| ACE ATKINS |
MY INTRODUCTION TO Robert B. Parker came in the form of an aged paperback of The Godwulf Manuscript, its cover featuring a .45 automatic, a yellow rose, and bullet holes. “What a Find!” declared the L.A. Times. The name—as big as the title—read SPENSER. I got it for ninety-nine cents at a second-hand bookshop a few weeks after the unexpected death of my father. I was a sophomore at Auburn University, where I played football on scholarship, and I was, at the time, absolutely lost on all fronts.
Even before my dad had died, I wasn’t particularly having the time of my life in college. I had coaches who’d changed their mind about my talents and quickly used my father’s death to try to push me from the program and free up my scholarship. I spent a lot of time running laps and doing meaningless and demeaning drills. I was caught in that time between teenager and man and was still in need of a mentor to help me find my way out. Coaches were useless. My father was gone.
Spenser appeared in typical Spenser fashion: right when you need him most.
When someone asks me what made Spenser the character matter to me, the answer is pretty complicated. As a writer, I learned everything about hero-driven detective fiction—and just fiction in general—from Spenser and Robert B. Parker. Through Parker, I was introduced to the Big Three—Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald, an exclusive group he’s now joined. Spenser would lead me to a career as a crime reporter in Florida, where I often used what Spenser taught me to get people to open up or to dig into internal affairs investigations, con men scams, or cold case murders.
I think about Spenser every time I need motivation to go for a jog or lift weights. I think about Spenser when I travel, pick up a menu, or decide on a restaurant. Or if I’m asked if I would like another drink. The answer is always yes.
But as a young man just discovering Robert B. Parker, Spenser first gave me the tools to be the sort of adult I wanted to be. Through Spenser’s smart-assed individualism, Parker let me know that all of those little things that made me different from my teammates and annoyed my coaches were actually okay. He taught me a great deal about tolerance and what was really good about life and how to live it well. He brought me to classic jazz and standards, taught me how to properly dress a salad and core an apple, and instructed me on what kind of beer one should order. You can stumble through life drinking Miller Lite, or you can reach for the Sam Adams Winter Lager. It’s up to you.
Spenser has mentored plenty of lost souls on the page, most notably Paul Giacomin, who’s introduced in Early Autumn. The novel is written much more in the style of Hemingway than Hammett and the other Spenser books, a coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old caught between warring parents, neither of whom could care less about him. After spending weeks protecting Paul and his mother, Spenser works out an agreement to take the boy and finish the job of raising him. He helps Paul become completely autonomous, not needing approval or direction. Spenser teaches him how to box, how to cook, and how to dress properly.
I was never as lost as Paul, a kid who couldn’t button his coat and was self-medicated on soap operas and sitcoms, completely uninvolved in life. My parents were loving, capable, and had done a fine job. I knew how to dress. I knew how to fight.
But after the early death of my father, I was left with a lot of questions about being a man.
In Early Autumn, Spenser provided me with one of those answers when he tells Paul: “The point is not to get hung up on being what you’re supposed to be. If you can, it’s good to do what pleases you.”
That may sound basic, but it was an absolute revelation for me, a young man who, up till that point, was always supposed to be something that other people said was important. I was not so sure. I felt some kinship with Paul, who admits halfway through the novel that he actually wanted to be a dancer. He tells Spenser this in almost embarrassment. For me, talking about wanting to be a writer was almost as tough.
Those of you who aren’t from the South may have a difficult time fully understanding the importance of football there, especially in my native Alabama. Everyone—no, everyone—identifies themselves through their allegiance to either Auburn or the University of Alabama. Children don’t get much of a say in the matter, as they are born into Auburn or Alabama families, much in the same way someone is born Jewish or Catholic. As the son of Auburn’s 1957 national championship team’s MVP, I was expected to bleed orange and blue. Except that I didn’t.
I was expected to believe that playing Auburn football was the apex of my existence, the single greatest thing I would ever do, something I would look back on with misty tears one day while greeting friends with a heartfelt “War Eagle!” Notably, my father, although he worked for the NFL for thirty years, never got sentimental about football. But he did care about it deeply, enough to make it his life’s work, and enough that one of his biggest insults for someone he didn’t like was that they were a “non-athlete.”
Instead, I found I just didn’t care all that much. I liked challenging my body physically and working hard. I liked sacking a quarterback about as much as I loved talking about books, music, and classic movies. But all the pomp and circumstance, the team chants and cheerleading, felt stupid to me. I did not cry after a loss; I only thought of what could be fixed or done better.
You have to understand that my lack of enthusiasm for the football culture would be like an Orthodox Jew not caring about being kosher. It was heresy to some. Spenser let me know that not being a joiner or cheering on the team was more than fine. You could actually read books and enjoy them and still be a tough guy and a good athlete.
I had coaches who thought I wasn’t serious enough about football because I read novels while getting my ankle taped for practice. They’d scoff at me for carrying around a paperback, as if reading for pleasure was some kind of novelty. Often, that paperback was Parker’s, or Hemingway’s, or Elmore Leonard’s. I learned through Spenser that a man could equally enjoy plays and film and good jazz and kicking someone’s ass now and then. A man was not just one thing. A man could take pleasures in all things, athletic and cultural.
As a teenager, I already had a love of classic film, most notably noirs and Westerns. After discovering Parker, I decided to take classes at Auburn on film and screenplay writing. I learned even more about the structure and technique of writing from a professor who I’d later find out had been a star football player at the University of Mississippi.
I began to do more than just watch movies and read books, I dissected them and learned from the masters: Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, and John Ford. (Someday, I’d correspond with Bob Parker about our shared obsession with Shane and The Magnificent Seven.)
I did the same with music, often digging through the CD bins for music that Spenser liked: Monk and Coltrane, Miles Davis and Chet Baker. Most college students I knew were into disposable Top 40 or those too-earnest college bands. Through Spenser, I found myself drawn to all things good and classic. Spenser tells us that the quality of everyday things makes life worth living. You should also shine your dress shoes, shave carefully, and handle your liquor.
About a year into meeting Spenser, my mom stood in line for more than an hour at a bookstore in Atlanta to get me a signed copy of Double Deuce. Through that meeting, I found out that Bob Parker’s nickname was also Ace, after a Hall of Fame football player who’d been a friend of my dad’s. I could not have been more proud. The first edition Bob signed is one of my prized possessions to this day.
Yeah, I collected rare books, too.
I recently had a discussion about being an athlete who wanted to be more with a friend who’d had a similar situation. We talked about being stranded between two worlds that each wanted us to be one thing. We’d both had professors who were just as bigoted as my coaches, believing the dumb jock stereotypes. They’d either grade me harder or discount me entirely because I was a football player. They could not imagine that a guy who could bench press more than four hundred pounds might actually really dig William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
It kind of upsets the rules.
Or, as Spenser says in Early Autumn: “Because they don’t know any better. . . . Because they don’t know what they are, or how to find out, or what a good person is, or how to find out. So they rely on categories.”
About this same time, I’d tried to gain admittance into an undergraduate creative writing program only to be told the class was too full. I still feel—although I may be wrong—that it had something to do with me being a football player. I was pretty much ostracized on both fronts. Damned if you do . . .
Thank God for Spenser. He basically told me, “Who gives a shit.” And as far as respecting authority, he taught me that you’re a fool if you don’t question it at every turn.
Spenser tells Paul why his father can’t contemplate a more truthful way of defining oneself in Early Autumn:
“But he doesn’t really know how to be a good man, so he goes for the simple rules that someone else told him. It’s easier than thinking, and safe. The other way you have to decide for yourself. You have to come to some conclusions about your own behavior and then you might find that you couldn’t live up to it.”
As Parker tells us, Spenser had played football on scholarship at Holy Cross but wasn’t much on being told what to do or much of a “rah-rah” kind of guy. He left early to join the Army and later work for the Middlesex DA’s Office, or as Bob later put it, “be a cop.” Spenser didn’t last long working in a hierarchy and reporting to others. He wanted to handle situations himself. He liked being his own person—he thrived on it. I understood.
Being a novelist is a lot like being a private investigator. You spend a lot of time studying others. You always keep a bottle in your desk drawer. I don’t think I could do anything else to make a living. Operating under someone else’s rule system never appealed to me.
At Auburn, I was surrounded by a lot of zealous self-proclaimed Christian coaches. Several of them were hypocrites, unrepentant adulterers and alcoholics every day but Sunday. In situations that should have bred contempt and disenchantment, Spenser taught me to only expect more of the same and rise above it. Just because they were adults doesn’t mean they were to be respected and followed blindly.
It’s better to just recognize who you are dealing with and act accordingly. Spenser can share space with a vicious thug or a pompous professor without it changing him. He even finds some enjoyment in watching them work.
I had always had a distrust of authority, but Spenser really taught me how to laugh at those who try to control others, those who try to rattle and upset whomever they challenge. Nothing pisses off controlling personalities more than laughing at them.
Sometimes this would get me into trouble. Burning through all the existing Spenser books—at the time from Godwulf to Paper Doll—finely honed my natural smartass talents and increased my confidence to use them in interactions with coaches. These were grown men telling kids they’d never amount to anything and had better just quit now. They wanted to run you down as far as you could go to show who was in control. By using humor (with new confidence, thanks to Spenser), I was able to battle back and gain admiration from my teammates.
My junior year I had a run-in with my strength and conditioning coach, a portly guy who barely stood above five feet and was known for his always-present tobacco spit cup and his sanctimonious prayer meetings before weights. One day, I caught him in a long repose on a bench press, holding his head up with the flat of his hand, inadvertently posing like a centerfold model. Before I thought about it, I said, “Looking sexy today, coach.”
He got off the weight bench and started to admonish me for acting like “a damn homosexual.”
I assured him that if I were a homosexual, he definitely was too short and fat for my taste.
A lot of stadium stairs were run that day.
I also learned it wasn’t a good idea to correct my position coach’s grammar. He said the only books worth reading were either the Bible or were written by televangelist Pat Robertson and believed the past tense of the word squeeze was “squez.” After the hundredth time hearing this, I raised my hand, telling him the truth.
The laughter from my teammates was worth every step. And the confidence I gained from making light of the men trying to run me from the program allowed me to finish what I started. I made it through my senior year, a season where a new coach led us to an undefeated year and I was fortunate enough to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
I think Spenser would have liked how it all turned out.
I don’t think I ever considered how a man wouldn’t go for a hot Jewish woman like Susan Silverman or trust his life with a tough black guy like Hawk. After all, I’d grown up with a father working in the NFL, and some of the coolest, most bad-ass dudes I met in my youth were black, as were my present teammates and buddies. But as a teenager, the idea of being around someone gay was fraught with a lot of questions, hesitations, and jokes. This was something I’d never really considered at a young age. Most men who played football or sports would use offensive gay slurs for men who didn’t. There was a lot of locker room humor and dummies like that weight coach who looked at homosexuals as people afflicted by a disease—as if you could catch it.
In college, Spenser absolutely molded my views on sexual orientation. Why should a man fear or look down on a man or woman who’s gay? This has been a topic of conversation for Spenser since Looking for Rachel Wallace, when Spenser is hired to guard an outspoken lesbian writer. Hate mongers and bigots have threatened to kill Rachel Wallace if she publishes a book on oppression. Spenser muses over why he should pass judgment on someone’s sexual orientation; after all, he’s sure that he and Susan “weren’t all that slick in the actual doing ourselves. When you thought about it, maybe none of us were doing Swan Lake.”
In Paper Doll we first meet Detective Lee Farrell, a hard Boston cop whose partner is dying of AIDS. The relationship between Spenser and Farrell is of two men who live by the same code of honor and believe in the same thing. Who they take to bed is completely irrelevant.
The meeting of the two starts off in rocky fashion, with Spenser telling Farrell to let go of the chip on his shoulder:
“I don’t care if you are as good as I am or not. I don’t care if you’re tough or not, or smart or not. I don’t care if you are gay or straight or both or neither. I care about finding out who killed that broad with a framing hammer, and so far you’re not helping me worth shit.”
But the conversation is between two men who set out to do a job, all prejudices aside.
Later in the series, we meet Teddy Sapp, an exceptionally bad-ass Georgia bouncer who just happens to be gay. Spenser judges Sapp on his ability as a tough and someone to count on. Again, not exactly ideas I’d considered as a teenager. But if Spenser could respect a gay man for his professionalism and personal code, then I figured I would, too.
In the world of tough crime fiction, Spenser’s acceptance and appreciation of the gay community was light years ahead when Paper Doll was published twenty years ago or when Rachel Wallace hit stores more than thirty years ago. Spenser talked about discrimination in the work place, the AIDS epidemic, and committed gay relationships long before these were mainstream conversations. If Spenser can influence a young man raised in a traditional home and living in a very macho-driven world to change his thinking, imagine what Spenser has done for millions of other readers.
When we think of Spenser, we all think of good food and drink. It’s as much a part of his character as his love of baseball or the .357 he keeps in his right-hand desk drawer. No one is better at throwing a meal together from assorted items found in the refrigerator or pantry. Although he enjoys a steak at Grill 23 or a lobster sandwich at Locke-Ober, he also has a deep appreciation of an assorted dozen from Dunkin’ Donuts. Spenser is never snobbish, but self-assured on what he likes to eat and what he likes to cook.
I know Spenser definitely led me to cooking. As a teenage boy, I had no interest in making apple fritters or baking corn muffins. But a few books into the series, I realized how much fun and how relaxing cooking can be. I started to experiment with ingredients, diving more into Creole and Cajun cooking, looking for places to find really good andouille or redfish. I have hand picked apples to be cored, dipped in a simple batter and fried in rings for fritters. Grocery shopping isn’t just monotony with Spenser; it’s full of possibilities and excitement.
As Spenser noted in Pastime,
“I’ve spent a lot of my time alone, and I have learned to treat myself as if I were a family. I give myself dinner at night. I give myself breakfast in the morning. I like the process of deciding what to eat and putting it together and seeing how it works, and I like to experiment, and I like to eat. There is nothing lonelier than some guy alone in the kitchen eating Chinese food out of the carton.”
As a young newspaper reporter in Tampa, I lived in a small studio in a brick apartment building built in the ‘20s. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I always stocked Sam Adams, good whiskey, and basic items that could create a quick and delicious meal. I was often on my own, even on the weekends, and I’d pour myself a cocktail, turn on some Coltrane, and have a terrific evening. Being alone and being content was a fine place to be. Self-sufficiency is being content with yourself.
“What you’re good at is less important than being good at something. You got nothing. You care about nothing. So I’m going to have you be strong, be in shape, be able to run ten miles, and be able to lift more than you weigh and be able to box. I’m going to have you know how to build and cook and to work hard and to push yourself and control yourself. Maybe we can get to reading and looking at art and listening to something beside situation comedies later on. But right now I’m working your body because it’s easier to start there.”
—Early Autumn
Early on, I didn’t really need Spenser to tell me to keep in shape. I had to keep in shape, or I could be hurt pretty badly or lose my scholarship. Training was an everyday thing. I checked into the weight room daily, ran sprints and distance. It was one part of the college athlete experience that I actually enjoyed.
But after college, I really had to find drive and motivation to keep making time for this. I was working a pretty competitive beat at the newspaper, and a few hours in the gym or jogging wasn’t easily found. But as Spenser tells us, the purpose of a training regimen is developing discipline, not necessarily to lift the most weight or be the fastest. Keeping in check with your body and pushing yourself will manifest itself in other positive ways.
As a young reporter, I ended up joining a gym that stepped right out of a Parker novel. It was run by a tough, short, ex–pro wrestler named Harry Smith, who was every bit as tough and salty as Henry Cimoli. Harry is the kind of guy who gave every ethnicity grief for their known stereotypes while proudly flying all the flags of his member’s ethnicities on the gym roof. The gym became like my second home when I lived in Tampa, and it was a hell of a good place to learn some one-liners.
I’ve just hit my forties, about the same age as Spenser when we met him in The Godwulf Manuscript, and the training gets harder every year. But it’s become a core part of my writing routine, especially now that I’m writing two physical heroes. I work out storyline ideas as I run or battle some tough rednecks or Southie thugs as I hit the heavy bag. Spenser taught me that sometimes the toughest answers are found while you sweat.
I’d spent most of my life looking around in dark places that were often appalling. But oddly, I was never really appalled. I looked where I needed to look to do what I did. And what was there was there. I’d done it too long to speculate too much on why it was there. When I needed to, I could flatten out my emotional response until it was simply blank. I liked what I did, probably because I was good at it.
—Painted Ladies
I don’t know if anyone could ever fully be Spenser—I’ve never met anyone that cool in real life. Parker always said Spenser could do five times what he could do. I don’t think he just meant physically. Not only was Spenser unflappable around the assholes he met, he could find enjoyment anywhere he went. He entertained himself equally by knowing and recognizing the details of a police house, a fine restaurant, or a flophouse motel.
I think the reason readers have stayed with Spenser for nearly forty books, making him arguably the most successful private eye series of all time, is Spenser’s outlook. There is something in the pages of the novels that makes readers take note of the world around them, maybe enjoy that cup of coffee as they sit at the airport or pay more attention to where they are at that very moment. And I feel this is a crucial lesson these days as people become more absorbed in the digital world without experiencing the actual world. Spenser is all in the here and now. This serves him well as an investigator, a bodyguard, and as someone who has survived numerous attempts on his life. But it’s also a worldview that helps him enjoy life more than the rest of us.
There have been countless times I’ve returned to Spenser when I feel I’ve run aground, when I’m experiencing grief, or when I feel I’m overwhelmed with too much in my head. There is a rhythm and a Zen energy that Parker developed for Spenser that transfers well beyond the page, adjusting readers’ outlooks even if it’s just for the time they’re reading the novel. You can hear the wind, the leaves in the trees, and appreciate the change of seasons.
In that, Bob Parker has left us much more than just an entertaining series and compelling hero. In the spaces between and during the action, he’s taught us how to untie our minds and stand still, to watch and enjoy what’s going on around us. To be here now.
As Spenser heads into his fortieth adventure, I was honored to be chosen by the Parker estate to continue this iconic series that has meant so much to me. As I started the task, I was filled with natural self-doubt and hesitation. I found it a bit ironic, knowing that Spenser chose an ex–college football player with an appreciation for bourbon as his apprentice in Sixkill, the last novel that Bob wrote. In that book, Susan and Spenser talk about Sixkill’s transformation:
SUSAN: If he learns what you know, and behaves as you behave, then it allows him to slough off the costume.
SPENSER: So I haven’t helped him change as much as I’ve helped him get out.
And as I write, I keep in mind what Spenser tells Sixkill when they first take on a bunch of thugs together, feeling like I’m walking with Bob as I do this:
Four men came out of the entrance tunnel and onto the field.
“Don’t think about it. You’ve trained enough. It should come as needed. Like riding a bicycle.”
After two decades of friendship, I’ve learned a hell of a lot.