properties that could be filmed at home) that when cities like Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit began to show up in the second great wave of private eye tales that started in the 1970s, critics coined the phrase “regional mysteries” to define the phenomenon, as if Los Angeles and San Francisco were any less provincial than Springfield, U.S.A.

Parker’s is not the city of Beacon Hill, Fenway Park, and baked beans—although with the exception of beans he would not overlook these threads in the local fabric. It’s a gritty, aging powderkeg, a place of private estates and public housing projects where the privileged and underprivileged classes cloister behind high walls, a place where speeding cars bent on dark errands thunder over streets stained with the blood of patriots, home of sinister family secrets and the Tenderloin. In his hands alone it has risen to a level in suspense lore beside Sax Rohmer’s Limehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street. He paved the way for the careers of fellow Bostonians Dennis Lehane, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Mark Wahlberg.

Not that he spends much time on physical details, of his city or anything else. He’s a lean writer—gaunt would not be overselling the case—and in a publishing climate that encourages 500-page tomes on the theory of marketing by the pound, a typical Spenser weighs in at less than two hundred. For a while (it was during that bleak period when I suspect Parker had lost his taste for Spenser through over-familiarity), the production team at his publishing house introduced wide margins and a typeface nearly large enough for you to put your fist through the Os to keep the books from being lost among the travel pamphlets in bookstores. Later, when the Parker-Spenser love affair had begun all over again, the novels acquired more meat and a new energy level, but they never lost muscle or gained fat. In this area, Parker’s
writing more closely resembles the rendered-down prose of Hammett, whose spare use of San Francisco landmarks could place his setting in 2012 as easily as 1925, than Chandler’s evocative descriptions of wooden oil derricks and flourishing orange groves in his period’s San Fernando Valley.

Despite a Best Mystery Novel Edgar and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as his towering stature in the community, Parker’s books rarely involve mysteries in the traditional sense, i.e., raising a compelling question (most often “whodunit?”) that is answered in the closing pages. They’re more suspenseful than puzzling, and belong more to the action genre than to the conventional detective story. Spenser acquires the information necessary to complete his assignment less by assembling physical clues and comparing timetables than by cornering those who have the information and pressuring them to divulge it, usually by dint of his formidable physical presence. To this end, the amount of time he spends in the gym and doing road-work, his healthy eating, his moderation in drinking, and his long-ago success in quitting smoking are tools crucial to his vocation rather than just tropes to define character. (One wonders, a la the old Batman-versus-Superman debate, how the chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling Marlowe would fare in a toe-to-toe slugfest with Spenser. Certainly, Hammett’s suety Continental Op would be forced to rely more on his world-weary wits than on his brawn.)

• •

Spenser has been a part of the landscape so long it’s difficult to imagine a time when he was unknown. It’s like watching Wyatt Earp introducing himself in the first reel of a Western and getting no reaction from the rest of the cast. But I doubt Parker’s editors at Houghton Mifflin heard a choir when his
first typescript arrived in the slush pile. Quite likely they greeted it with the same jaundiced eye they brought to my
Motor City Blue
six years later, as a nice neat potboiler worth gambling a token advance on but no commitment beyond that. A tombstone advertisement in the
New York Times
and advance reading copies sent to the usual suspects for comment and review would probably have been the extent of the promotion, possibly with some signings at Boston-area bookstores. Full-page screamers, multiple-city tours, and guest spots on national TV talk shows are for established performers who hardly need the push.