Robert B. Parker
Robert Brown Parker (1932-2010) was a New England soul with a Massachusetts heart and Boston blood. He had a mind patient enough to play the academic game (Colby College B.A., Boston University M.A. and Ph.D.). He taught at Northeaster University from 1971-1979, notching a full professorship in 1976. He was a Korean War veteran. His first novel was published in 1971. When he left academia for full-time writing in 1979 he had had five novels published about a private eye named Spenser.
By the time his life-long wife Joan (the model for Spenser’s love, Susan Silverman) found him dead at his writing table in 2010, he had written 39 Spenser novels, 9 novels featuring Jesse Stone (a L.A. cop who retires to a New England small town), 6 novels featuring Sunny Randall (a female private eye, ex-cop, Boston-based), and 4 Westerns about Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. An assortment of other books, including an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, rounded out his prolific career.
Parker rejuvenated the private eye literary field, one he loved and respected. He was a master of an ironic humor, economy of action, and an understated passionate drive in his protagonists. He had his literary jokes, but they were as often meant to puncture pretension as to wink at the reader.
After his death, Joan carried out Parker’s wishes (or his lack of territoriality) by arranging that his “properties” be continued by other writers who would respect the integrity of what he had created. I include those books here as well as Parker’s own addictive works.
DVD - Jesse Stone series starring Tom Selleck volume 2
DVD - Jesse Stone series starring Tom Selleck volume 2
"Benefit Of The Doubt": In "Jesse Stone: Benefit Of The Doubt", Jesse finds himself struggling to get his job back as the Paradise police chief, and he is forced to rely on his cop intuition to sort through a maze of misleading clues and hidden meanings as he attempts to solve a shocking and horrifying mob-related double homicide.
"Innocents Lost": Tom Selleck returns as Paradise's anguished former Chief of Police, Jesse Stone, in his most gripping mystery yet. Cindy Van Aldan was like a daughter to Jesse. Now she's dead. Although all signs point to a suicidal drug overdose a checkered history riddled with addiction, associations with homicidal mobsters and an involvement in prostitution Jesse knows his friend better than that. This time it's personal, and Jesse will stop at nothing to avenge the lost innocence and subsequent death of the young girl he once mentored.
"Night Passage": Emmy (R) and Golden Globe (R) Award winner Tom Selleck ("Three Men And A Baby," TV's "Magnum, P.I." ) reprises his starring role as police chief Jesse Stone in this prequel to the hit telefilm "Stone Cold," based on the best-selling series of Jesse Stone murder/mystery novels by Robert B. Parker. Following his divorce and the loss of his job as a homicide detective with the LAPD, Stone travels across the country to Paradise, Massachusetts, a small and seemingly quiet New England town where he is recruited by the town's board of selectmen to become the new Chief of Police. But things are not quite so heavenly in Paradise, as Stone starts off his first day on the job investigating a domestic abuse case that leads to a money-laundering scheme possibly involving bank manager Hasty Hathaway (Saul Rubinek, "Unforgiven," "The Contender") one of the men responsible for hiring Stone. Stephen Baldwin and Stephanie March co-star. Will town officials be able to stop Stone from digging too deep into their dirty secrets, or will Stone and his dedicated police force be able to unearth a deadly cover-up in "Night Passage".
"Sea Change": In this exciting drama, Jesse Stone has settled in as the police chief of the small New England town of Paradise, Mass, and his ultimate nightmare has come true: Stone finds himself filling his time writing parking tickets and struggling to keep his ever-present attraction to beautiful women and booze under control. With one of his officers on maternity leave and another fighting for his life after suffering a gunshot wound, Jesse's restlessness gets the best of him and he re-opens a 12-year-old cold case involving the murder of a bank teller. Jesse finds his unsolved case unfolding while he's also investigating the tawdry circumstances surrounding an alleged rape aboard a yacht during the town's annual Race Week.
Jesse Stone Collection: Volume 2 (DVD)