Whipped Cream Difficulties

I have not been able to find a formal report of this elsewhere, but both Bill Crider and Sarah Weinman are reporting the death of Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser and Jesse Stone novels (among other works).

Edited to add: The LAT now has a short article up, and promises a full obit to come.

A lot of people who knew Parker better than I did are probably going to be commenting over the next few days. I’m at work right now, but when I get home tonight I’ll update this entry with some thoughts of my own.

Update: I’ll post links to the major papers obits tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I’m putting my thoughts after a jump, because they contain both possible spoilers (including one for Gone, Baby, Gone) and language…

I’ve been thinking all day about what I wanted to say here. I don’t have any profound insights about Parker (I never met the man) and pretty much share the conventional wisdom about his books (the first dozen Spenser books were wonderful,  A Catskill Eagle was a piece of shit, and the subsequent books were basically comfort food). I always thought it was significant that, after Valediction, Parker didn’t try to blow up the Spenser/Silverman relationship, the way Dennis Lehane and Robert Crais did with their male/female relationships. I wondered sometimes if Parker felt trapped by Spenser the way Doyle supposedly felt trapped by Holmes, and if that would explain Jessie Stone, Sunny Randall, and the Western novels.

This makes me feel like I’m crapping on the guy after he’s dead and can’t punch my lights out. I liked Parker’s books, even the comfort food ones. I’m going to touch briefly on some of them that hold special significance for me, and the reasons why.

The Godwulf Manuscript: I know this wasn’t the first one I read (and I forget what the actual first one was) but it made a huge impression when I did read it. What stands out for me is the fight scene at the end, and the dialog between Spenser and the main villain, a cringing coward:

I have killed three people to save your miserable goddamn ass. Your wife took about six slugs in the stomach and bled to death in great agony to save your miserable goddamn ass. I will call up Martin Quirk in a minute and he will come here to arrest you. You will tell him everything that you know and everything that I want you to tell him and everything that he asks you. If you do not, I will get Quirk to put us together in a cell in the cellar, and I will beat you to death. I promise you that I will.

There was a point in my life where I wanted to be the guy who could carry off that dialog for real. There was another point where I at least wanted to be the guy who could write that dialog.

Early Autumn: There’s not much of a mystery here; this is more of a study in character development (and I mean that in more ways than one). I include it here for two reasons:

1. If I ever meet Dennis Lehane, I intend to ask him if Gone, Baby, Gone was written as a direct response to Early Autumn.
2. Early Autumn also contains one of my favorite lines of dialog in any novel ever:
   

   “Five,” I said. “Five fuck’s in one sentence, Paul. That’s colorful. You don’t see color like that much anymore.”

The Judas Goat: For the whole thing of Spenser and Hawk sitting around lonely hotel rooms in Europe, talking about what’s important without talking about what’s important. “We just copped the gold medal in outdoor scuffling.”

Looking for Rachel Wallace: Spenser basically saying, “Fuck it” and walking to Belmont through the snow. Why? To rescue a woman he has every reason to believe hates him, because he knows that no one else is going to do it. There’s a moral lesson in there somewhere.

Ceremony: This is one of the first mystery novels I can remember reading that basically said, “Look, sometimes you don’t have any choices that aren’t shit.”

Promised Land: This is one of the books that I’d put in the first rank of American private detective novels (along with Gone, Baby, Gone, California Fire and Life, and Free Fall, among others).

I mentioned earlier Spenser and Hawk talking about what’s important without talking about what’s important. That’s what stands out most to me in Parker’s work; the constant obsession with character, honor, duty, doing the right thing, and doing things right. There’s a recurring theme of Spenser constantly placing himself in, at the very least, inconvenience, if not outright danger, to satisfy his sense of honor; this actually became something of a running joke inside the books themselves.

What got to me, though, beyond the obsession, was that they don’t talk about it. Hawk and Spenser don’t discuss what honor and loyalty and duty means; they just are. The few times Susan manages to draw Spenser out are notable; the story about the bear in Pastime, for example.

Whenever a mystery writer dies, there’s always a rumor about one last book in the vault where he (generally, these rumors are about male writers) kills off his main character. For some reason, I hope that’s not true of Parker. Even though this was one of the major complaints many people had about the later Spenser books, I have this comforting vision of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan moving forward into an unchanging eternal future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 10:05 am and is filed under Books, Obits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.