to his task more as a fan than an author. He wrote the first book, Murder in E Minor , for the private pleasure of his mother, who longed to read more about her favorite characters; it was his own first novel, and wasn’t published until 1986, eight years after he’d written it. By 1994 he’d published six more, and that was that. A decade later he began writing books of his own.
As I said, I found Murder in E Minor unsettling. It almost felt as though Stout had written it, and the narrator almost sounded like Archie. There was one stunning glitch, in that Archie smoked a cigarette or two in the book’s course, and that was about as startling as if Lilian Jackson Braun’s Qwilleran were to whip out his pen knife and geld a cat. A few thousand readers called this to the author’s attention and in the books that followed we heard no more of Archie and tobacco.
But the rest, as I said, was almost right. And, naturally enough, Goldsborough improved as he went on. He becamea better writer, as one is apt to do with practice, and he also became better at sounding like Stout and at putting Wolfean words into the mouths of his characters.
It’s my impression that members of the Wolfe Pack, that enduring sodality of ardent West 35th Street Irregulars, have varying degrees of enthusiasm for the post-mortem Wolfe books. They did bestow the Nero award on the first book and surely read the others. The consensus seems to be that they’re glad to have these seven further adventures but do not for a moment confuse them with the genuine article.
I read the first, as I’ve said, and one or two others. For all I know, they may have been more suspenseful and more strongly plotted than the originals, but I’d never read Rex Stout for plot or suspense. I read, like everybody else, for the pleasure of the writing and the charm of the characters, and Robert Goldsborough was not entirely lacking in those areas. He worked very hard at sounding like Rex Stout and at letting his narrator sound and act like Archie Goodwin.
Rex Stout, of course, never worked at it. He didn’t have to.
• •
And there, I submit, is the problem. Ace Atkins is a fine writer, and at least as gifted in plot construction as Parker himself. (Here’s a Spenser plot: 1. A client brings Spenser a problem. 2. Spenser studies the situation and figures it out. 3. Spenser addresses the problem and brings it to a successful conclusion. There’s a lot of snappy dialogue and some of the best physical action anyone ever wrote, but those three sentences pretty much cover it in terms of plot.)
I don’t know what Ace Atkins has going for him in the way of mimetic ability, but I’m willing to believe he’ll do a fine job of sounding like Parker. I gather he’s a Parker fan even as Parker was a Chandler fan, and Goldsborough aRex Stout fan. We can assume he understands Spenser and Hawk and Susan, and will know what words to put in their mouths, and how they’ll react to the situations in which he places them.
I can’t make all of the same assumptions about Michael Brandman, with whose writing I’m not familiar. As I understand it, his background is TV, and he worked closely with Parker on the adaptations of the Jesse Stone stories for that medium. One might infer that his strengths lie in plot and story construction, but there’s no reason he might not be able to provide a reasonable facsimile of the Parker voice.
Here’s the thing: No matter how good a job either of these fellows does, no matter how much skill and sensitivity they bring to the table, and no matter how much thought and effort they apply, all they can attempt to provide is an imitation of a genuine original.
I guess there’s a place for that sort of thing. Look at all the Elvis impersonators, all the tribute bands.
• •
I alluded to this a few paragraphs back, but it can stand elaboration: Nobody ever wrote a better fight scene than Robert B. Parker. Whether the violence is hand-to-hand or
As I said, I found Murder in E Minor unsettling. It almost felt as though Stout had written it, and the narrator almost sounded like Archie. There was one stunning glitch, in that Archie smoked a cigarette or two in the book’s course, and that was about as startling as if Lilian Jackson Braun’s Qwilleran were to whip out his pen knife and geld a cat. A few thousand readers called this to the author’s attention and in the books that followed we heard no more of Archie and tobacco.
But the rest, as I said, was almost right. And, naturally enough, Goldsborough improved as he went on. He becamea better writer, as one is apt to do with practice, and he also became better at sounding like Stout and at putting Wolfean words into the mouths of his characters.
It’s my impression that members of the Wolfe Pack, that enduring sodality of ardent West 35th Street Irregulars, have varying degrees of enthusiasm for the post-mortem Wolfe books. They did bestow the Nero award on the first book and surely read the others. The consensus seems to be that they’re glad to have these seven further adventures but do not for a moment confuse them with the genuine article.
I read the first, as I’ve said, and one or two others. For all I know, they may have been more suspenseful and more strongly plotted than the originals, but I’d never read Rex Stout for plot or suspense. I read, like everybody else, for the pleasure of the writing and the charm of the characters, and Robert Goldsborough was not entirely lacking in those areas. He worked very hard at sounding like Rex Stout and at letting his narrator sound and act like Archie Goodwin.
Rex Stout, of course, never worked at it. He didn’t have to.
• •
And there, I submit, is the problem. Ace Atkins is a fine writer, and at least as gifted in plot construction as Parker himself. (Here’s a Spenser plot: 1. A client brings Spenser a problem. 2. Spenser studies the situation and figures it out. 3. Spenser addresses the problem and brings it to a successful conclusion. There’s a lot of snappy dialogue and some of the best physical action anyone ever wrote, but those three sentences pretty much cover it in terms of plot.)
I don’t know what Ace Atkins has going for him in the way of mimetic ability, but I’m willing to believe he’ll do a fine job of sounding like Parker. I gather he’s a Parker fan even as Parker was a Chandler fan, and Goldsborough aRex Stout fan. We can assume he understands Spenser and Hawk and Susan, and will know what words to put in their mouths, and how they’ll react to the situations in which he places them.
I can’t make all of the same assumptions about Michael Brandman, with whose writing I’m not familiar. As I understand it, his background is TV, and he worked closely with Parker on the adaptations of the Jesse Stone stories for that medium. One might infer that his strengths lie in plot and story construction, but there’s no reason he might not be able to provide a reasonable facsimile of the Parker voice.
Here’s the thing: No matter how good a job either of these fellows does, no matter how much skill and sensitivity they bring to the table, and no matter how much thought and effort they apply, all they can attempt to provide is an imitation of a genuine original.
I guess there’s a place for that sort of thing. Look at all the Elvis impersonators, all the tribute bands.
• •
I alluded to this a few paragraphs back, but it can stand elaboration: Nobody ever wrote a better fight scene than Robert B. Parker. Whether the violence is hand-to-hand or
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