Spenser With an S

Forgive the long hiatus, gentle reader. No book reports for you these many days because I’ve been working my way through Robert B. Parker’s series of detective books featuring Spenser, everybody’s favorite Liberal muscleman, pounding “to whipped cream” all the religious (i.e. Christian) nuts (i.e. Christians), anti-gay (i.e. Christian) bigots (i.e. Christians), and Bostonian “rednecks” (i.e. Christians) who are so racist (i.e. Christian) as to oppose forced busing. The savages.

I had said all I wanted to say about Robert B. Parker and Spenser in a previous post, and nothing new has cropped up in the next six or seven books. It’s television. You like Hawk and Susan and Quirk and Spenser this week, you’ll like ’em next.

The Los Angeles Public Library failed (as not unusual) to supply me with early Spensers, and eReader, my source of “electronical” books was also a bit spotty in its spenserian offerings, and so I had actually to spend real American dollars getting titles like Pale Kings and Princes and A Catskill Eagle from this bookshop and that. Had to shell out for the one pictured above, Looking for Rachel Wallace. Not the best of the bunch so far, maybe the weakest. Women’s Lib circa 1980. Ho ho.

Still, Spenser keeps driving left hooks and right jabs into ugly mugs and making with the wiseapple comebacks, so I got what I paid for. Whether or not you will like it, I can’t say. If you want a free copy, check my recycle bin (blue) before the pickup on Friday.

Between reading (with much skipping) these hardboiled novels I’ve also been working my way through The Faerie Queene because its author shares a surname with our tough, but soft-hearted, solver of crimes. They’re not entirely different, these two writers, at least in one respect. The Elizabethan Spenser sends the reader scurrying for frequent footnote consultation. Readers of the 20th century Spenser, if born after 1980, may also need to ask their elders the meaning of various time-bound references. Tell me, aged one, whatever can Parker mean when he writes “people in a bar played Space Invaders?”

Spenser, For 37 Years

Robert B. Parker’s death last January prompted me to look into his series of crime novels featuring Spenser, a private investigator working the Boston area. In the interest of continuity I went back to the very beginning, The Godwulf Manuscript from 1973. From there I started marching forward: God Save the Child (1974), Mortal Stakes (1975), Promised Land (1976). That’s where I am now.

Good detective stuff. If you like that, you’ll like them.

But what really gets me is the seventiesishness of these early books. You ask, what should a book from the 70s and set in the 70s be other than seventiesish? I reply (shrugging) well, after all, a bad writer can flub the setting, no? Parker is not a bad writer; when away from the Selectric™ typrewriter, you can bet he was peering narrowly at the world about him. His 70s are very 70s, from the long pointy collars to the liberated attitudes and all the cultural detritus in between.

So many time-sensitive bits of 70s arcana pop up in the novels (as well as earlier stuff still lodged in the collective consciousness of the 70s) that I wondered if anyone born after 1980 could understand these early Spensers without footnotes. For example:

• Bobby Riggs in the Astrodome (tennis player who played a celebrated “Battle of the Sexes” match with Billie Jean King)
• A yellow Bic Banana pen (domesticated psychodelia)
• Phillips 66 (now ConocoPhillips)
• Jackie Susann (i.e. Jacqueine Susann, author Valley of the Dolls)
• “It’s an old George Gobel line.” (TV comic of the 50s; later a Hollywood Square and late night talk show staple)
• “Duffy Tavern, Archie the manager speaking…” (50s TV show)
• A Phil Brito album (Crooner of the 40s)
• “…a small color TV flickered silently…” (No need to mention “color” anymore)
• “I expected Marlin Perkins to jump out…” (Host of Wild Kingdom, TV nature program)
• “I heard a fragment of Roberta Flack…”(Pop singer)
• “…lots of children, lots of Kodak Instamatics.” (Popular cheap camera)
• “I did my David Frye impression [of Richard Nixon]…” (Comedian)
• “I read Dondi and hated it.” (Comic strip,1955–1986)

I Can Read: Back Story

Appaloosa was such a kick, both as film and a book, I decided to see if I could glean equal enjoyment from one of the oodles of detective stories on which Robert B. Parker’s fame is based. But which of the oodles?

I recalled reading on Jimmy Johnson’s Arlo and Janis website, that his comic strip was alluded to in at least one of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser detective thrillers. A Google grouping of “Arlo, Janis and Spenser” led to Back Story. I zipped at once to Mysteries to Die For, a specialty book store in Thousand Oaks, and snagged my own personal copy wherein I discovered how Detective Spenser was hired for the price of six Krispy Kreme doughnuts by actress Daryl Gordon to find the person who murdered her mom, Emily, 28 years earlier.

Well, Spenser proceeds (as his partner, Hawk, says) to “shoot up almost everybody that move in eastern Massachussetts so’s we can find out who killed Emily Gordon.” He also makes lots of wisecracks, including this one in conversation with Hawk (Spenser is a white guy; Hawk a black guy):

“If they come after me, you come lippity-lop to my rescue.”

“Lippity-lop?”

“Yeah. Like Br’er Rabbit. I’m trying to bridge the racial gap.”

“Let it gap,” Hawk said.

This banter, showing up about halfway through the mystery, caused me to realize with surprise that I had already read Back Story. I had read it years ago — maybe 2004? — whenever it was I had learned about it on the Arlo and Janis site. Fortunately for the sake of preserving the suspense, all I recalled from the previous reading was the “lippity-lop” exchange — it made me laugh then and it made me laugh again this time. Also, there was a scene where Spenser shoots three very shoot-worthy bad guys in Harvard Stadium that stirred a faint memory. Not one other detail, or wisecrack, or plot twist, or action scene had remained with me, so I was able to enjoy this repeat reading with the pure pleasure of a first. Maybe four or five years hence I will be able to enjoy it a third time as though it were new.

I ask you: Is that a favorable review or a negative review?

Back Story by Robert B. Parker
(Berkley Trade Pub, Mass Market Paperback, 304pp.)

Appaloosa: The Lil Book

The new Neal Stephenson gargantuan novel, Anathem, was so absolutely satisfying that it sort of left me high and dry in the reading-for-pleasure department. I mean, what could possibly follow such a tour de force? First I turned to Captains Courageous to keep the reading high going by means of the verbal surprises (e.g. “…they laughed themselves hungry.”) that Kipling scatters by the handful on every page. Next, García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude was so thick with wonderous invention that turning the final page was like waking from a dream.

Rudyard and Gabriel had done their jobs well: I was ready to return to reading trash.

A random movie choice pointed the way. Ed Harris’s snazzy cowboy flick, Appaloosa, awoke my curiosity about novelist Robert B. Parker. The guy knocks out about fifty books a year, mostly private eye yarns starring Spenser the Detective. I admit to having harbored a slight prejudice against the blameless fellow because he seemed to be in good odor with the sort of New York Times reviewers who lionize Elmore Leonard to prove they aren’t snobs. But, then, I figured a mystery series featuring a guy whose favorite comic strip is Arlo and Janis, had to have something going for it. So when I learned that Mr. Parker had jumped genres to write the western novel, Appaloosa, on which the movie was based, I bit. Actually bought a paperback copy, I did.

And I’m glad: laconic dialogue so dense with unspoken meaning it’s almost poetic. Action all the more actiony for the dry way it’s related. Not one single wasted word. What I wished Louis L’Amour was but isn’t. Wallace Stegner without all that goldarned literary respectability. It’s cowboys. Cowboys. They shoot bad guys, ride horses, and scratch their heads trying to figger out those women folks.

Appaloosa cheerfully did the job I paid it to do. And look: there are about 3,000 more Robert B. Parker novels standing in line, each one anxious to please.

Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker
(Berkley Publishing Group, Mass Market Paperback, 305pp.)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
(William Morrow & Company, Hardcover, 960pp.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; translated by a swell fellow by the name of Gregory Rabassa
(HarperCollins Publishers, Paperback, 417pp.)