In Pursuit of Spenser (8 page)

Consider the sequence in
Early Autumn
when Spenser takes Paul Giacomin off to make a man out of him. The physical routine he puts the kid through would flat-out kill him, and Spenser doesn’t even give him days off to recover. Parker would have to know as much; he was a weightlifter, if perhaps a less diligent one than his hero.

But he writes it this way anyway, because this is Romance, and he makes it work. A realist would teach the kid a couple of basic exercises and start him off with two or three light sets a day of each, and progress would be a gradual thing. That might make just as good reading, but it would be a different sort of book from the one Parker wanted to write.

And one thing he knew was that everything worked out for the best if he wrote the book he wanted to write.

• •

I had my troubles with
Early Autumn
. I’d spent enough time lifting heavy metal objects, and enough days afterward with sore muscles, to find the departure from plausibility hard to take. I’ve had my problems with Spenser and Stone and Virgil Cole, all of whom may be described as true-blue, uxorious, or pussy-whipped, as you prefer. (The three terms are hardly mutually exclusive.)

So? I was never the Ideal Reader for Parker’s work, and God knows he got along fine without me. But I did read almost all of the books, and not because of the stories he chose to tell or the characters who peopled them.

I just kind of liked the way they sounded.

• •

And I liked and respected the man. Let’s not leave that out.

I don’t think Parker and my paths crossed more than six or eight times, and we never came close to sitting down for a heart-to-heart. There were a couple of dinners where we were both on the dais, a couple of book biz events that threw us together.

Once, I think at a Left Coast Crime conference in Scottsdale, Bob was doing a one-man act in a large room that was predictably packed. He said he wasn’t comfortable preparing talks, but would do a Q&A—and, not surprisingly, turned out to be very good at it.

Somebody asked him which of his own books was his favorite. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Once they’re done I never look at them.” I was all the way in the rear, but I guess he’d spotted me. “How about you, Larry?” he called out. “Do you ever read your own work?”

“I read nothing else,” I said.

Lord, that was satisfying. You have to love a guy who floats
one belt-high across the plate like that, and does so on the one day in twenty when you’re quick enough to get your bat on it.

• •

I was a bad choice to write this piece, and would have passed if I felt I could. But if my feelings for the work are mixed, those for the man are not. I was in fact honored to be invited to this particular clambake, and simply could not say no. Both Bob and the singular voice we know as Spenser will be missed.

| PARNELL HALL |

THERE’S NOTHING UNIQUE
about a wisecracking private investigator. Smart-mouthed PIs are a dime a dozen. Every private eye writer in the last thirty years has one—and for good reason. They’ve all read the Spenser novels, and they’ve molded their private eyes after him. I know I did. When I started my first Stanley Hastings novel, back in the mid-80s, I wanted a private eye that talked like Spenser. Never mind that my private eye was an ordinary family man who never had fist fights or car chases, and didn’t even carry a gun. (I was working as a PI at the time, chasing ambulances for a negligence lawyer, and I modeled the character after myself.) If my PI could talk like Spenser, I was convinced he’d be fun to read.

Other writers felt the same. And so a whole generation of clever PIs was born. Many were closer to Spenser than mine, being tough and athletic and jogging and having dangerous sidekicks like Hawk. But all, to the best of their authors’ abilities, talked like Spenser.

And yet Spenser stands out.

It is not just that he is better at it, though he is. His remarks are rooted in his personality. Spenser is a knight in shining armor, a do-gooder, a man who lives by a code of honor, with values and standards and principles. His jests humanize him, mask his heroism, diffuse the macho image that is rightfully his. Without humor, he would appear a self-righteous prig, adhering to a strict moral code. With it, he is a jaunty, cocky son of a bitch, constantly ridiculing himself while he ridicules others.

And he is just so damn good at it.

Whatever the situation, Spenser is as quick with a quip as he is with his fists. He hits the ground running in
The Godwulf Manuscript
with his description of a blond co-ed: “She was wearing something in purple suede that was too short for a skirt and too long for a belt.”

And he doesn’t let up, asking Lieutenant Martin Quirk, who tries to intimidate him, “Can I feel your muscle?”

Or asking mob boss Joe Broz, “Do you always dress in blue and white . . . or do you have your office redone to match your clothes every day?”

And he tackles everything from sex to politics to religion, always with the same irreverent attitude.

In
The Widening Gyre
, he is asked to bodyguard a senatorial candidate who has been getting death threats. The candidate questions his religious beliefs: “Do you believe in almighty God?”

Spenser answers, “Why? Does he want to hire me?” As the candidate reacts in shock, Spenser, always the feminist, adds: “Or she.”

It’s not only the attitude and circumstances that characterize Spenser’s wit. It’s also his ability to convey volumes with just a few words. When Spenser meets the radical feminist with whom he clashes in
Looking for Rachel Wallace
, her editor, desperately trying to placate her, says Spenser has read her book. Rachel asks him what he thought of it.

He answers, “I think you are rehashing Simone de Beauvoir.”

Notice the delicious triple-thrust of the remark. First, he fails to pay her a compliment, which is clearly what she expected. Second, he demonstrates a knowledge of feminism that Rachel, in her prejudice, assumed he would not have, plus the fact he was aware of that assumption. And, third, he offers the opinion that she is merely a second-rate imitation of other, genuinely important feminists.

That’s a hell of a lot to pack into one short sentence. But Spenser does it with ease.

Rachel, fighting back, proceeds to grill him on his knowledge of Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps to make sure he is not quoting something he read in the press release. Spenser passes the test while labeling it for what it is.

Rachel asks, “What did you feel was her most persuasive insight?” To which Spenser answers, “Her suggestion that women occupied the position of
other
. Are we having a quiz later?”

Rachel has no sense of humor and tells him so. Instead of reassuring her it will be no problem, he says, “Okay if now and then I enjoy a wry, inward smile if struck by one of life’s vagaries?”

Perhaps he is trying too hard to impress her with his erudition; still, the remark is priceless.

Spenser’s intelligence is on display in every quip. In
Early Autumn
, Spenser has to rescue Paul Giacomin, a teenaged boy, from his dysfunctional family. This is not, of course, the job for which he was hired. In this case, the divorced wife is the client, and the initial task is to retrieve the boy from the father, who won’t return him.

Spenser quickly realizes the boy is nothing more than a trophy the two are fighting over in order to hurt each other. Not one to pull his punches, he sums up the situation for the wife: “Capture the flag.”

Short, punchy, insulting, and rude, but dead-on accurate.

To find Paul, Spenser tails the father’s girlfriend to his house, breaks in, and surprises the two of them. The father immediately threatens to call the cops.

Spenser’s response? “I enjoy meeting policemen. Sometimes if you’re good they let you play with their handcuffs.”

Spenser has the father and girlfriend buffaloed. As he describes the situation: “He looked at me. Elaine Brooks looked at me. If there’d been a mirror, I would have looked at me. But there wasn’t, so I looked at them.”

Humor permeates the scene. Even the description has a playful nature.

Spenser often takes delight in playing with words. In his first adventure,
The Godwulf Manuscript
, he is hired by a university to recover a rare stolen manuscript. The head of campus security takes exception to some of Spenser’s questions:

“Who the hell is employing who? I want to know your results, and you start asking me questions about professors.”

“Whom,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It’s whom, who’s employing whom. Or is it? Maybe it’s a predicate nominative, in which case . . .”

He also has fun with words in
Hugger Mugger
:

“Okay,” I said. “Let me just expostulate for a while. You can nod or not as you wish.”

“Expostulate?”

“I’m sleeping with a Harvard grad,” I said.

And Spenser is even more playful in
Small Vices
. He narrates:

Since my name was anathema at Pemberton, I had to employ guile. I called the alumni office and said my name was Anathema and I was with the IRS . . .

“What did you say you name was?”

“Anathema. Pervis Anathema, refund enactment agent.”

He claims to have a tax refund for a former student and asks for her address. And, yes, he gets it.

He also deals with the president of Pemberton College, who is surprised to find him well educated. When she tells him he speaks rather well, he replies, “You too.”

She is initially taken aback by the remark, then smiles and acknowledges that she was indeed being patronizing, which he has managed to convey brilliantly with two simple words.

This is something Spenser uses humor for frequently: to highlight the foolishness of other people’s assumptions. In particular, their assumptions that he isn’t very intelligent.

In
Promised Land
, when he and Susan Silverman bring a runaway wife he has tracked down to his apartment, she is impressed by the extent of his book collection.

“Look at all the books. Have you read all these books?”

Spenser counters in his usual way, with self-deprecating sarcasm that mocks her prejudiced assessment of him: “Most of them. My lips get awfully tired, though.”

Spenser is also not above using humor to highlight his own foolishness. While Spenser is driving Rachel in his car in
Looking for Rachel Wallace
, she pontificates on the idea that women are always named after their fathers not their mothers.

Two cars try to box him in on the highway. Spenser pushes her down on the floor, goes up on the curb to pass the car in front of him, scraping his bumper down its side, and gets away.

Spenser blames himself for letting them nearly box him in, feeling he should have noticed them sooner: “I was too busy arguing patristic nomenclature with you.”

Not bad for a man who just eluded two cars that tried to force him off the road in order to kill the woman he was protecting. The remark is clever, belittling and dignifying the subject at the same time, while demonstrating Spenser’s facility with language and the concept and mocking the discussion, him, and her by the use of the literate prose. Moreover, he does this with a short, descriptive sentence that is spot on. A trial attorney’s long-winded argument, citing precedent after precedent, could not convey more than his simple statement does.

Later, in the bar, Rachel describes the incident to her friend, Julie, suggesting that Spenser may have made up the whole thing: “Well, I was on the floor, and he swerved around a lot, and then the car behind us was gone. I can’t speak for sure myself. And if I were convinced no one were after me, Spenser would be out of work.”

Spenser retorts: “Aw, you’d want me around anyway. All you chicks want a guy to look after you.”

The comment is short, punchy, and effective, neatly dismissing Rachel’s insinuation by ignoring it, and using an outrageous barb particularly offensive to a feminist. The fact that Julie is Rachel’s lover adds yet another dimension to the wisecrack.

Spenser’s quips are often deceptively simple. “I’m going to beat your man,” Spenser tells Kevin Bartlett in
God Save the Child
, “so you’ll know it can be done.” Spenser needs to kill a fourteen-year-old boy’s admiration of the steroidal body builder. The only way to do it is by beating the guy senseless. Which he proceeds to do. But that simple declarative statement of intent, confident, assured, matter-of-fact, is probably as impressive as the actual act. And this is usually the way Spenser behaves: forthrightly, with little guile.