It’s always hard to tell whether you read all the “Spenser” books by Robert B. Parker. First of all, there were so many of them, plus they were so good, so funny that you had to pass them along to spread the joy. The Cobb Manor bookshelves boast only about 10 of them now, thanks to an aggressive lend-lease policy.
Parker died at 77 this week, slumped over the typewriter in his Cambridge home, working on another book. Some of us were hooked on his work from the first one, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” in 1973.
Parker graduated from Colby College, served in Korea and got a doctorate from Boston University in 1971. His dissertation was (surprise) “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality,” which compared and contrasted Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald.
Spenser, like Parker, was too good to be true, and it was sometimes hard to separate the two. The Boston private eye was so tough he had no first name. Didn’t need one.
Spenser had his private eye office in Boston’s insurance district where I labored unhappily for several years. He did his weightlifting and boxing at a gym near South Station where my father worked for 47 years. One of the first books concerned a basketball player at Northeastern University, where I labored unhappily for many years. He was such a good prizefighter that he once boxed Ezzard Charles and got a broken nose for his trouble.
He didn’t like to kill people, unless it was absolutely necessary.
He was the consummate smartass, a title to which we all aspired. But he always made you laugh, an unusual facet to a detective novel. He also was a gourmet chef and always made you hungry, too.
Parker wrote every single day and turned out 60 crime novels plus a few Westerns, including “Appaloosa,” which ended up on the silver screen. “Spenser For Hire” ended up as a pretty good television series, then a few made-for television-movies.
As Spenser’s adventures continued to appear at an annual clip, writers such as Robert Crais, Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane refashioned Parker’s hero-sidekick dynamic as they saw fit. “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it,” Coben told the Atlantic in 2007.
By the end of his life, Parker was less known for his content than for his prolific output. He produced up to three published books a year. “I normally write seven to 10 pages a day, which means I generally finish a new book every three months,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “It comes easily, and I don’t revise because I don’t get better by writing a new draft.”
I blame Spenser for a house full of detective and crime novels, an addiction so great that Amazon.com e-mails me when I fail to buy a few books each month. With the possible exception of Elmore Leonard, I have found no one who can satisfy this mania. Maybe Daniel Woodrell.
I have 79 “noir novels” in my Amazon “shopping cart” waiting to be purchased. They include “The Professional,” by Mr. Parker. There are another 14 in my wish list. Like my Netflix Queue (313 movies), I shall never live long enough to enjoy them all.
You know how you can’t put down some good books? The Spenser books were so good that you would put them down to savor later, because they were so good and going so fast. You could easily read a Spenser book at a single sitting, maybe two. They were not great literature, and some serious book reviewers wondered at the popularity of it all.
Fools.
Parker received three nominations and two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He received the best novel award in 1977 for the fourth Spenser book, “Promised Land.”
Let’s leave it to L.A. Times book critic Sarah Weinman: “Spending time in Parker’s company these last several years was akin to attending a concert by Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald late in their careers: There was just enough juice to revisit the standards, and it hardly mattered if the tone warbled into an echo of former melodious glory.”
They tell us that there are two more completed, unpublished Spenser novels. Naturally, I will add them to my shopping cart upon release.
It is impossible to believe there will be no more after that. Like Spenser, we thought Parker was simply too tough to die.
Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.