In Pursuit of Spenser (10 page)

Susan tries to defend Pam: “She feels bad enough.”

Which only frustrates Spenser more: “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel anywhere near bad enough. Neither do you. You’re so goddamned empathetic you’ve jumped into her frame. ‘And you thought you felt you had to stand by them. Anyone would.’ Balls. Anyone wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.”

In tracking down evidence in
Mortal Stakes
, Spenser encounters a pimp named Violet, who refers him to Patricia Utley, the madam of a high-priced call girl service, who owns
a four-story townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan. She talks of taking an eighteen-year-old hooker under her wing and teaching her how to talk to people, how to use makeup, how to dress.

“You and Rex Harrison,” Spenser says. He doesn’t mention
My Fair Lady
, but later in the same context calls her “Pygmalion,” making his meaning clear. The literary allusions have an edge, ironically equating a sex-peddler with a professor of phonetics. And he doesn’t let up, even though the woman is cooperating and giving him the information he needs. He sticks it to her for exploiting the girl: “You keep telling yourself you’re a businesswoman and that’s the code you live by. So you don’t have to deal with the fact that you are also a pimp. Like Violet.”

Spenser is so rude to the woman she has her goon throw him out. And yet he will turn to her years later, when faced with another moral dilemma: what to do with another teenage prostitute, April Kyle.

Spenser is often faced with moral dilemmas. He does not let them thwart him. As much as he may moralize them intellectually, he deals with them pragmatically. In
Ceremony
, he introduces April to Patricia Utley, the madam he denounced so eloquently for employing a teenage prostitute in
Mortal Stakes
. We have Spenser the panderer, enabling a teenage hooker—in effect, pimping for her. Has he changed his moral position? Not in the least. The one girl had a chance at a better life. The other did not. April would be turning tricks regardless. In Spenser’s estimation, it would be better for her to be turning fewer tricks for a high-society madam, who would look after her health, than be a crack whore for some sleazeball who would beat her. Realizing this, Spenser doesn’t hesitate to endorse a life of prostitution for the girl that he has worked so hard to save. As Susan points out during Spenser’s
struggle with Jerry and Joe Broz, Spenser’s code is idealized; his view of the world is not.

In
Mortal Stakes
, Spenser empathizes with the baseball pitcher who is hopelessly conflicted because gamblers are threatening to reveal secrets about his wife’s past unless he throws games. The man is torn between wanting to protect his family and not wanting to hurt his team.

As Spenser tells Susan,

“I know what’s killing him. It’s killing me too. The code didn’t work.”

“The code,” Susan said.

“Yeah. Jock ethic, honor, code, whatever. It didn’t cover this situation.”

“Can’t it be adjusted?”

“Then it’s not a code anymore.”

Yet that code is not inflexible. Though he believes in the sanctity of life, Spenser admits to Paul in
Early Autumn
that he has sometimes killed people: “I had to. I don’t if I don’t have to. Nothing’s absolute.”

“What do you mean?” Paul asks.

Spenser answers, “I mean you make rules for yourself and you know that you’ll have to break them because they won’t always work.”

This is Spenser, plain and simple, the pragmatist, the knight in shining armor, the man with principles and ethics and a code of behavior who would readily toss it all out the window if the situation required. Unapologetically, and without making excuses. As he tells Paul, “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, boy.”

Spenser says it ironically, self-deprecatingly, mocking his bravado, and yet for him it is true. It is inherent in his code
that a man has to do what he believes is right, no matter how difficult that may be. At the same time he sees the humor in that code, sees himself as a parody of a heroic figure, a lone knight championing a just cause, who won’t back down, even from impossible odds. Despite his self-awareness, he is that which he mocks, a noble PI, armed and humorous, fighting valiantly to uphold his code of honor.

| LOREN D. ESTLEMAN |

ROBERT B. PARKER
and Louis L’Amour have more in common than a guaranteed spot on the
New York Times
list of bestselling writers: From the late 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, they saved America’s place in world literature.

At a time when America’s eastern intelligentsia was performing last rites for the Western, L’Amour’s frontier novels finished consistently among the top five most popular books in the world. When Parker’s first Spenser novel,
The Godwulf Manuscript
, appeared in 1973, Ross Macdonald, the last surviving member of the trinity that included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, was nearing the end of his Lew Archer, private detective, series—drawing the curtain, some
said, on a tradition that began in 1920. Within a handful of years, Spenser would sell in the millions and drag dozens of new private eye writers into print on the broad tails of his trenchcoat.

When a juggernaut like the Western cedes much of its share of the market to competitors, the talking heads take notice and write its obituary. They overlook the fact that no other genre has ever commanded so much attention. It stood to reason, given the spread of technology, from primitive video games to Twitter, that the Western would surrender its dominance. What it has done—as opposed to the fat historical melodramas of the 1950s and nearly all of so-called mainstream fiction—is survive. In theaters, it has outlasted the comedy short, the travelogue, and the cartoon. In 100 years, not a twelvemonth has passed that has not included a major Western motion-picture release.

The outlook was not so encouraging in bookstores, where the Western racks would have been crowded out the door long before by updated bodice-rippers, grunge-punk science fiction, and flashy techno-thrillers had not Louis L’Amour’s books stood fast against the pressure, dozens at a time. Similarly, the long, quixotic, bantering, pugilistic history of the American private eye saga might have gone to the scrapheap but for the unavoidable sight of every title in the Spenser series lined up in a box display at the front of the shop.

Intellectuals—pale, dyspeptic creatures—wrung their hands at the public’s poor taste. They’d rather we slogged our way through James Joyce or snarled our brains in the ropy dependent clauses of William Faulkner. Even that vulgarian Ernest Hemingway was preferable to a lug like Parker. Mickey Spillane dealt this kind of snobbery a devastating blow when some sourpuss pundit challenged him to defend the fact that seven of the ten then-bestselling novels of all time featured
Spillane’s Mike Hammer: “You should be happy I didn’t write three more.”

While our melting-pot society was distractedly searching for its place in the cultural firmament, that spot was already being filled. Just as jazz and rock-and-roll built a national art form from material dismissed as junk, the Western and then the hardboiled detective story assumed its critical place alongside Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy, and they did it by way of dime novels and pulp magazines that were cheap enough to read and throw away—but not to forget.

How appropriate, then, that the publishing concern of Street & Smith gave us both Ned Buntline’s many Buffalo Bill adventures in the Wild West and Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, private detective, thrillers in the era of Prohibition and Depression, as the rip-roaring Cody who appeared in print and the two-gun-packing Williams are one and the same: American originals, acting while others sit and make plans. A society born in the Caesarean throes of rebellion places its faith in heroes who operate outside established authority. Never mind that the hard-working, little-esteemed cowboy of frontier reality and the professional nine-to-five independent investigator of modern times bear small resemblance to their idealized counterparts in fiction. These men (and, increasingly, women) are heroes for hire, unique to a culture that lists individual initiative at the top of its virtues.

Now, the concept of the oak-hewn, native-born demigod is an impossible ideal. Inevitably, constant scrutiny and salacious revelation will break it to bits. But, as has been said, what we are and what we like to
think
we are say the same thing about us as a people. It’s better to overreach than not reach at all, and to expect more than we get. Life must disappoint us in this. Good fiction never does.

Spenser is an icon straddling two centuries. Those who aren’t familiar with his image in print know him through his characterizations on TV as presented by the late Robert Urich and the ubiquitous Joe Montegna. (At the time I interviewed Urich, while I was covering the taping of
Lonesome Dove
for
TV Guide
, I could not resist asking how he felt about the cancellation of
Spenser: For Hire
on ABC. He said that the network had made the decision to clear room for a new Aaron Spelling show, and that he was inconsolable over the loss of what he considered the role of a lifetime.) Spenser has even managed an enthusiastic endorsement in comic strips by way of Jimmy Johnson’s Boomer-friendly
Arlo and Janis
, and has provided the clue to many a crossword-puzzle answer. Pop-culture immortality is the most enduring of all.

Women admire Spenser for his rugged good looks, his love of and respect for Susan Silverman—his brilliant and capable girlfriend—and his compassion. Men like him for his courage, strength, and determined self-sufficiency:
autonomy
is a favorite word in his vocabulary. He’s a hit with cops, and that isn’t an obvious slam-dunk in a genre that hasn’t always paid strict attention to such trifles as standard police procedure and due process. A sergeant I rode along with years ago with the local county sheriff’s department was such a fan that he carried extra copies of Parker’s books in his patrol car to give out to people he encountered during the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift—some of them suspects under arrest. He routinely sacrificed his meal break to raid the dumpsters behind bookstores for discarded paperbacks whose covers had been torn off to return to publishers when they failed to sell. His personal library of books without covers was one of the largest in Southeastern Michigan—although as Parker’s popularity increased and his returns diminished, Spenser became scarce on his shelves.

Parker’s cast of supporting characters is equally well-drawn as his lead. Susan Silverman, a licensed psychologist, is a devoted companion and a worthy adversary in the philosophical discussions that add a layer of dimension to Spenser’s actions: Even a disastrous experiment in cohabitation, in
Double Deuce
, could not destroy their relationship. (Personally, I was surprised when it didn’t work out: a man who shares beer from the same bottle with his Labrador retriever and a woman who calmly replaces the lid on a cooking stewpot after dropping it on the floor without pausing to rinse it off would suggest to me the ideal domestic arrangement. But who am I to judge? My wife washes fruit.)

Martin Quirk and Frank Belson, the Boston City police detectives who are always crossing Spenser’s path, are tough
and
smart, which is not commonly the case when an outsider protagonist matches wits with them in this type of story. And the sinister Hawk—the psychopathic, atavistic Hawk, heir to the position once held by Injun Joe, Israel Hand, and the Golem—whom Parker once described as the kind of man Spenser might have become under other circumstances, is one of the standout characters in popular fiction. “Gonna get you killed someday, babe,” Hawk says in
The Judas Goat
when Spenser tells him what he will and won’t do. This unregenerate, cold-blooded killer has only one point of redemption: a loyalty to Spenser that parallels Doc Holliday’s to Wyatt Earp. (Small wonder that
Gunman’s Rhapsody
, Parker’s take on the O.K. Corral gunfight, rings so familiarly.)

• •

I first became aware of Parker’s series when my first novel,
Motor City Blue
, appeared and a number of reviewers compared my private detective, Amos Walker, to Spenser. The characters are demonstrably different, but they share the same sense of
justice as well as the same profession. I tracked down and read the first three Spenser books and was hooked. In those days, before the rest of the world caught up, Parker was difficult to find in bookstores and libraries. Ironically, just about the time he broke through—it was around the time
A Savage Place
was published—I began to lose interest. It seemed to me that the detective had formed split personalities—a Duke Wayne larger-than-life avenger in one scene, an overly sensitive Alan Alda in another; Susan was usually present in the latter. Also, Hawk appeared to assume the convenient role of the vigilante extracting justice against the enemy, enabling Spenser to remain unsullied. It’s only fair to add that at this point I’d been surviving on a steady diet of Robert B. Parker. One never does justice to a writer by reading a number of his books in close succession. The little repetitive mannerisms of style and characterization became painfully apparent.