Something Cooking

I was passing through Newark, New Jersey, in 2002 when I picked up a paperback thriller in the airport bookstore. It was by Robert B. Parker, a writer I had never heard of, and I can’t remember what attracted me to it: almost certainly its portability and low price. I was at that time the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. My beat was everywhere east of the Rockies, and I frequently took short-hop flights to cover stories. A banker had absconded with a bunch of cash in Baltimore; a stripper had been elected mayor in a small con­servative town in Colorado; there was a videogame convention in Chicago – and I hopped on a plane.

I typically travelled with a laptop, an old-fashioned brick phone, a change of underwear in my laptop case and an inflatable neck pillow so I could sleep on flights. But when I couldn’t sleep, it was handy to have a book: not a taxing one. So, having left in a hurry or been between books, it was catch-as-catch-can on the way to the gate. The book, I remember, featured basketball and a gruff private detective called Spenser clumping around the place putting noses out of joint (it’s the sixteenth Spenser Mystery, the internet is kind enough to tell me, and it was called Playmates, published in 1989). I read it with no expectations but finished the whole book before my flight landed. I loved it. It was funny and gripping and sarcastic, and though unshowily well written it had no pretensions to being great literature. It was perfect pulp. From then on, whenever I travelled, I bought another Robert B. Parker novel. My other discovery, which was pleasing, was that any airport bookshop in the States at that time would have great piles of them. They were all different and all substantially the same. My year in New York (I left after filing a report on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) was a year of reading Parker. Parker was obviously a big deal in America and all but unknown in the UK. He’s had publishers here, on and off – John Murray pub­lished him for a bit, then the small press No Exit, and he seems to be with Quercus these days – but he’s never been well known. In the States, though, he won lots of prizes and was known as ‘the dean of crime fiction’. I once asked James Ellroy if he liked him, and he made a rude gesture – but that’s Ellroy for you. I couldn’t now swear that I’ve read all of Parker’s novels – and I can’t remember with any confidence, at this stage, which ones I have read – but I know I’ve read most of them. And not being able to remember having read them gives me the very agreeable prospect of being able to reread them. He’s that sort of writer. An intense pleasure, quickly forgotten. What are these books like? The stories zip along at a great clip: they are pacey and laconic, and most of what makes them is the tone of voice. Parker will tell you briefly what the characters are wearing, and what they are eating (of which more later), and that’s about it. Almost everything else is dialogue: smart, wisecracking, hard-boiled back-and-forth. Like Wodehouse, the plots are intriguing but it’s the texture of the writing that really does it. Raymond Chandler was Parker’s lodestar. When he wrote his first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, in 1973, he was fresh from completing a rushed doctoral dissertation on Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald, and he produced what he called a ‘fairly blatant’ copy of the master. Spenser was a conscious attempt to transplant Philip Marlowe to Boston. Parker speculated that Chandler’s hero was named after Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe, so he named his own hero after the author of The Faerie Queene. Parker is well read and will quietly let you know it. One of Spenser’s many deadpan sayings is lifted from Tennyson: ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.’ An unusual feature of Parker’s work, at least as far as thriller writers go, is that it contains very little of what filmmakers like to call ‘jeopardy’. There is never, or almost never, the faintest danger Spenser will be seriously hurt, let alone killed, by his enemies. The closest he comes to death is in Small Vices (1997), where Rugar, or ‘The Gray Man’ (a contract killer who is the closest thing he gets to an arch-nemesis) puts three bullets in him and he’s out of action for a year. Essentially, Spenser is invincible. He is the toughest, most imper­turbable tough guy in Boston, possibly the world. Or joint toughest. The only person as tough as him is a black gangland enforcer called Hawk – and Hawk is Spenser’s best friend. Anyone going up against Spenser and Hawk is going to end up losing. In this respect, I think, these stories anticipate the satisfactions of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, where you never really worry about the hero losing a fight. You just enjoy watching his antagonists come to regret their over-confidence. Here’s a very typical exchange, again from Playmates, as they’re having lunch:

Hawk said, ‘Guy named Bobby Deegan came by to see me.’ ‘Bobby gets around,’ I said. ‘You know him?’ Hawk said. ‘Came by my office this morning,’ I said. ‘Urged me to lay off a thing I was looking into.’ ‘S’pose you said, “sho nuff, Bobby,”’ Hawk said. ‘I was going to,’ I said. ‘But my chin was trembling so bad it was hard to talk.’ ‘Ah,’ Hawk said. ‘That why Bobby looking to have you clipped.’ ‘Clipped?’ ‘Un huh.’ ‘A sweetie like me?’ ‘Un huh.’ ‘Gee,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d won him over.’

The two knock about together – Spenser usually just on the right side of the law, Hawk usually just on the wrong side – and if they have to do some shady deals or twist some arms to get the work done, they do. Spenser and Hawk dip in and out of Boston’s criminal underworld – the pimp Tony Marcus and his jittery teenage gunsel Ty-Bop are recurring characters – and negotiate there on a basis of pragmatism and arm’s length respect. Like Chandler’s paladin Marlowe, Spenser must go down the mean streets without himself being mean. Spenser is at ease with a high body count, but his code of honour trumps the law of the land. His heart really is pure. The way Parker puts it is that Spenser ‘doesn’t always win, but he never loses. And part of the reason that he never loses is that he never ceases to be who he is. He lives life on his own terms and in that sense he’s undefeatable.’ But the Spenser stories depart from their predecessors in all sorts of ways. For a start, where the Chandler–Hammett generation of heroes took their breakfast from a bottle, Spenser is extremely inter­ested in food. He cooks so much, and so elaborately, in the books that fans have even put up a wiki site called ‘The Spenser Cookbook’ detailing everything that he cooks (sample, from Playmates: ‘fresh crabmeat sautéed in olive oil and white wine with red and yellow and green peppers and mushrooms. With potatoes and broccoli dressed with honey mustard’). More than that, Spenser may be hard-boiled professionally but he’s soft-boiled in person. There’s none of the misogyny or homophobia that crackles through 1930s crime-writing. In fact, long before ‘woke’ was even a thing, Spenser was a bit woke: Parker is a Chandler disciple who has digested the legacies of 1960s liberalism. Spenser’s girlfriend Susan is a psychotherapist, for Pete’s sake. Many readers, including me, find Susan kind of annoying: she is princessy and pretentious, nibbles half a biscuit at a time, and fre­quently attempts to psychoanalyse our hero. Yet Spenser’s adoration of and loyalty to Susan is an unwavering theme of the books. Not only does he cook, the soppy big thing, but he is in touch with his emotions, deeply monogamous and dotes on ‘Pearl the Wonder Dog’ – the shorthaired German pointer he shares with Susan. Parker himself was open about having had a lot of therapy, and Spenser’s relationship with Susan (they don’t cohabit, and Pearl is their ‘child’) was modelled on his own unconventional but devoted marriage with his wife Joan. Having been together since their teens, the two separated for a time in the early 1980s. ‘The first year we reunited she lived in a different town. The second she lived in a dif­ferent building. Now she lives upstairs and I live down.’ She lived on the top floor of their three-storey Boston townhouse, he lived on the bottom floor, and they shared the middle floor. As literary editor of the Telegraph, a few years after my stint in New York, I flew to Boston to interview Parker. He did not disap­point. He was stocky and moustachioed and spoke in a growling Massachusetts accent. Then 75, he liked to box and lift weights, just like Spenser. I got on his good side by bringing biscuits for the real-life Pearl the Wonder Dog. I asked whether he agonized over his spare, matter-of-fact prose. I had imagined, perhaps, that he revised and revised, whittling it to the bone in the manner of Pound cutting Eliot. Reader, he did not. ‘I do a first draft,’ he told me. ‘I don’t revise. I don’t reread. I send it in.’ The preference for dialogue, he said, was because it was ‘easy and it chews up a lot of pages’. He was still banging out a novel every three months. He boasted that his publishers ‘bring out three a year and I write four a year, so I’m five or six ahead. If I were to drop dead as we speak there would be books being published well into next year.’ No publisher could manage even three Spensers a year, so Parker invented two more series characters – a police chief called Jesse Stone (who ended up being played on the telly by Burt Reynolds) and a female detective, pretty obviously Spenser in drag, called Sunny Randall. They’ll do at a pinch, but the Spenser stories are really where the action is. Parker did drop dead, in 2010, a couple of years after we met. As he predicted, the books kept coming. Indeed, they did more than just run out the stock. The estate commissioned some other crime writers to keep his franchises going, but the books are nothing without Parker’s style. The best ones have Spenser and Hawk in them. The handful involving the Gray Man are especially good. But, really, it doesn’t matter where you start. The next time you’re passing through an air­port, especially Newark, go to the bookstore and pick up a Robert B. Parker, one of the real ones, for the flight. You’ll make a friend for life.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Sam Leith 2024