Robert B. Parker

• Born: September 17, 1932
• Birthplace: Springfield, Massachusetts
• Died: January 19, 2010
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; private investigator

Principal Series: Spenser, 1974-; Jesse Stone, 1997-; Sunny Randall, 1999-

Contribution

Robert B. Parker was heir to the tradition of the hard-boiled detective most notably embodied in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Parker’s Spenser is principled and honorable but not a loner like Chandler’s Marlowe. Spenser has a monogamous relationship with an intelligent and liberated woman, Susan Silverman, and he is ably assisted by Hawk, a formidable African American who is less principled but just as honorable as Spenser. In 1976 Parker received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Promised Land (1976). In 1995, Parker and John Lutz jointly received the Eye, a lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America. In 2002 Parker was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2006 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention.

In addition to his detective series, Parker wrote three mainstream novels, Wilderness (1979), Love and Glory (1983), and All Our Yesterdays (1994). Critics have described them as thoughtful and well written but flawed, and they have not achieved the popularity of his detective series. Parker’s Spenser series has been optioned for television and films, and he acted as a consultant for the television series Spenser for Hire (1985-1988). In 2005-2007, several novels in the Jesse Stone series were turned into television films starring Tom Selleck. Parker’s female detective, Sunny Randall, was created because he was asked to write a novel that could be adapted as a film vehicle for Helen Hunt, the Academy Award-winning actress.

Biography

Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on September 17, 1932, to Carroll Snow, a telephone company executive, and Mary Pauline (Murphy) Parker. During his youth, he read widely in pulp fiction, learning the conventions of the hard-boiled detective. He attended Colby College, where he met Joan Hall, whom he married on August 26, 1956, two years after he graduated with his bachelor’s degree. He served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956 in Korea. After completing his military service, he returned to school and received his master of arts degree from Boston University in 1957. He then sought employment as a technical writer to support his wife and son David, born in 1959. His second son, Daniel, was born in 1963. In 1957 he was a management trainee with Curtiss-Wright Company, Woodridge, New Jersey. From 1957 to 1959 he worked as a technical writer with Raytheon in Andover, Massachusetts, then went into advertising with Prudential Insurance Company in Boston from 1959 to 1962. At the same time, from 1960 to 1962, he was a partner in his own advertising agency, Parker-Farman Company.

In 1962 Parker’s wife, Joan, persuaded him to return to Boston University and complete his doctoral degree, which he received in 1970. While completing his doctorate, he held positions as an instructor at Boston University (1962-1964), the University of Lowell (1964-1966), and Massachusetts State College at Bridgewater (1966-1968). From 1968 to 1974 he was an assistant professor at Northeastern University. He completed his dissertation, “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” in 1970 (later published as The Private Eye in Hammett and Chandler, 1984).

Parker estimated that it took him two and a half years of writing in his spare time to complete his first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, published by Houghton in 1974. He was promoted to associate professor in 1974, and after publishing God Save the Child (1974), Mortal Stakes (1975), and Promised Land, he was promoted to full professor in 1976, the same year that Promised Land won an Edgar Award.

Parker became a househusband while his wife, Joan, attended graduate school to earn a master’s degree in early childhood development. She began a teaching and administrative career in education. In 1977 Joan was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy two weeks later. Parker and his wife coauthored a personal account published the following year as Three Weeks in Spring (1978). This devastating experience made Joan aware of tensions in her marriage, and in 1982 she asked for a separation. During their four years of separation, they each underwent psychotherapy. They decided to remain together and purchased a house, which they remodeled to create two separate entrances leading to different levels, two kitchens, and two baths. Parker has made use of this arrangement in his fiction: Spenser and his longtime lover, Susan Silverman, have separate residences. Parker also has used his experience as the father of two sons in depicting Spenser’s relationship with Paul Giacomin, a lost young man whom Spenser befriends.

Parker died, at his writing desk at home in Cambridge Massachusetts according to the Washington Post report, on January 18, 2010. He was 77.

Analysis

Robert B. Parker was the acknowledged literary heir to Raymond Chandler. In 1988 he was asked by the Chandler estate to complete the thirty-page manuscript that Chandler was working on at the time of his death. The resulting Poodle Springs (1989) carried both authors’ names. Parker also wrote a sequel to Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939), which he called Perchance to Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel to Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” (1991). Although Parker’s Spenser remained true to the conventions of the American hard-boiled detective as established by Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald, Parker differs from his predecessors in having combined the detective novel and the love story. Spenser is in love with Susan Silverman, a psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard. Spenser and Susan are not married and do not live together, but they have a monogamous relationship. Parker has also changed the locale from Chandler’s Los Angeles to Boston. His Boston is so fully realized that he and one of his fans, Kasho Kumagai, compiled a book entitled Spenser’s Boston (1994).

With unerring skill, Parker wrote in first-person narrative interlaced with dialogue. The reader sees everything through Spenser’s eyes; his wit enlivens every conversation. Parker’s work is highly literate. Spenser, his detective’s name, is a reference to Edmund Spenser, regarded by his contemporaries as the heir to Geoffrey Chaucer and the leading sixteenth century nondramatic English poet. The selection of name is deliberate. Chandler initially called his hero Malory after the English poet Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). Parker’s Spenser is well aware that his literary namesake wrote TheFaerie Queene (1590, 1596) and just as aware that few of the police officers and mobsters who populate his world have heard of the English poet. Nevertheless, he frequently quips “Spenser, spelled with an ’s,’ like the English poet.” Each book of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene focuses on a knight who engages in a quest relating to a particular virtue: holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy. Like these literary knights, Parker’s Spenser is concerned with virtue. He lives by a code that involves protecting the weak and never engaging in gratuitous murder or violence; he is faithful to Susan in spite of temptation. Honor matters; the means that he uses to solve a crime becomes as important as his success in completing a case.

Hawk, Spenser’s longtime friend, always keeps his word, and he understands but does not share Spenser’s values. Tall, black, and bald, with a ghetto background, Hawk dates Harvard professors but has shady connections with the underworld. He makes his living by working in a criminal world that Spenser knows about but rejects. Whenever Spenser needs backup, Hawk is there, working for free and exchanging wisecracks with his buddy. Other repeating characters include Martin Quirk, a police lieutenant; Lee Farrell, a homosexual police officer; Vinnie Morris, a thug who is a good shooter and loyal to Spenser and Hawk; and Rachel Wallace, a feminist and gay activist. Parker, like William Faulkner, deliberately uses the past history of his characters in new stories. This developing fictionalized context becomes its own world.

Promised Land

In Promised Land, Spenser is hired by Harvey Shepard to find his wife, Pam. She has taken up with Rose and Jane, who plan to organize a women’s movement modeled on the Black Panthers; they set up a bank holdup to get money to buy guns. Pam participates in this holdup, in which a man is killed. Spenser discovers that Harvey has invested unwisely in a real estate development, the Promised Land. To make good on some bad debts, he is now in the clutches of the loan shark and gangster King Power and his enforcer, Hawk. Spenser works out a scheme in which King Power sells guns to Rose and Jane, and the police pick them up. He lets Hawk know in time for him to get away from the police, and in return, Hawk saves Spenser’s life during the violent denouement.

A Catskill Eagle

The title of A Catskill Eagle (1985) is taken from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851). Spenser comes to grips with despair and jealousy when his relationship with Susan Silverman is threatened. To pursue her career, Susan has separated from Spenser. She has left him for another man, Russell Costigan, the son of the wealthy and unscrupulous Jerry Costigan. Spenser receives a short note from Susan saying that Hawk is in jail in Mill River, California, and that she also needs help. Spenser and Hawk pursue the Costigans and free Susan. Susan returns to therapy to regain her independence, and then she is reunited with Spenser.

Small Vices

In Small Vices (1997), the lawyers who defended Ellis Alves, a black rapist and general bad guy, think that he may have been framed for the murder of Melissa Henderson, a white coed. The law firm of Rita Fiore hires Spenser to investigate the case and see if it should be reopened. The title is taken from William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606):

Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks:Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.

The vices in this case are not small. Spenser discovers that the facts of the murder were covered up to protect Melissa’s rich-kid, tennis-star boyfriend. His adoptive and very affluent family hires a hit man to assassinate Spenser. After a brush with death and long rehabilitation, Spenser returns to even the score with his assassin and arrange for justice.

Principal Series Characters:

• Spenser is a wisecracking private eye, a former professional boxer and police officer fired for insubordination. He is highly literate, notices what people wear, and cooks gourmet meals. He lives by a code of honor that involves keeping his word and protecting the helpless. Spenser is a faithful lover to Susan Silverman, a psychologist with a doctoral degree from Harvard. Spenser has a circle of loyal friends, ranging from police officers to criminals; his closest friend, Hawk, a black thug, works with him on most of his cases.
• Jesse Stone is a former Los Angeles homicide detective who has been fired for alcoholism. Corrupt city officials in Paradise, Massachusetts, hire him as chief of police because they assume that he will be ineffective, but he proves them wrong. His unfaithful former wife, with whom he is still obsessed, has followed him to Massachusetts.
• Sunny Randall , a petite blond private investigator, lives alone with her mini bull terrier but receives help from her gay sidekick. She is still involved with her former husband Ritchie, whose family has mob connections.

Bibliography

Binyon, T. J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Classifies Parker’s Spenser as a professional amateur and views his work as moving from detective fiction to the thriller.

Geherin, David. Sons of Sam Spade: The Private-Eye Novel in the 70s—Robert B. Parker, Roger L. Simon, Andrew Bergman. New York: Ungar, 1980. Discussion of Parker as heir to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.

James, Dean, and Elizabeth Foxwell. The Robert B. Parker Companion. New York: Berkley Books, 2005. Comprehensive work contains plot summaries, a biography of Parker, lists of characters, and information on Spenser’s Boston.

Keating, H. R. F. Writing Crime Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. British crime writer analyzes the genre and discusses Parker as heir to Chandler.

Parker, Robert B., and Anne Ponder. “What I Know About Writing Spenser Novels.” In Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, edited by Robin W. Winks. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986. Revises and expands an article that appeared in The Armchair Detective in 1984. In-depth discussion of Spenser and the philosophical underpinning of his world.

Schmid, George. Profiling the American Detective: Parker’s Prose on the Coded Game of Sleuth and Rogue, and the Tradition of the Crime Story. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. An examination of Parker’s detective fiction and how it fits into the genre.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1985. Historical study of the detective story with comments unsympathetic to Parker.

Winks, Robin W. Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982. Appreciative study and defense of detective fiction as literature. Describes the evolution of Parker’s Spenser. Calls attention to Mortal Stakes and Promised Land.