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Robert B. Parker

kevinburtonsmith

(1932–2010)

Well, the guy had balls, anyway.

It’s one thing to be compared to the Holy Trinity of Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald. It’s quite another to elbow your way in. Particularly for Chandler fans who saw Parker first step into Chandler’s hallowed shoes: his completion of Chandler’s unfinished last Philip Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs, which Parker did in 1989.

Suffice it to say he had a pair.

Mind you, Parker–despite his protestations that he was a slacker and only became a writer because he didn’t want to actually work for a living-never played it safe. And it was always clear what he was aiming for. He wrote his dissertation for a Ph.D. in 1971 on Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald, and his private eye hero, Spenser, was always more than just an attempt to carry on those beloved private eye traditions; it was also a brave, unapologetic no-holds barred attempt to drag those traditions, kicking and screaming, into the modern age.

Traditionalists and fedora fetishists were quick to denounce him, and he was certainly the victim of more than a few fellow writers’ gripes (or even grapes), but Parker’s Spenser, like it or not, left the biggest mark on the genre in ages. Certainly none of his contemporaries, even those who are arguably better writers, have had as much influence on the genre in terms of popularity and impact.

As Robert Crais, the creator of California private eye Elvis Cole, put it upon learning of Parker’s death, “There has always been a Big Three in American detective fiction–Chandler, Hammett, and Macdonald. Now there is a Big Four, and deservedly so. Robert B. Parker influenced a generation of writers. His contributions will continue to influence the coming generations. A tragic and terrible loss.”

* * * * *

Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Mass. on September 17, 1932, the only child of Carroll and Mary Pauline Parker. He and Joan Hall met as children, and again, years later, as freshmen at Colby College in Maine. Parker earned a B.A. in English in 1954, served as infantryman in Korea, and married Joan upon completing his service on August 26, 1956. In 1957 he earned an M.A. in English from B.U.

He worked a variety of jobs for the next five years: management trainee, technical writer, copy writer, ad exec. In 1962, with Joan’s encouragement, he enrolled in Boston University’s Ph.D program, hoping a professorship would give him more time to write. Between 1964-68 he taught at Mass State College-Lowell, Suffolk U., and Mass State College-Bridgewater. In 1968 he joined Northeastern U. as an Assistant Prof. of English. He completed his Ph.D in 1971, his doctoral thesis entitled “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald”. At first he alternated teaching and writing, even as the first Spenser novels began to appear, to much popular and critical acclaim. He continued teaching at Northeastern until 1978, when he left to write full time.

He remained an avid weightlifter and runner throughout most of his life, despite at one point being slowed down by surgery. Though Spenser is a boxer and gourmet cook, Parker didn’t box, and is more modest about his cooking.

Joan had a M.Ed. in Early Childhood Education and Development from Tufts. Their sons David and Dan were born in 1959 and ’63 respectively. David is a choreographer, Dan an actor.

Parker did use his experiences as raw material, but I wouldn’t call his books autobiographical. Wish fulfillment, maybe, is how he put it.

* * * * *

Parker’s first four novels, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), God Save the Child (1974), Mortal Stakes (1975) and the Edgar-winning Promised Land (1976), introduced Spenser, and were an explosive opening salvo in the P.I. genre that has yet to be matched. Here was a private eye who wasn’t a California-bound loser or loner, who actually enjoyed his life, and was capable, it seemed, of having an actual relationship with a woman who wasn’t a ditzy housewife, his own secretary or some psycho-killer nympho. As Margaret Cannon of The Globe and Mail once succinctly put it, “Spenser liberated the PI from California, gave him a whole new line of inquiry, and taught him to love.”

Spenser could be as cold and ruthless as Hammer, or as chivalric as Marlowe, but almost always as plain spoken as The Continental Op. He jogs, keeps himself in shape, cooks gourmet meals, and pals around at the gym with an enforcer for the mob, Hawk, who isn’t bothered by Spenser’s idealogical struggles, and will gladly kill (and does) without hesitation or compunction. Spenser’s beholden to no one, fiercely independent, almost obsessed with autonomy, and yet extremely loyal to his friends.

If Parker had stopped those first four Spenser novels, he would still be worthy of mention on this site. But he didn’t stop there. He continued to write Spenser novels, a novel or three a year, and each has made its way up the charts. It spawned a moderately successful (but disappointing) TV series, Spenser For Hire, starring Robert Urich, and a string of TV movies starring Urich (again) and later Joe Mantegna.

The Raymond Chandler estate asked him to complete Chandler’s last, unfinished Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs. Parker took up the challenge, and in 1989 delivered it, following it up the next year with Perchance To Dream, his attempt to write a sequel to Chandler’s first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. If Parker’s success had already alienated him in the affections of many of his green-eyed peers, they must have seen this as the height of arrogance. Added to this was the fact that Parker’s strong opening salvo was long over, and many of the subsequent books suffered by comparison. And yet here was Parker, plowing on, brazenly tampering with the Master’s canon, storming the citadel while riding the master’s horse!

In fact, it’s Parker (and Spenser’s) unapologetic confidence that seemed to be the most recurring complaint. He seemed to just rub many folks the wrong way. He refused to romanticize writers (he was known to ponder — out loud — why plumbers never come down with plumber’s block), and he seemed impervious to criticism. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, yet he was more than generous in praising other writers’ work, both young and old (his brief, but heart-felt tribute to Ross Macdonald is one of the best, and most fair, pieces about Macdonald I’ve ever read).

But Parker long ago seemed to give up writing for anybody but himself–and occasionally his fans. No, the Spenser books aren’t all classics, but even the weakest books (and a few are mighty weak) in the series are eminently readable. Parker was, if nothing else, a master storyteller, and his light, breezy style is deceptive — it’s really difficult to make it look that easy, and there are real hard questions often being asked in his work. Sure, sometimes his ambitions seem a bit lofty, or even pretentious, but he was never been one to rest on his laurels. He continued to pump out the Spensers, and has also written some damn good non-series tales, including 1983’s Wilderness, a Deliverance-type tale; All Our Yesterdays, a multi-generational saga of an Irish family, its secrets and sins, and the violence it seems doomed to, and even a western, 2001’s Gunman’s Rhapsody that imagined Wyatt Earp’s later years. Love & Glory (1983) wasn’t even crime fiction, never mind crime fiction — it was an unabashed romance novel of sorts.

And he kept on chugging away.

In the eighties and nineties, flush with success, Joan and he spent several years “hustling Hollywood,” but were disappointed with the results, so in 2000 or so, they went back to Boston.

“We became experts at pitch meetings – which is like being expert at child molestation… so at some point we said: f*** this, we’re going home. I could now write a Spenser in three or four months.”

And he did. If anything, he productivity ramped up. In his sixties, at an age when most writers tend to slow down or even stop writing altogether, Parker kept going, pushing himself. Sure, he wrote a Spenser or two every year, but he never coasted — in fact, the later Spenser novels don’t have to apologize to anyone. They were solid and well-written and while they may not have been as groundbreaking as his early work (how many times can you re-invent the wheel?), he continued pushing the envelope, continued to explore Parker’s life-long literary themes of love, loyalty, friendship and honour with wit and heart.

And he kept on writing. Instead of resting on his laurels, he started two new crime series, one featuring Jesse Stone, a flawed, alcoholic California homicide detective who tries to start a new life for himself as the chief of police of a small town in Massachusetts (and became the basis for a popular series of TV movies starring Tom Selleck) and another series revolving around Sunny Randall, a female eye from Boston, which originated as a possible project for actress Helen Hunt.

In fact, Jesse Stone may have — at least for a while — surpassed Spenser as Parker’s best known creation, having sparked a string of popular CBS TV movies starring fan favourite Tom Selleck, which in turn sparked the continuation of the novels after Parker’s death by show writer Michael Brandman, who was subsequently replaced by Reed Farrel Coleman, Shamus-winning creator of Moe Prager.

Parker also wrote an acclaimed standalone, Double Play (2004), that revolved around Joseph Burke, an ex-solder playing bodyguard to Jackie Robinson and published several YA novels, including Chasing the Bear (2009) which imagined Spenser’s teenage years.

And just in case anyone still thought he was slacking off somehow, he started a very popular Western series featuring town-taming guns-for-hire Hitch and Cole, which spawned an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned Hollywood Western that didn’t suck.

Late 2009 saw the publication of The Professional, the 39th Spenser novel. And then, in early 2010, Parker passed away and that great heart finally stopped beating.

He liked beer and he liked baseball, but when it was time to work, Parker sat down and got the job done. And in the act of doing that, he died — as widely reported — at his desk.

In the end, Parker was, like Spenser himself, a professional. But he had fun with it.

We’ll miss him.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

BOOKS BASED ON PARKER’S CHARACTERS BY OTHER AUTHORS

TELEVISION

 

FILMS

ALSO OF INTEREST

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Gerald So for plenty of the biographical info supplied here — some of it taken from David Geherin’s Sons of Sam Spade — and for making sure I keep my nose clean.

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