Robert B. Parker was once an academic who studied the work of hardboiled crime writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, little expecting that he would later be considered their most distinguished successor.
Parker is best known for Spenser, his wisecracking, streetwise private investigator whose fame was boosted considerably by the US television series Spenser: For Hire in the late 1980s. From 1973, when the run of books began with The Godwulf Manuscript, Parker published a Spenser novel every year, ensuring that his PI left a bigger mark on the crime genre than anyone else for many decades.
Spenser led the way for PIs in the 1980s and 1990s, and many writers have said that they would not have been able to publish private-eye stories had it not been for Parker’s literary creation.
Some Spenser novels were better than others (the early books are widely considered his best) but all are entertaining reads: crime, romance, tight and witty dialogue, plenty of psychological insights and mouth-watering food prepared by Spenser himself. And in each book Parker’s home town of Boston is depicted meticulously — he wanted to make the city real in the same way that Chandler did Los Angeles.
Robert Brown Parker was born in 1932 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child of Carroll and Mary Pauline Parker. He met Joan Hall, the girl who would become his wife, at a birthday party when they were 3; they met again and dated as students at Colby College in Maine. Parker gained a BA in English in 1954 and served as an infantryman with the US Army in Korea. He married Joan two years later, after completing his military service, and having been awarded an MA from Boston University the following year he tried various jobs: management trainee, technical writer and advertising executive. But it was academia that beckoned, and he started a PhD at Boston in the hope that the study, and the professorship that would follow, would give him more time to write.
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The plan paid off. In 1971, while teaching at Northeastern University, Boston, he completed his doctorate (the dissertation was entitled “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”). Two years later The Godwulf Manuscript appeared.
Asked later what had drawn him to the genre, Parker replied: “I have no idea. Probably reading Raymond Chandler early and often. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I remember when it came time to write the first novel, I just sat down and wrote it. I didn’t think what shall I do, shall I update, shall I transfer the crime story from southern California? I just wrote The Godwulf Manuscript. Once you do that and someone buys it and publishes it, you tend to write another one.”
Spenser was loosely based on Chandler’s Marlowe but brought up to date. As well as being a former boxer and ex-policeman, Spenser is a gourmet cook — he likes to marinate lamb chops in red wine and rosemary — and an enthusiast for literature. Like his creator, Spenser works out in a gym; unlike Parker, the private eye drinks: beer, Murphy’s Irish whiskey, Finlandia vodka or a vintage wine.
Spenser is proud, stubborn and never slow to get into a fight, but also literate, amusing and quick-witted — as good with words as with his fists. The character was named after Edmund Spenser, the 16th-century poet whose greatest work, The Faerie Queene, examined knightly virtues. But Spenser’s first name was never used; in fact, Parker said, it was never known because he had not decided on one. The detective’s best friend and right-hand man is an Afro-American mob hitman named Hawk, and his lover is a Jewish feminist therapist called Susan Silverman.
Silverman was clearly based partly on Parker’s wife and helped him to add something extra to the Chandler formula. “With the first book I was kind of imitating Chandler,” he told an interviewer. “In the second I had a little more confidence. When Spenser met Susan, she was just going to be his new bed-mate. Then I realised that it was my opportunity to write about the fundamental fact of my life. I can use her. I can write about love.”
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Parallels between Parker’s life and his fiction are easy to find. Spenser’s separation from, and reconciliation with, Susan echo the Parkers’ marriage (after a period of separation they lived in the same house again, but on separate floors). Spenser’s surrogate son, Paul Giacomin, is a dancer and choreographer, as is Parker’s son David. There are several sympathetic gay characters in Parker’s fiction, and his other son, Daniel, played two of those characters in TV adaptations.
By the late 1980s Parker’s reputation was such that the Raymond Chandler estate asked him to write the final four chapters of the author’s last, unfinished, Marlowe novel, Poodle Springs. That he did in 1989, following it with Perchance to Dream, his attempt at a sequel to Chandler’s first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep. Parker’s readiness to take on these tasks inevitably led some critics to call him arrogant. But being a taut writer, a skilful plotter and a confident man, he made a good job of both books, and Poodle Springs in particular was critically acclaimed and successful commercially. “Parker isn’t, even here, the writer that Chandler was, but he’s not a sentimentalist and he darkens and deepens Marlowe,” a review in The Atlantic Monthly said.
Parker said that very little about his work was planned. “I really don’t know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I have started writing it,” he told one interviewer. With whodunits, he said: “I often don’t know who did it until the book lays out, and I may not know until nearly the end.”
He helped to write scripts for some TV adaptations of Spenser books starring Robert Urich, who played the private eye in the ABC series from 1985 to 1988. Urich died from cancer in 2002, but adaptations continued to be made starring Joe Mantegna. Parker approved of the new actor. “I looked at Joe and saw Spenser,” he said.
The book that Parker felt was his finest work was All Our Yesterdays (1994), a multigenerational saga about an Irish-American family from the early 20th century. It was a critical success but sales were disappointing.
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Parker took several other detours from Spenser. In 1997, with Night Passage, he started a new series featuring Jesse Stone, a former LA police detective with a drink problem who becomes chief of police in a small Massachusetts town. Tom Selleck later played him in television adaptations. In 1999 the novel Family Honor introduced Sunny Randall, a female private eye whom Parker created at the request of the Hollywood actress Helen Hunt. The books sold well but a movie was never made. Parker said later that his wife had helped him with the female point of view. In 2001 he wrote a western, Gunman’s Rhapsody.
When asked once about his writing habits and plots, he replied: “I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer. At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.” He added: “It takes me four or five months to write a novel, which leaves me a lot of time the rest of the year. I don’t like to hang around.”
Overall, Parker wrote more than 60 novels, including 38 Spenser novels. He received a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award in 1976, the year of his third Spenser book, Mortal Stakes, and in 1987, the year of his 14th Spenser, Pale Kings and Princes, an honorary doctorate from Northeastern University, where he taught for more than a decade. Among his last titles were the Spenser books Rough Weather and Chasing the Bear: A Young Spenser Novel and The Professional, the Jesse Stone novels Stranger in Paradise, Night and Day and Split Image (due to be published next month), and the westerns Resolution and Brimstone.
He is survived by his wife and their two sons.
Robert B. Parker, crime writer, was born on September 17, 1932. He died after a heart attack on January 18, 2010, aged 77