In Pursuit of Spenser (12 page)

Yet the reviews were excellent—quotes from the earliest still appear on his dust jacket flaps—and sales were sufficient to justify bringing out a second entry,
Mortal Stakes
. I worked with some of the same staff at Houghton Mifflin later, and I’m happy to report they were patient and willing to let a writer who showed promise find his audience. This was the last generation in publishing that bought bestsellers in order to subsidize books they
wanted
to publish, which was a good working premise for more than a century. When it was abandoned, and each title was expected to pull its own weight, the first tiny fissures appeared in the foundation of an industry that is still tottering.

This willingness to take a chance in the publishing world was vital to Parker’s success, since I think the series didn’t really take off commercially until
Looking for Rachel Wallace
in 1980. The gender-equality issues had hardened into a solid theme, and Spenser’s desperate obsession with finding and rescuing the eponymous heroine swept critics and the public along on a wild ride at a pace usually confined to globe-trotting thrillers in which the fate of the world is at stake. Word-of-mouth had caught up with Spenser. From then on, he was an institution.

For which I’m grateful. By this time, the series had moved to Delacorte, and probably some at Houghton Mifflin were regretting having let it go. It was in this mood that my
Motor City Blue
came in over their transom, with a brand-new private eye starting his career in the even more outlandish city of Detroit.

Meanwhile, private eye fiction’s fortunes had changed. A tide of new readers had carried in a boatload of new titles from as far away as Australia, and an organization was founded to promote the interests of writers of private detective stories, who only a few years earlier could have held their convention in a telephone booth. From out of this new wave came Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton. They weren’t the first to showcase female private eyes—Marcia Muller had beaten them to it, and there were a few even in the heyday of the pulps, usually created by male writers—but they were a far cry from the slinky
femmes fatales
and helpless ingénues of the testosterone-fueled Golden Age, when an inordinate number of scantily clad women appeared bound and gagged on lurid magazine covers. Surely Parker’s strong female characters, and Spenser’s willingness to acknowledge their strength, helped prepare the readership for this new direction in literary evolution.

Sadly, it’s uncertain whether today’s bottom-line publishing requirements would have given the Parker-Spenser collaboration the time it needed to develop. Many houses—forgetting that few of the longest-running franchises stayed at one place—won’t take on a series dropped by a competitor, believing that where one enterprise failed another cannot succeed. There’s no telling how many promising properties have been left adrift by this notion, abandoned by their creators or stranded in the ghetto of self-publishing, which rarely leads to success or respect.

Some years ago, Sara Paretsky protested an insider’s decision that a first novel had to sell 15,000 copies or the writer’s contract would be dropped. She reminded the party that the first several titles in her smashingly successful V.I. Warshawski series didn’t sell nearly that many. The unspoken question was, where did publishers think the next Paretsky was coming from? Or the next Robert B. Parker?

I’m an optimist, however. I prefer to think that talent will find a way. It wasn’t long ago that Ace Atkins, who continues the Spenser tradition, broke into print through the auspices of an editor with vision and influence. We’re fortunate to have him in this position: Spenser needs a writer of skill and determination to uphold his standard, and we aren’t ready to let him go. The times are ripe. An unnecessary recession caused by greedy bankers and weak-willed politicians must result in a fresh and eager audience for a modern knight-errant bent on justice. And I’ve a strong feeling that Parker, a dedicated artist of passion who passed away while at work at his desk, would agree with the choice of Atkins to continue the series.

Spenser is just too big for one career to encompass.

| JEREMIAH HEALY |

WRITERS OF CRIME
fiction tend to be cooperative—even collaborative—as opposed to competitive. When I broke into the mystery field during the mid-’80s, however, this “we all live in the same village” ethos within a profession was, quite frankly, surprising to me. An illustration: If Author A was contacted by a library to give a talk, A—as part of the village protocol—would suggest the inclusion of Authors B and C as well, usually with diversity of gender and sub-genre, so that all three authors could appeal diagonally to members of the audience who might have attended to see only one of them.

By then, I’d already experienced mini-careers as a sheriff’s officer and military police lieutenant, trial attorney and law
professor. Each of those vocations stressed team-first, yes, but given the fields involved, daily life became a confrontational, us-versus-them dynamic (including, even, the law professor/student one, which uses confrontation in order to meld the latter into the best advocate he or she can be). Over time, though, my reaction to our crime-writers’ village evolved from surprised to reassured, especially when a marquee author was not just willing, but actually enthusiastic, about sharing the ephemeral spotlight.

Looking back, of all my colleagues, the one who did the most for my own career was Bob Parker. And, for the record, it was always either Bob or Mr. Parker, never Robert. In addition, although many of us think of him as the iconic Robert B. Parker, I never heard the man say or saw him write his middle name, which was Brown.

• •

The first decade of our twenty-first century proved tragic in terms of losing American giants of crime fiction: Ed McBain (formally, Evan Hunter, though, by birth, Salvatore Lombino) and Dennis Lynds (a.k.a. Michael Collins), Tony Hillerman and Donald E. Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark), James Crumley and Mickey Spillane, William G. Tapply and Stuart M. Kaminsky.

And, so suddenly on January 18, 2010, the giant I knew best: Robert B. Parker, who set most of his many Spenser novels in and around our shared city of Boston.

Appropriately, there have been numerous obituaries published and posted since Bob’s death. And by age seventy-seven, he’d certainly excelled in many spheres: Army service in Korea; marriage to the love of his life, Joan; the fathering of two sons, David and Daniel; and, lastly, becoming—and even more difficult, remaining—a bestselling crime author.

I first discovered his novels in the winter of 1978 while frantically shopping at the Walden’s Books in Boston’s Center Plaza for paperbacks to read on the planes (four of them, each way) that would take my then-to-be-bride and me to and from the then-remote island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, for our honeymoon. Prior to that day in the Walden’s, I’d certainly enjoyed the occasional mystery, but I’d never heard of Mr. Parker. The book that I picked up off the shelf and opened was his first Spenser from five years earlier,
The Godwulf Manuscript
. I remember laughing—loud and long—after reading just the first sentence:

The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.

Thankfully, I was still a trial attorney then, wearing a three-piece suit, and therefore avoided arrest or civil commitment because of my outburst.

I could not, as they say, put Bob’s debut down. In fact, I re-read it twice during that stay on Bonaire, trying to figure out, in a lawyerly fashion, how he’d managed to pull off the most entertaining story I’d experienced over the prior twenty years. Six months later, I began teaching at the New England School of Law (now renamed “New England Law: Boston”) but continued to be a fan of Spenser. When assured I was going to receive tenure (the dream of every Irish-American male: lifetime employment, inside work, no heavy-lifting), I said to myself, “Okay, you’ve always wanted to write a novel, and you’ve been reading and enjoying private-investigator fiction (Marcia Muller, Bob Parker, and, stretching the category a little, John D. MacDonald). Maybe you’ll enjoy writing such a book and, even if you don’t succeed in getting it published, you’ll have had fun trying.”

Incorporating aspects of my law—and law enforcement—backgrounds, the writing of my first novel,
Blunt Darts
, was truly a blast. The selling, however? Eh, not so much.

I’d arrogantly concluded that any New York publishing house in its collective right mind would jump at the chance to provide its customers with a(nother) tough but sensitive male private eye operating out of Boston. I even naively submitted to the New England publishing house that was then bringing out Bob’s books about Spenser, an established main character who shared a lot of traits with my own embryonic private eye, John Francis Cuddy.

Twenty-eight rejections later, I was humbled but unbowed (as a trial attorney, you learn to put losses behind you and continue plowing forward). Then the late lamented doyenne of mystery editors, Ruth Cavin, offered me a contract for
Blunt Darts
. When the paperback edition was released, I timidly introduced myself to Kate Mattes (of the also late and lamented Murder Under Cover bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Kate was happy to schedule a future signing for my second, accepted (but not yet published) novel,
The Staked Goat
. However, she also encouraged me to speak during the interim with her friend, Mr. Parker, about how the mystery-writing industry really worked.

Bob graciously agreed to meet me at Grille 23, an upscale restaurant in a Boston neighborhood called the Back Bay. Coincidentally (or maybe not), the grill was on Berkeley Street directly opposite the then–Boston police headquarters building (now itself a fancy hotel with a downstairs bar, called Jury’s, perversely positioned right about where the recently collared would while away time awaiting arraignment in court). A reporter from a national magazine was later to interview Bob over dinner at the grill, and since I both lived
and worked just blocks away, a drink with me beforehand seemed logistically sensible.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of meeting my writing idol made me a little jittery. Therefore, I arrived at the restaurant early, taking an empty barstool with a twin adjacent to it.

Funny, the trivial details that lodge in your data bank. As though it were yesterday, I clearly recall ordering a screwdriver (for the viceless: vodka and orange juice), though light on the alcohol, because I wanted to make a good first impression on Mr. Parker.

I’d brought a legal pad to jot down expected pearls of wisdom, but nothing to read, so I doodled a pretty elaborate floor plan and description of the bar and the restaurant behind it. Oddly, though, while I often try to capture as research settings that I’m visiting for the first time, I’ve never used Grille 23 in either a novel or a short story. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even previously alluded to the place.

As soon as Bob came through the grill’s front door, I recognized him—sort of—from his small, grainy book-cover portrait(s).

I’ll confess: While I don’t think I knew then that Robert Urich (since, tragically, deceased as well) was to be the first actor portraying Spenser (and more about this casting decision later), I suppose I did expect Bob Parker, life-sized, to fit my internal vision of his private eye character: Around six-foot-two, a raw-boned one-ninety-plus, with a nose broken and fixed so many times that, at different stages of his prior career as a prizefighter, its tip probably inclined toward each point of the compass.

Ah . . . no.

Envision instead a former college professor, about five-foot-eight and stocky, with close-cropped dark hair and a
matching mustache framing and accenting the ruddy, moonlike face of a mischievous Buddha. If you, like me, were then a boxing fan, Bob could have been the older, shorter brother of George Chuvalo (Canada’s best-ever heavyweight, and one of the few athletes in all of pugilistic history to have fought over ninety bouts without once being knocked off his feet and onto the canvas).

Grille 23’s bar (and adjoining restaurant) being virtually empty, Bob homed in on me as well, perhaps helped a little by my hopping down off the stool and extending my right hand toward a manly shake.

His first words to me were, “Glad you’re already here, because you’re covering our bar tab.”

As Bob ordered an Amstel draught, I knew I’d just met not only my idol, but also my mentor for this new career of crime-writing, especially when he told me to call him Bob.