“Fashion goes out of style, yet style never goes out of
fashion,” says the stylish essayist and short story writer Joseph
Epstein of the late stylish singer and dancer Fred Estaire. The
quote is from Epstein’s very readable Fred Astaire of
2008.
This truism holds for writing as well as hoofing, which
everyone agrees Astaire brought off with more style than anyone. In
fact, style may be the most durable quality in writing, especially
in the currently popular genre of crime fiction.
If style is the man, the man is the late Robert B. Parker,
whose next to last Spenser novel,
Painted Ladies, is on book store shelves now and
available, along with a considerable Parker back list, for last
minute stocking stuffing.
Parker’s fast-moving crime stories are written in spare
but insistent prose, short on description but with much crisp,
often amusing dialogue. The stories never lag and the plot is
supplemented by Parker’s acute observations on the social scene,
friendship, loyalty, integrity, responsibility, courage, the place
of work and love in our lives, and what it means to be a man or
woman in our current post-everything jumble.
That’s quite a bit for genre fiction to carry. But Parker
delivers much of what readers used to look for elsewhere before
literary fiction fell on hard times. What on earth is Ian
McEwan nattering on about?
“Ladies” — they aren’t what you’re doubtless thinking
they are — gets underway when a professor and art expert asks
Spenser to act as bodyguard during an exchange of money for a
kidnapped painting. The painting-nappers insist Spenser stay in the
car during the swap, which sees the painting and the professor
blown up by a bomb. There was little Spenser could have done to
prevent this, but this is a violation of his code he isn’t about to
let stand.
The museum that owned the painting, the company that
insured it, and the university where Spenser’s late client worked
don’t seem interested in the painting or the professor’s sorry end.
When a couple of very professional hit guys try to take Spenser
permanently off the case, he doubles down his efforts.
As Spenser unravels the mystery through a tight,
well-constructed plot, readers learn a bit about art theft and
forgery, all connected to some holocaust survivors and some bad
actors who are not what they seem to be until Spenser unmasks
them.
Ladies is the next to the last
Parker novel featuring Spenser, the tough but literate Boston PI
(no first name is ever given — though in a tease in
Ladies it is for the first time revealed that Spenser has
a first name). This well-wrought Spenser story and
Sixkill, which Putnam’s will bring out in May, are proof
of literary life after death.
Parker went on to his reward in January after a heart
attack at his office writing desk. If delighting tens of millions
of readers for decades counts for much in the Final Calculus, that
reward should be considerable. Parker was a fast writer and
prolific. Though he was 42 and a full professor of English at
Northeastern University when his first novel was published, he
brought out more than 50 crime novels and a handful of westerns by
the time he died at 77. At his death he left behind four completed
manuscripts, including the final Jesse Stone novel (yes, the series
of made-for-TV movies with Tom Selleck as Stone), a western, and
two Spensers.
But not to worry, Parker may have earned a PhD in English
but he never wrote like a professor (see above re style). I
challenge those laboring under the impression that English PhDs can
write to pick up any edition of the Publication of the Modern
Language Association (the English professor’s trade publication)
and try to read any article. But DO NOT do this on any day when you
have to drive or operate heavy equipment.
By the time Parker and Spenser appeared on the mystery
scene in 1973 in The Godwulf Manuscript, many thought the
private eye genre was exhausted. It was indeed getting a bit seedy
and down at heels. The high practitioners of the art — Raymond
Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Ross MacDonald were dead or no
longer writing and Mickey Spillane was pretty crude
stuff.
Even the work of the Big Three was pretty dark, noir
stuff, artfully done but demanding a high tolerance for cynicism
and world-weariness. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Hammett’s Sam
Spade, and MacDonald’s Lew Archer were isolated loners with not
much in the way of lives outside of their jobs. Unhappy men who
could be real downers.
Spenser, au the contraire, has a love life, friends, and a
realistic outlook on this complex, marvelous, but sometimes
menacing world, and great humor. Spenser’s wise-cracks are funny,
and unlike the mordant ones of Marlowe don’t make readers, after
they’ve laughed, feel like they want to take a shower. Spenser can
spend times down the mean streets without forgetting how to have a
good time. Parker and his knight errant brought the private eye
novel back to life and put a happier face on it. His reward was
tens of millions of book sales over four decades and legions of
satisfied readers.
The
last time I wrote about Parker for TAS some
correspondents complained that Parker was too liberal to be whooped
up in a conservative publication. A movement conservative
prosecutor could probably come up with some charges and
specifications: Parker’s keenness on the benefits of psychotherapy,
the fact that some of the villains in his stories are clearly right
extremists, and his going perhaps further out of the way than
necessary to demonstrate that he isn’t anti-gay. But it’s too
facile to conclude from these things that this complex writer is
just another lefty.
Throughout his many works Parker, and his readers, also
had fun at the expense of feminist, environmentalist, and food
extremists. He takes the hide off of academe for the many egregious
offenses there (he was in the belly of that beast for a decade).
His defense of the manly virtues alone is enough to give him an
ideological pass.
Spenser is all for sexual equality, but doesn’t for a
second entertain the absurd modern notion that men and women, save
for size, strength, and plumbing, are more or less the same. Life
for Spenser is to be enjoyed as we find it and not hobbled by the
fanciful abstractions that so bedevil leftists. Now that’s a
TAS approach.
TAS regulars can’t spend all their
time reading about unfunded mandates and other perfidies of the
left. For the well-earned fiction break, I raise up the
entertainments of Robert B. Parker, especially the Spenser novels.
After a few hours with Spenser, hardy conservatives can return to
the battle refreshed and confident.
