Looking For Robert Parker

Robert Parker came into my life in the early 1990s, when my friend Tracey admonished me to oh my God, read someone who wasn’t Stephen King. The first book I read was a slim little volume called Looking For Rachel Wallace, featuring a tough-guy private eye named Spenser investigating the disappearance of a prominent lesbian-rights activist. What struck me at once was how all the characters seemed instantly real: Spenser, his psychiatrist girlfriend Susan, his best friend Hawk, and Rachel Wallace herself. The fact that the burly man’s man who appeared on the back cover had written a sympathetic, real individual in Rachel Wallace – and allowed Spenser’s reactions to her be real – surprised me. As it turned out, Robert Parker wasn’t done surprising me.

I plunged in at one, relishing the how the seeming simplicity of the writing masked the complexities of the plots. Of course, sometimes the Spenser adventures could be just that – fun, entertaining jaunts punctuated by Spenser and Susan bang-a-thons and extremely detailed descriptions about food and clothing. The more interesting ones, though, were those that delved into deep character development. Early Autumn, which was a departure from the Spenser formula, and for the better. Potshot, a later book that cast Spenser and his cronies become The Magnificent Seven. Small Vices, in which Spenser is shot and partially paralyzed. Spenser is friends with sympathetic hookers and madams, hitmen and Mafioso, gay bodybuilders and police officers. He’s everything to everyone, and despite his mythic status, he always seems real. It becomes easy to ignore that in the early books, Spenser was a Korean war veteran, and in the more recent ones, he was just approaching fifty. What isn’t easy to ignore is that there won’t be any more Spenser stories.

Relatively late into his career, Spenser developed series around two other characters – small-town lawman Jesse Stone and female P.I. Sunny Randall. The first Jesse Stone books seemed hungry, necessary – the work of a writer who has been doing one thing for so long, he needed to make some sort of change. The Sunny Randall books started off as a weird experiment and then got more interesting as they went along. And Wilderness, one of his stand-alone books, is one of the best suspense novels I’ve ever read.

Robert Parker wrote his college dissertation on Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, but when he wrote, the voice was his own. When I decided to start writing novels, it was Parker’s voice that resonated with me, especially when working on my Wayne Corbin books. The man was such a master of simplicity and grace in his writing – making the difficult look easy, but never frivolous. I had the chance to meet the man two years ago, in his home. It was such an honor to stand with the man in his place of writing, and shake the hand that had written such wonderful stories.

Every year, I pick up a Robert Parker book or two that I may have missed and plow right through it. They go down easy, his mysteries, but they stay with you. The idea that that seemingly endless supply of books now is finite is a crushing thought. He was one of my heroes, and I’m going to miss him terribly.