In Pursuit of Spenser (5 page)

We were both, from the outset of our respective careers, unshakably and unquestionably Bostonian. I got that way by birth; he came it to it by choice and certain inextricable “Bostonianisms” that defined his character and that of Spenser, his indelible PI hero.

A defining characteristic of a true Bostonian is, I sometimes feel, a lack of tolerance for rudeness. Being rude is very different from being impolite, which is good because Bostonians might be the least polite people in the Western Hemisphere. (Take that, Philadelphians.) But there’s an ocean of difference between the impolite and the rude. Rude is stepping on someone’s foot and not apologizing even when you realize your mistake. Impolite is someone saying, “Why’d you step on my foot and not fucking apologize, asshole?” Rude is cutting someone off in traffic, so they crash their car, and then driving off. Impolite is cutting someone off in traffic. Rude is taking two parking spaces. Impolite would be keying the car of someone who took two parking spaces. (And if you
really
want to be impolite you do what’s known as a “Dorchester key” and key both sides of the car.)

Much like with pornography, you know the difference between the rude and impolite when you see it. I’ve often been accused of being impolite—so have most of my friends (usually when we’re visiting another state or dating a Yankees fan)—but I’ve only been accused of being rude once, and that was by some asshole who really meant I was being impolite but didn’t know how to pronounce three-syllable words.

You don’t have to be from Boston to be a Bostonian. (See Damon, Matt; Affleck, Ben; and Leary, Denis.) And you can be from Boston and still not be a Bostonian. (You know who you are; or better yet, you don’t. But we do.) Robert B. Parker of Maine was a Bostonian. He loved tall tales and hated bullshit; he could be impolite but never rude; his favorite facial expression was deadpan; he knew exactly the word to italicize when he spoke; he had no time for phonies, people who put on airs, or people who, in the parlance of Old Boston, outgrew their hat sizes. I’m fairly certain he never used a smiley face emoticon.

As I write this, a football game plays on a TV in the next room. It’s an exhibition game between the Patriots and the Lions and mostly meaningless for everyone but the players on the bubble who may or may not make the team. But I’ve left it on because I love the sounds of the thuds and the ref whistles and the white noise of the crowd. Also, possibly, because Patriots games remind me of Robert B. Parker, which, on the surface, could seem weird. Bob and I knew each other only casually. We enjoyed each other’s company the few times we ran into each other with enough time to have a quick drink, but we were acquaintances, not friends exactly. I knew very little about him beyond the standard biography available on his website or the back of a book jacket. I don’t know if he was a fanatic about football, I don’t know if he
ever played it, I don’t know much at all about him and his relationship, if any, to NFL entertainment. I just know that during Christmas season one year in the late ’90s, he and I shared a very satisfying moment together while watching a football game on TV. It was undoubtedly politically incorrect, and arguably involved the emotional abuse of a child. But it served to bring Bob and me together on a meeting of the minds so complete that I never felt I had to know much more about the man.

I first met Bob Parker in the summer of 1984. I was eighteen and working for a bookstore in downtown Boston, and my manager had given me the responsibility of organizing a Parker book signing because she knew I was a fan of his work. The book, if memory serves, was
Valediction
, one of the great Spenser novels that fell in an amazing string of them, from
The Judas Goat
to
Looking for Rachel Wallace
to
Early Autumn
,
A Savage Place
,
Ceremony
, and
The Widening Gyre
. It’s a career run, actually, comparable to the Rolling Stones four-peat of
Beggars Banquet
,
Let It Bleed
,
Sticky Fingers
, and
Exile on Main Street
; Dickens pulling off
The Pickwick Papers
,
Oliver Twist
, and
Nicholas Nickleby
back to back to back; and seasons two through four of
Seinfeld
. Yes, that level of greatness.

At the time of that signing, I had been reading the Spenser books since high school. Back in my mid-teens, I’d had to hunt them down, often in used bookstores, which is how I discovered so many backstreets in Boston and in Cambridge—hopping on and off subways to trek to yet another used bookstore in hopes of scoring a Parker or an Elmore Leonard, neither of whom enjoyed the kind of popularity that would befriend them just a few years later. And, in that relentless searching, I learned my city as much as I learned it on drives through the neighborhoods with my father or, later, as a floral delivery driver and then a chauffeur.

Another way I learned the city was through the reading of the Spenser novels themselves. It was in
Looking for Rachel Wallace
, for example, where I was first introduced to Locke-Ober, a venerable institution of Old Boston, which is not something a kid from Dorchester would have ever learned about without help. It’s at Locke-Ober where Spenser meets with John Ticknor, an editor who wants Spenser to protect angry, unapologetic, lesbian feminist Rachel Wallace, who’s written a book that’s bringing her death threats. Ticknor warns Spenser that Rachel will hardly be an easy gig; Spenser and his testosterone-fueled code of ethics (or so Rachel presupposes) represent everything she’s hoping to dismantle in society. At one point, Spenser, ever the smartass, says something smartass and “Ticknor smiled again, but not like he wanted me to marry his sister.”

Looking for Rachel Wallace
was the first Parker book I read. And that line about Ticknor, which shows up on the third page, was the first line I read of Bob’s that made me sit up straight and laugh. I may have even flipped the book over in my hand to look at the cover again and ask, “Who
is
this guy?” There was something so immediately Bostonian about the understated sarcasm and the left field nature of the analogy. Bostonians care fairly little about your political, sexual, or religious affiliation but everything about whether you’re full of shit. Full of shit or full of yourself—those are cardinal sins in The Hub. And Parker, though a transplanted Mainer (but Mainers, flinty souls that they are, are possibly less tolerant of bullshit than Bostonians), was a Bostonian from the day he took his first teaching job at Northeastern.

So I read on, and within another twenty pages, I knew something transformative was happening. It’s hard to remember now how revolutionary the early Spenser books were, but they were gate chargers and wall busters. For
starters, they were politically and socially astute in a way that a lot of the more ham-fisted PI novels of the time weren’t. Spenser was a tough guy, a former cop and former boxer, and he was brave and nearly fearless and would sooner take two in the hat and two in the chest than betray his principles. In that way, he wasn’t much different than so many heroes of the genre who preceded him or ran alongside him as contemporaries. But Spenser was also well-read, articulate, a connoisseur of good food and fine wine, and, dare I say, sensitive. At the end of
Looking for Rachel Wallace
, for example, after he kills two gun thugs, he holds the woman he’s just rescued and
cries
, for God’s sake.

Spenser deals with cases that challenge his preconceived notions (and maybe the preconceived notions of the genre, itself)—notions about feminism, gay rights, the educational system, parenting, religion—and often he is forced to reconsider those notions. That is the arc of each book—a journey to transformation. Spenser—no first name—so resolute in his code of ethics, is not, however, unyielding about the nuances of that code. So while his macro code never changes—always fight for those who can’t fight for themselves; never take a bribe and never take a knee; break your word for no one; to thine own self be true—the micro code can and does. He is open to epiphanies, new journeys and perspectives, a challenging of his personal status quo.

That doesn’t just make him interesting, it makes him human. And when a character is recognizably human, he is vulnerable. You fear for him. So even though Spenser is not only the self-professed “toughest man in Boston,” and is also the “toughest man in New England” (in
Pale Kings and Princes
he goes to Maine or New Hampshire—I can’t remember which—to prove it by beating a guy’s ass to the ground)—he is admittedly flawed, which makes him vulnerable. And that
gives his mano-a-mano confrontations something at stake. He has something to lose, and we have something to lose too, because we’ve befriended him.

Another pioneering aspect of the novels (particularly in the late ’70s and early-to-mid ’80s when they were hitting their stride) was that Spenser has a girlfriend. Not a girlfriend who stays faithful to him and is endlessly understanding as he fools around on her with exotic Russian hit-women or love-the-one-you’re-with damsels in distress. And not the girlfriend who exists to get kidnapped and then rescued by the hero so she can be held in his masculine arms and forever define herself by how she can best play a supporting role in his life. Not even a girlfriend who would appreciate being called “girlfriend.” No, this woman is a professional woman, far better educated than Spenser (no slouch himself when it came to referencing literature or the intricacies of food), utterly self-sufficient, a practicing psychiatrist. I’m speaking, of course, of Susan Silverman, a polarizing character in the Parker canon—hell, a polarizing figure in the crime fiction world as a whole. And while it is true that, as the series entered its later decades, Ms. Silverman becomes smug and tiring to a nearly indefensible degree, she is fresh air incarnate in the early novels.

Girlfriends in detective fiction had, up until that point, existed to be discarded. They could be killed in order to give the detective a personal vendetta upon which to embark, as often happened in, say, John D. MacDonald’s brilliant Travis McGee novels, to the point where I found it hard to believe a self-respecting South Florida insurance company would underwrite a policy for any woman who bumped uglies with McGee. Or, as mentioned above, they could get kidnapped (pretty much a guarantee if our hero was facing off against a serial killer or thugs who also owned a warehouse by the
docks). Or they could just sort of hang around, keeping the home fires burning, until our hero came back and needed to get himself some. No wonder women hated to read PI books back then. They couldn’t find themselves in them.

Susan Silverman is her own woman all the way. She loves Spenser, has lusty, regular sex with him, and often psychoanalyzes him at convenient moments in the narrative so he can continue on his course with the assurance that he is, in fact, truly the bravest and most virtuous man in the book (or all of New England). But Susan also fights with Spenser, challenges him and his assumptions, refuses to be defined by him, and for one long stretch, breaks up with him until he stops expecting her to be anything but what she is.

Some of the reason that male readers dislike Susan is because of these very attributes. (And, yes, in later books some of the reason is because an air of smug entitlement and self-regard covers her like a second skin.) But one can never discount how, through her, Robert B. Parker created a new archetype in American PI fiction—the woman-as-equal.

That would have been enough of a day’s work, but Parker wasn’t through. Once he’d gotten Susan up and running, he introduced Hawk, the Cristal-drinking, shaven-headed (long before shaven heads were cool; hell, it was Hawk who probably made them cool), mostly heartless but endlessly loyal “dark angel” to the author’s more virtuous Spenser. Hawk’s descendents are legion—Walter Mosley’s Mouse; James Lee Burke’s Clete Purcell; Robert Crais’ Joe Pike; Harlan Coben’s Wynn; my own Bubba Rogowski. I’m not going to say none of those just mentioned would have existed without Hawk, just that Hawk existed first, so any question on the subject starts with him, no one else.

The dark angel can do what the good guy hero can’t. He’s unbound by morality—either his own or the readers’. In one
novel, when Spenser and Hawk have just had a confrontation with a particularly nasty piece of work who they know will continue to come after them, they leave the guy lying on the floor, a bloody mess. But then Hawk tells Spenser he has to kill the guy or they’ll never be safe. Spenser says, “I can’t kill a guy lying on the floor,” to which Hawk replies, “Shit, I can.” And shoots the guy.

If a hero does that enough times, he’s no longer a hero. But the dark angel can do it and the audience applauds. Maybe because everyone wants a dark angel, and maybe because everyone has experienced the exquisite pleasure of giving into the will of the id. A main character who consistently gives in to the will of his id grows morally reprehensible and—far worse—dramatically uninteresting. But a secondary character who occasionally gives in to his id
becomes
the main character’s id. That’s what the dark angel archetype is—the unrestrained id of the otherwise above-board main character.

And if Parker didn’t exactly create the archetype, he certainly perfected it. Soon nothing was more disappointing to discover in a Spenser book than the news that Hawk would not be appearing in it. Luckily, after a while, Parker realized it and kept Hawk, if not front and center, certainly at the top of the cast list.

When I ran that signing for Bob in 1984, Hawk was part of every third question his creator got. The questions were variations on a theme that can be distilled to this: “Do you know a real Hawk, and how can I get one?”

I watched Bob answer a permutation of that question at least fifty times in the hour he signed. And his answer was always steady, never annoyed. That’s not to say he wasn’t annoyed (if you like answering the same question fifty times in an hour, I’ve got a group of four-year-olds I’d like to send to your house), but that the annoyance was easily tempered
and even wholly overwhelmed by the gratitude he felt toward people who cared so much about his work. There was nothing about Bob that was obsequious or eager to get you to like him. He was gruff and gravel-voiced and clearly had a limited tolerance for idiots and small talk. But he was also ever the gentleman, ever gracious with his fans.