Like Bat Masterson, Robert Parker died at his typewriter, a perfect point of departure for a writer whose every word conveyed the enjoyment felt by a born story-teller, and the pleasure Parker took in the company of his many characters, a pleasure the reader shares. Even if Parker had not been a brilliant, innovative story-teller, his characters were so sharply delineated and distinctive that their conversations alone could carry his novels. Though he never claimed his 40 Spenser novels had any serious literary weight, they constitute, in fact, a long, detailed, thoughtful examination of what it takes to be a good man, to be a good woman, to be a good human. Along the way, plenty of illustrations of the variety of evil humans crop up.
Spenser himself nearly always narrates, so his character is the most completely developed. It’s complex enough to require quite a few books to fully develop it. At first glance, he’s your standard tough-guy private detective, meeting each book’s client, often a good-looking broad, in his seedy 2nd floor office, taking no guff from anyone, criminal or cop. But quite early in the series, Spenser’s character begins to diverge from the stock PI formula.
Though Parker made some rather half-hearted stabs at providing Spenser with a back-story in the early novels, he didn’t make a serious attempt at explaining the origins of Spenser’s character until one of his last books, Chasing the Bear, in which Spenser tells his longtime soulmate Susan SIlverman of his upbringing in a small Western town by his widowed father and two maternal uncles.
All carpenters, the three men make extra money boxing at country fairs, and they teach the young Spenser to box as soon as he can walk. “‘Too many bullies in the world,’ [Uncle] Patrick used to say. ‘It’s good to know what you’re doing.'”
“‘So it wasn’t all about being tough guys,’ Susan said to me.
“‘It was never all about being tough guys,’ I said. ‘It was more about knowing what to do.
They were big on knowing how to do what you needed to do. Read, fish, hunt, fight, carpenter, cook.'”
Whatever sorts of cooking a houseful of bachelors taught Spenser, he’s continued to broaden his menu, and in almost every book Parker smoothly slips in recipes for an entire meal. For example, “I pounded some lamb steaks I’d bought for lamb cutlets. Dipped them in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs . . . . I put them aside and peeled four potatoes. I cut them into little egg-shaped oblongs, which took a while, and started them cooking in a little oil, rolling them around to get them brown all over. I also started the cutlets in another pan. When the potatoes were evenly browned, I poured off the fat, added some Chablis and fresh mint, covered them and let them cook . . . . I made a Greek salad with feta cheese and ripe olives and Susan set the table while I took the lamb cutlets out of the pan and cooked down the wine. I shut off the heat, put in a lump of unsalted butter, swirled it through the wine essence and poured it over the cutlets. With the meal we had warm Syrian bread and most of a half gallon of California Burgundy.” One of the delights of the series is getting to share Spenser’s delight in life’s pleasures – in food, in drink, in both the natural and man-made world around him. Like John Irving’s T.S. Garp, Spenser often finds he can save an otherwise disgusting or unrewarding day by taking the time to make himself a good meal.
In Spenser’s line of work, he runs into more than one bully and more than one considerably more serious threat, but he’s particular in his responses. Encountering an aggressive young man while investigating his mother’s murder, Spenser refuses to meet the boy’s challenge:
“His stare was full of arrogance. It came with wealth and position. And it came with being a wrestler. He thought he could toss me on my keister.
“If I kept talking to them he was going to try it, and find he had misjudged. It would probably be a good thing for him to learn. But now was probably not the best time for him to learn it . . . .
“‘I’m afraid I’ll have to keep looking into this. I’ll try not to be more annoying than I have to be’ . . . .
“I smiled graciously, and went past them out the front door. It wasn’t much of a move, but it was better than wrestling with Chip.”
Often, rather than answering intimidation in kind, Spenser uses humor to both diffuse the tension (sometimes it works) and let the intimidator know that he’s not intimidated.
This is how he handles an encounter with a couple of aggressive small town cops:
“The captain had a round hard-looking potbelly and a long neck. He wore reflective sunglasses. The sergeant was tall and square with a moustache that curved down around the corners of his mouth. He had on reflecting sunglasses too.
”Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Are you Tonton Macoutes?'”
Not to say he won’t knock someone out or shoot him if he finds no alternative and finds himself or others seriously threatened. But violence is never his first choice, and he always regrets engaging in it, even when he knows it was necessary.
That’s one of the ways he differs from his alter-ego Hawk, who tells him, “We a lot alike, Spenser. You got more scruples, maybe, but we alike.” To which Spenser replies,
“‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I never been sure you had any rules.’
“‘You know better. I just got fewer than you. And I ain’t soft-hearted. But you know, I say I gonna do something, I do it. It gets done. I hire on for something, I stay hired. I do what I take the bread for.’ “
Keeping to your word is one of the common traits of Spenser’s adopted family of compadres. Considering Hawk and Teddy Sapp, a gay bouncer who’s become part of Spenser’s periodic crew, Spenser sums them up: “In some ways they were the exact opposite. Black, white. Straight, gay. But at the core they were almost the same guy. They were smart. Their word was good. They were fearsome. And they knew it . . . . it gave them a kind of ironic serenity. “
Out of that list, “their word was good” probably matters most to Spenser and to Parker. It implies self-knowledge and it implies that if you say you’ll do something, you’ll do it, even if it becomes dangerous or inconvenient or costly to do it. And it implies that you not only know who you are and what you value and believe, but that you respect those things in yourself, and in others. As a teen-ager, Spenser has the following exchange with Aurelio, a young hispanic student on whose behalf he has interceded:
“‘I wish I was a tough guy,”‘Aurelio said. ‘Like you, Spenser. But I’m not.’
“‘Everybody’s gotta be what they are,’ I said.”
All of Spenser’s friends, from police captain Martin Quirk to hired guns like Vinnie Morris and Cholo to unofficially adopted son Paul Giacomin and the love of his life, Susan Silverman, know who they are and have no interest in modifying themselves to suit anyone else. They are reminiscent of Thelonious Monk’s definition, “A genius is one most like himself.”
That self-knowledge is arrived at by taking action, whatever action may be called for in all sorts of situations, not from theories of any derivation. Confronting a racist gang member, Spenser says,
“‘But I didn’t come here to argue racial purity with you.’
“‘You’d lose,’ he said.
“‘Probably,’ I said. ‘You’re a professional bigot. You spend your life arguing it. You are an expert. It’s your profession. And it ain’t mine. I don’t spend two hours a month debating racial purity . . . . ‘
“‘And you people are always accusing us of violence . . . .’
“‘You people?’ I said. ‘Us?’ I’m talking about me and you. I’m not talking about us and you people.'”
Spenser has been hired to protect feminist author Rachel Wallace on a book tour. After he has thrown a couple of corporate “security” types on their asses when they tried to physically haul her out of a meeting with disgruntled female employees, she tells him, “‘It demeaned me. it assumed I was helpless and dependent, and needed a big strong man to look out for me. It reiterated that image to all those young women who broke into mindless applause when it was over.'”
To which Spenser replies, “”Maybe that’s so. Or maybe that’s a lot of theory which has little to do with practice. I don’t care very much about theory or the long-range consequences to the class struggle, or whatever. I can’t deal with that. I work close up. Right then I couldn’t let them drag you out while I stood around.'”
In other words, though he doesn’t disagree with Wallace’s views on women’s liberation, his particular commitment to protect her from assault renders those views irrelevant. He views generalizations of all kinds with distrust and distaste. Considering a coterie of violently militant feminists, he observes, “”I’m sick of movements. I’m sick of people who think that a new system will take care of everything. I’m sick of people who put the cause ahead of the person. And I am sick of people, whatever sex, who dump the kids and run off to work, to booze, to sex, to success. It’s irresponsible.”
After he’s told Susan Silverman about his intercession in Aurelio’s behalf, Spenser says, “”I wasn’t trying to solve race relations in town. I was just trying to help Aurelio, because he was a nice little guy and because Jeannie asked me to.'”
“‘When I was at Harvard,’ Susan said, ‘the concern was mostly with larger problems, saving the world, that kind of thing.’
“‘How’s that working?'” I said.
Susan smiled. “‘Since I’ve known you,’ she said, ‘you have actually been saving the world, one person at a time.’
I grinned. “‘I guess I work on a smaller scale than Harvard,’ I said.
“‘Thank God,’ Susan said.
Talking with Erin Macklin, a former nun who’s chosen to teach in a ghetto school, Spenser asks her,
“‘Save many?’
“‘No.’
“‘Worth the try,’ I said.
“‘One is worth the try,’ she said.
“‘Yes.’
“‘You understand that, don’t you?’ she said.
“‘Yes.'”
But immediately after that exchange, “She nodded several times, sort of encouragingly. She leaned back a little in her chair, and crossed her legs, and automatically smoothed her skirt over her knees. I liked her legs. I wondered for a moment if there would ever be an occasion, no matter how serious, no matter who the woman, when I would not make a quick evaluation when a woman crossed her legs. I concluded that there would never be such an occasion, and also that it was a fact best kept to myself.”
This is an example of the half-amused self-assessment that keeps Spenser a believable hero. He and Susan, for example, have committed themselves to a monogamous relationship, sans marriage, and Spenser remains pretty much permanently bowled over by his love for Susan, but, as he observes above, he’s still a guy, and though he refrains from acting on his automatic guy impulses, he feels no need to apologize for them.
If Spenser spends a fair amount of time pondering his choices, he spends very little time explaining those choices to others, and no time at all buying the self-satisfied linguistic preenings of the politically correct. Waiting in Grand Central Station for a suspect with New York police detective Corsetti, “A bum came shambling past us . . . .
“Corsettic took out his wallet.
“‘Step over here,’ Corsetti said.
“‘Yessir.’
“The bum shuffled back. He didn’t look at either of us. He looked at the floor. His shoulders hunched a little as if maybe Corsetti was going to hit him.
“‘I got no change,’ Corsetti said.
“He handed the bum a ten-dollar bill. The bum took it and stared at it. He still didn’t look at Corsetti, or me.
“‘Beat it,”‘ Corsetti said.
“‘Yessir,’ the bum said. ‘God bless.’
“He backed away with the bill in his hand, still looking at it, then turned and walked away across the waiting room under the high arched roof toward 42nd Street.
“‘Fucking stumblebums,’ Corsetti said. ‘The uniform guys come through couple of times a day, sweep ’em out, but they’re right back in here a half-hour later.’
“‘Especially in the winter,’ I said. ‘Is “stumblebum” the acceptable term for our indigent brothers and sisters?’
“‘Sometimes I like “vagrants,'” Corsetti said. ‘Depends on how much style they got.’
“‘Think the money will help him?’ I said.
“‘Nope.’
“‘Think he’ll spend it on booze?’
“‘Yep.’
“‘So why’d you give it to him?’ I said.
Corsetti swallowed the last of his coffee and grinned at me.
“‘Felt like it,’ he said.
Spenser respects the people he respects not for what they say or how they say it, but for what they do, and for what they won’t do. Rachel Wallace’s publisher, interviewing Spenser for the job as her bodyguard, tries to examine Spenser’s feminist credentials,
which Spenser refuses to discuss with him. “‘Saying I have no distaste for her [Rachel Wallace] won’t reassure her. Or it shouldn’t,’ Spenser tells the publisher. ‘There’s no way to prove anything to her until something happens. Words don’t do it.'”
That’s not to say that Spenser is unaware of or indifferent to language. Exposed by his father and uncles to a set of “The Great Books,” Spenser often thinks of lines from Shakespeare, Frost, and other writers to sum up some situation he faces. Disdain for the “politically correct” approach is shared by many of his longtime friends, who frequently show their disdain by aping standard stereotypes of the speech and characters of their various races. Hawk takes great pleasure in talking like Kingfish Stevens for minutes at a time, only to switch into his Downton Abbey voice. Cholo, the Mexican shooter from Los Angeles, nearly always presents himself, in the accents of the Frito Bandito, as “a simple peasant from South of the Border, unused to the sophisticated ways of you city dwellers.” Such poses serve as a defense not only against the racism they parody, but against the ignorant self-satisfaction of the politically correct brand of liberals.
And Parker’s language, as the series went on, became ever more precise, as he became ever more selective of the telling detail. Paying close attention to his surroundings, of course, serves Spenser as a survival skill, but in the early books Parker tended to convey this by what seemed nearly endless catalogs, such as, “The expressway connects in Saugus to Route 1 and for the next ten miles is a plastic canyon of sub-sandwich shops, discount houses, gas stations, supermarkets, neocolonial furniture shops (vinyl siding and chintz curtains), fried chicken, big beef sandwiches, hot dogs cooked in beer, quarter-pound hamburgers, pizzas, storm doors, Sears, Roebuck&Co., doughnut shops, stockade fencing – preassembled sections, restaurants that look like log cabins, restaurants that look like sailing ships, restaurants that look like Moorish townhouses, restaurants that look like car washes,, car washes, shopping centers, a fish market, a skimobile shop, an automotive accessory shop, liquor stores, a delicatessen in three clashing colors, a motel with an in-room steam bath, a motel with a relaxing vibrator bed, a car dealer, an indoor skating rink attractively done in brick and corrugated plastic, a trailer park, another motel composed of individual cabins, an automobile dealership attractively done in glass and corrugated plastic, an enormous steak house with life-sized plastic cows grazing out font in the shadow of a six-story neon cactus, a seat cover store, a discount clothing warehouse, an Italian restaurant with a leaning tower attached to it . . . . “
We’ve all driven that stretch of road, and indeed all those establishments inhabit its edges, but we don’t need them all named to get the picture, and examining each
passing shop and dealership becomes tedious pretty quickly. But as Parker got more and more interested in character and dialog, he learned to convey the essence of Spenser’s surroundings far more succinctly. Visiting a race horse farm in the South, Spenser is moved to seek breakfast. Entering the track kitchen, he finds “A well-dressed man and woman were eating ham and eggs, grits, and toast at one of the tables. Three ample women in large hats and frilly dresses were at the table next to theirs . . . . The white woman came around the counter with a startling number of plates and put them down in front of the ample women. I could see how they got ample.”
In Early Autumn, Spenser takes up the cause of a surly, stunted adolescent Paul Giacomin, who has become a pawn in the struggle between two estranged, equally narcissistic parents, one of whom is evidently attempting to kidnap him. Spenser takes the boy to a remote forest property he owns, and teaches him some of the skills he was taught in his youth – boxing, carpentry, self-discipline, all leading to self-respect. And one more: “I said, ‘When you’re thinking about something important, like if your father might try to kidnap you again, it’s better to think of what the best thing would be to do if he tried, rather than trying to decide how likely he was to try. You can’t decide if he’ll try. That’s up to him. You decide what to do if he does. That’s up to you. Understand? . . . . A way of living better is to make the decisions you need to make based on what you can control. When you can.'”
The portrait of manhood that emerges through Spenser’s development is simple enough: keep to your word, learn how to excel at whatever activities you decide to engage in, don’t forget to be grateful for the good things of life, and don’t worry about things beyond your control. Simple doesn’t mean easy, but it surely cuts through a lot of fancy bullshit analysis.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the books of John D. MacDonald, “To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.” I think the same could be said for Parker’s Spenser books, and I wish they were more widely read right now. We could use some of that hard simplicity.
