RIP, RBP

I owe Robert B. Parker more than I can tell. Fortunately, several years ago at a writing conference where we were both speaking, I got the opportunity to attempt to tell him.

I am saddened by his death. His absence leaves a great big gaping hole in American Crime Fiction. One that I and others will attempt to fill, but it is truly tragic that there will never be another Spenser novel.

At the age of 77, “just sitting at his desk” at his home in Cambridge, Mass., according to an email sent out by a representative of his U.K. publisher Quercus, Robert B. Parker is dead. The news of Parker's death on Monday was confirmed by Parker’s U.S publisher, Putnam; on Twitter, a representative wrote: “R.I.P beloved author Robert B. Parker. You were indeed a Grand Master, your legacy lives on, and you will be missed by us all.”

In a statement released late Monday, Parker’s longtime editor at Putnam, Christine Pepe, said: “What mattered most to Bob were his family and his writing, and those were the only things that he needed to be happy. He will be deeply missed by all us at Putnam, and by his fans everywhere.”

I can think of no better way for a writer to go than at his desk in the act of writing. I hope to go the same way (and, if it’s at 77, I won’t complain). Wonder what the last sentence, the last word he wrote was.

For me, losing Parker is like losing one of my literary fathers.

He is one of the main reasons I became a writer of crime fiction. In high school, I watched “Spenser for Hire,” the TV series based on his one-name Boston PI, Spenser. The series led me to the books, the books led me to a love of fiction in general and of crime fiction in particular. (The TV series is also where I fell in love with Mustangs and why I still drive one today).

When I started reading Parker’s Spenser novels in 1988, the series was already about ten strong, and since then, he has added at least one every year. In fact, he wrote them faster than his publisher, Putnam, was willing to publish them.
In recent years, he’d been writing other works in addition to the Spenser novels. Among them, a couple of very good westerns, a great book with World War II, baseball, and Jackie Robinson as a backdrop, a series featuring a female PI, and a series featuring former LA cop and now Paradise, Massachusetts Police Chief, Jesse Stone.

Younger, and not as evolved as Spenser, Jesse Stone, who battles alcohol and marriage problems in addition to the bad guys, is nonetheless tough, autonomous, and honorable—hallmark traits of Parker’s knights-errant. He’s also, like nearly all of Parker’s characters, a man in the process of self-discovery.

In all Parker’s works, crime and investigation merely provide a framework for his characters, giving them something to do while the real investigation into their psyche takes place. Like the Spenser novels, the Stone books are about a man and his journey to becoming a better man, while helping weaker people along the way. This is even truer of Stone than Spenser, since Jesse is younger, more troubled, more vulnerable.

Not a lot changed from one Parker book to another. I don’t mean to suggest that Parker wrote the same book over and over, though if he had it wouldn’t matter much to me or any of his other faithful fans. I’m saying, from book to book, Parker was tweaking the themes that mattered to him—which, more than anything, was what it means to be a man, exploring why hard-boiled men are the way they are. The core of all of Parker’s books is the same, which, I suspect is what we kept coming back for over and over again.

Parker wasn’t read for plot, but for the stripped-down style that nobody did better, the sharp, often witty dialog, the interesting, evolving characters, and the insights he peppered his prose with like a boxer with a great jab. Most of all, Parker was read for the journey of the man at the center of the story, which, whether it’s Spenser, Stone, Burke, or Virgil Cole, is finally and inevitably, Parker himself.

Toward the end of his life, Parker turned to the Western novel, and his work in it shows just how timeless his heroes and themes are.

Long before lone private eyes with heaters holstered beneath their seersuckers walked down the mean streets of uncaring urban back alleys, lone gunmen with six-shooters strapped to their waists walked down the dusty main streets of one-horse towns.

Listen to Raymond Chandler’s praise of the hard-boiled detective and tell me it couldn’t be applied to western gunslingers:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Chandler’s description of this type of hero could apply as much to Parker’s detective, Spenser, as much as his western lawman, Virgil Cole.

If any modern detective fiction writer understood the relationship between cowboys and cops, it was Parker. Not only was he the most popular and prolific writer of the private eye novel of our time, but he studied the form, its origins and evolution—even writing his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality.”

Linked by ethos, code, and honor, literary cowboys and private cops, particularly as Parker wrote them, have far more in common with each other than either has with his contemporaries. Spenser could be in a Western, just as Virgil Cole could easily be in a hard-boiled detective novel.

If you haven’t read Parker or it’s been a while, here are some of my favorites: “Walking Shadow,” “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” “Double Play,” “Back Story,” “Night Passage,” and “Appaloosa.”

Fare-the-well, father. I lift a Samuel Adams in honor of you. Thanks for the hours and hours and hours of entertainment and inspiration, for the characters whose code I share, for speaking to the heroic in us all.