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.
Early Autumn [Spenser #7]
Early Autumn [Spenser #7]
“[Robert B.] Parker’s brilliance is in his simple dialogue, and in Spenser.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
A bitter divorce is only the beginning. First the father hires thugs to kidnap his son. Then the mother hires Spenser to get the boy back. But as soon as Spenser senses the lay of the land, he decides to do some kidnapping of his own.
With a contract out on his life, he heads for the Maine woods, determined to give a puny 15 year old a crash course in survival and to beat his dangerous opponents at their own brutal game.