includes weapons, whether it’s one-on-one or there’s a whole crowd on hand, whether it happened the day before yesterday or back in the Old West, the man always got it down brilliantly. He did so with great economy, and spared us the gore and the sadism, but you were right there while it went down, and you could see just what happened and how it happened and, well, it was breathtaking. I’d read through one of his scenes a couple of times before going on, not because I was going to school (although I probably was) but because I didn’t want to let go of the experience.
• •
There’s another observation Parker made about his work that has stayed with me ever since I first came upon it. He pointed out that he was not writing realism, that he was in fact writing romance.
Let me capitalize that. He was writing Romance. Not, God help us, in the Harlequin/Solitaire sense, but in the Malory Morte d’Arthur sense. And that’s why it’s perfectly acceptable that Spenser remain the same age forever, that his shining armor remains untarnished, and that, in his affair with Susan, forever wilt he love and she be fair.
It was Parker’s special province to write Romance in a realistic style. And that works quite wonderfully, because it tricks us into suspending disbelief to a remarkable extent. We don’t strain at gnats, but neither do we refrain from swallowing camels.
Consider the sequence in Early Autumn when Spenser takes Paul Giacomin off to make a man out of him. The physical routine he puts the kid through would flat-out kill him, and Spenser doesn’t even give him days off to recover. Parker would have to know as much; he was a weightlifter, if perhaps a less diligent one than his hero.
But he writes it this way anyway, because this is Romance, and he makes it work. A realist would teach the kid a couple of basic exercises and start him off with two or three light sets a day of each, and progress would be a gradual thing. That might make just as good reading, but it would be a different sort of book from the one Parker wanted to write.
And one thing he knew was that everything worked out for the best if he wrote the book he wanted to write.
• •
I had my troubles with Early Autumn . I’d spent enough time lifting heavy metal objects, and enough days afterward with sore muscles, to find the departure from plausibility hard to take. I’ve had my problems with Spenser and Stone and Virgil Cole, all of whom may be described as true-blue, uxorious, or pussy-whipped, as you prefer. (The three terms are hardly mutually exclusive.)
So? I was never the Ideal Reader for Parker’s work, and God knows he got along fine without me. But I did read almost all of the books, and not because of the stories he chose to tell or the characters who peopled them.
I just kind of liked the way they sounded.
• •
And I liked and respected the man. Let’s not leave that out.
I don’t think Parker and my paths crossed more than six or eight times, and we never came close to sitting down for a heart-to-heart. There were a couple of dinners where we were both on the dais, a couple of book biz events that threw us together.
Once, I think at a Left Coast Crime conference in Scottsdale, Bob was doing a one-man act in a large room that was predictably packed. He said he wasn’t comfortable preparing talks, but would do a Q&A—and, not surprisingly, turned out to be very good at it.
Somebody asked him which of his own books was his favorite. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Once they’re done I never look at them.” I was all the way in the rear, but I guess he’d spotted me. “How about you, Larry?” he called out. “Do you ever read your own work?”
“I read nothing else,” I said.
Lord, that was satisfying. You have to love a guy who floatsone belt-high across the plate like that, and does so on the one day in twenty when you’re quick enough to get your bat on it.
• •
I was a bad choice to write
• •
There’s another observation Parker made about his work that has stayed with me ever since I first came upon it. He pointed out that he was not writing realism, that he was in fact writing romance.
Let me capitalize that. He was writing Romance. Not, God help us, in the Harlequin/Solitaire sense, but in the Malory Morte d’Arthur sense. And that’s why it’s perfectly acceptable that Spenser remain the same age forever, that his shining armor remains untarnished, and that, in his affair with Susan, forever wilt he love and she be fair.
It was Parker’s special province to write Romance in a realistic style. And that works quite wonderfully, because it tricks us into suspending disbelief to a remarkable extent. We don’t strain at gnats, but neither do we refrain from swallowing camels.
Consider the sequence in Early Autumn when Spenser takes Paul Giacomin off to make a man out of him. The physical routine he puts the kid through would flat-out kill him, and Spenser doesn’t even give him days off to recover. Parker would have to know as much; he was a weightlifter, if perhaps a less diligent one than his hero.
But he writes it this way anyway, because this is Romance, and he makes it work. A realist would teach the kid a couple of basic exercises and start him off with two or three light sets a day of each, and progress would be a gradual thing. That might make just as good reading, but it would be a different sort of book from the one Parker wanted to write.
And one thing he knew was that everything worked out for the best if he wrote the book he wanted to write.
• •
I had my troubles with Early Autumn . I’d spent enough time lifting heavy metal objects, and enough days afterward with sore muscles, to find the departure from plausibility hard to take. I’ve had my problems with Spenser and Stone and Virgil Cole, all of whom may be described as true-blue, uxorious, or pussy-whipped, as you prefer. (The three terms are hardly mutually exclusive.)
So? I was never the Ideal Reader for Parker’s work, and God knows he got along fine without me. But I did read almost all of the books, and not because of the stories he chose to tell or the characters who peopled them.
I just kind of liked the way they sounded.
• •
And I liked and respected the man. Let’s not leave that out.
I don’t think Parker and my paths crossed more than six or eight times, and we never came close to sitting down for a heart-to-heart. There were a couple of dinners where we were both on the dais, a couple of book biz events that threw us together.
Once, I think at a Left Coast Crime conference in Scottsdale, Bob was doing a one-man act in a large room that was predictably packed. He said he wasn’t comfortable preparing talks, but would do a Q&A—and, not surprisingly, turned out to be very good at it.
Somebody asked him which of his own books was his favorite. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Once they’re done I never look at them.” I was all the way in the rear, but I guess he’d spotted me. “How about you, Larry?” he called out. “Do you ever read your own work?”
“I read nothing else,” I said.
Lord, that was satisfying. You have to love a guy who floatsone belt-high across the plate like that, and does so on the one day in twenty when you’re quick enough to get your bat on it.
• •
I was a bad choice to write
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