| PARNELL HALL |
THERE’S NOTHING UNIQUE about a wisecracking private investigator. Smart-mouthed PIs are a dime a dozen. Every private eye writer in the last thirty years has one—and for good reason. They’ve all read the Spenser novels, and they’ve molded their private eyes after him. I know I did. When I started my first Stanley Hastings novel, back in the mid-80s, I wanted a private eye that talked like Spenser. Never mind that my private eye was an ordinary family man who never had fist fights or car chases, and didn’t even carry a gun. (I was working as a PI at the time, chasing ambulances for a negligence lawyer, and I modeled the character after myself.) If my PI could talk like Spenser, I was convinced he’d be fun to read.
Other writers felt the same. And so a whole generation of clever PIs was born. Many were closer to Spenser than mine, being tough and athletic and jogging and having dangerous sidekicks like Hawk. But all, to the best of their authors’ abilities, talked like Spenser.
And yet Spenser stands out.
It is not just that he is better at it, though he is. His remarks are rooted in his personality. Spenser is a knight in shining armor, a do-gooder, a man who lives by a code of honor, with values and standards and principles. His jests humanize him, mask his heroism, diffuse the macho image that is rightfully his. Without humor, he would appear a self-righteous prig, adhering to a strict moral code. With it, he is a jaunty, cocky son of a bitch, constantly ridiculing himself while he ridicules others.
And he is just so damn good at it.
Whatever the situation, Spenser is as quick with a quip as he is with his fists. He hits the ground running in The Godwulf Manuscript with his description of a blond co-ed: “She was wearing something in purple suede that was too short for a skirt and too long for a belt.”
And he doesn’t let up, asking Lieutenant Martin Quirk, who tries to intimidate him, “Can I feel your muscle?”
Or asking mob boss Joe Broz, “Do you always dress in blue and white . . . or do you have your office redone to match your clothes every day?”
And he tackles everything from sex to politics to religion, always with the same irreverent attitude.
In The Widening Gyre, he is asked to bodyguard a senatorial candidate who has been getting death threats. The candidate questions his religious beliefs: “Do you believe in almighty God?”
Spenser answers, “Why? Does he want to hire me?” As the candidate reacts in shock, Spenser, always the feminist, adds: “Or she.”
It’s not only the attitude and circumstances that characterize Spenser’s wit. It’s also his ability to convey volumes with just a few words. When Spenser meets the radical feminist with whom he clashes in Looking for Rachel Wallace, her editor, desperately trying to placate her, says Spenser has read her book. Rachel asks him what he thought of it.
He answers, “I think you are rehashing Simone de Beauvoir.”
Notice the delicious triple-thrust of the remark. First, he fails to pay her a compliment, which is clearly what she expected. Second, he demonstrates a knowledge of feminism that Rachel, in her prejudice, assumed he would not have, plus the fact he was aware of that assumption. And, third, he offers the opinion that she is merely a second-rate imitation of other, genuinely important feminists.
That’s a hell of a lot to pack into one short sentence. But Spenser does it with ease.
Rachel, fighting back, proceeds to grill him on his knowledge of Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps to make sure he is not quoting something he read in the press release. Spenser passes the test while labeling it for what it is.
Rachel asks, “What did you feel was her most persuasive insight?” To which Spenser answers, “Her suggestion that women occupied the position of other. Are we having a quiz later?”
Rachel has no sense of humor and tells him so. Instead of reassuring her it will be no problem, he says, “Okay if now and then I enjoy a wry, inward smile if struck by one of life’s vagaries?”
Perhaps he is trying too hard to impress her with his erudition; still, the remark is priceless.
Spenser’s intelligence is on display in every quip. In Early Autumn, Spenser has to rescue Paul Giacomin, a teenaged boy, from his dysfunctional family. This is not, of course, the job for which he was hired. In this case, the divorced wife is the client, and the initial task is to retrieve the boy from the father, who won’t return him.
Spenser quickly realizes the boy is nothing more than a trophy the two are fighting over in order to hurt each other. Not one to pull his punches, he sums up the situation for the wife: “Capture the flag.”
Short, punchy, insulting, and rude, but dead-on accurate.
To find Paul, Spenser tails the father’s girlfriend to his house, breaks in, and surprises the two of them. The father immediately threatens to call the cops.
Spenser’s response? “I enjoy meeting policemen. Sometimes if you’re good they let you play with their handcuffs.”
Spenser has the father and girlfriend buffaloed. As he describes the situation: “He looked at me. Elaine Brooks looked at me. If there’d been a mirror, I would have looked at me. But there wasn’t, so I looked at them.”
Humor permeates the scene. Even the description has a playful nature.
Spenser often takes delight in playing with words. In his first adventure, The Godwulf Manuscript, he is hired by a university to recover a rare stolen manuscript. The head of campus security takes exception to some of Spenser’s questions:
“Who the hell is employing who? I want to know your results, and you start asking me questions about professors.”
“Whom,” I said.
“Huh?”
“It’s whom, who’s employing whom. Or is it? Maybe it’s a predicate nominative, in which case . . .”
He also has fun with words in Hugger Mugger:
“Okay,” I said. “Let me just expostulate for a while. You can nod or not as you wish.”
“Expostulate?”
“I’m sleeping with a Harvard grad,” I said.
And Spenser is even more playful in Small Vices. He narrates:
Since my name was anathema at Pemberton, I had to employ guile. I called the alumni office and said my name was Anathema and I was with the IRS . . .
“What did you say you name was?”
“Anathema. Pervis Anathema, refund enactment agent.”
He claims to have a tax refund for a former student and asks for her address. And, yes, he gets it.
He also deals with the president of Pemberton College, who is surprised to find him well educated. When she tells him he speaks rather well, he replies, “You too.”
She is initially taken aback by the remark, then smiles and acknowledges that she was indeed being patronizing, which he has managed to convey brilliantly with two simple words.
This is something Spenser uses humor for frequently: to highlight the foolishness of other people’s assumptions. In particular, their assumptions that he isn’t very intelligent.
In Promised Land, when he and Susan Silverman bring a runaway wife he has tracked down to his apartment, she is impressed by the extent of his book collection.
“Look at all the books. Have you read all these books?”
Spenser counters in his usual way, with self-deprecating sarcasm that mocks her prejudiced assessment of him: “Most of them. My lips get awfully tired, though.”
Spenser is also not above using humor to highlight his own foolishness. While Spenser is driving Rachel in his car in Looking for Rachel Wallace, she pontificates on the idea that women are always named after their fathers not their mothers.
Two cars try to box him in on the highway. Spenser pushes her down on the floor, goes up on the curb to pass the car in front of him, scraping his bumper down its side, and gets away.
Spenser blames himself for letting them nearly box him in, feeling he should have noticed them sooner: “I was too busy arguing patristic nomenclature with you.”
Not bad for a man who just eluded two cars that tried to force him off the road in order to kill the woman he was protecting. The remark is clever, belittling and dignifying the subject at the same time, while demonstrating Spenser’s facility with language and the concept and mocking the discussion, him, and her by the use of the literate prose. Moreover, he does this with a short, descriptive sentence that is spot on. A trial attorney’s long-winded argument, citing precedent after precedent, could not convey more than his simple statement does.
Later, in the bar, Rachel describes the incident to her friend, Julie, suggesting that Spenser may have made up the whole thing: “Well, I was on the floor, and he swerved around a lot, and then the car behind us was gone. I can’t speak for sure myself. And if I were convinced no one were after me, Spenser would be out of work.”
Spenser retorts: “Aw, you’d want me around anyway. All you chicks want a guy to look after you.”
The comment is short, punchy, and effective, neatly dismissing Rachel’s insinuation by ignoring it, and using an outrageous barb particularly offensive to a feminist. The fact that Julie is Rachel’s lover adds yet another dimension to the wisecrack.
Spenser’s quips are often deceptively simple. “I’m going to beat your man,” Spenser tells Kevin Bartlett in God Save the Child, “so you’ll know it can be done.” Spenser needs to kill a fourteen-year-old boy’s admiration of the steroidal body builder. The only way to do it is by beating the guy senseless. Which he proceeds to do. But that simple declarative statement of intent, confident, assured, matter-of-fact, is probably as impressive as the actual act. And this is usually the way Spenser behaves: forthrightly, with little guile.
On the other hand, his humorous quips often have layers of meaning. When Rachel’s editor expresses surprise that Spenser has read the feminist book The Second Sex, Spenser says: “Don’t tell the guys down the gym. They’ll think I’m a fairy.”
He is joking, yet the remark is absolutely true. The guys at the gym would find his choice of reading matter effeminate and subject for ridicule. And yet the remark is still facetious, because, while this might be true, it would not bother Spenser one bit. The opinion of ignorant louts who know no better does not concern him. He would think nothing of reading a book in the aforementioned locker room, and if some steroidal blockhead took it as a sign of weakness and decided to pick on him, he would be confident he could put the jerk in his place. Though he wouldn’t feel it necessary to demonstrate his physical superiority, he would be quite content in issuing a verbal slap-down, whether his taunter could understand it or not. In either case, he would be calm, controlled, and comfortable in his own skin.
Through comments like these, too, we begin to see who Spenser is. His remarks embody a whole philosophy, a whole lifestyle, an attitude toward the world. We see here, for instance, that he doesn’t care what (most) people think of him. The same is true in a strip club in Ceremony, where Spenser is looking for a teenage prostitute named April Kyle and is menaced by three toughs: “Come on, smart ass . . . We going someplace and see how tough you are.”
Spenser replies, “You can find that out right now. I’m tough enough not to go.”
It doesn’t matter whether these toughs believe Spenser can take them. He knows he can hold his own. And that’s all he needs.
That Spenser can sit calmly and wisecrack while being threatened just emphasizes how tough he is. Even in danger, Spenser’s wit never leaves him. If anything, the worse the odds against him, the more he quips—and the more brazenly insulting those quips become. In Early Autumn, when he beards crime boss Harry Cotton and three goons in the man’s office, Harry says, “I don’t want you sticking your nose into my business, you unnerstand?”
Spenser replies, “Understand, Harry. With a D. Un-der-stand. Watch my lips.”
Harry’s voice gets shriller: “Shut your fucking mouth. And keep your fucking nose out of my fucking business or I’ll fucking bury you right here, right out front here in the fucking yard I’ll bury you.”
Spenser, to the boy, who he brought with him: “Five. Five fucks in one sentence, Paul. That’s colorful. You don’t see color like that much anymore.”
It’s actually two sentences, but the gangster doesn’t notice. He’s too busy failing miserably at intimidating Spenser.
Spenser frequently uses humor to deflect his own vulnerability—not just physically, but emotionally, too.
In The Judas Goat, Susan gets misty because Spenser is leaving for London on a dangerous case.
“I’ll come back,” I said. “I won’t die away from you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, and her voice filled.
My throat was very tight and my eyes burned. “I know the feeling,” I said. “If I weren’t such a manly bastard, I might come very close to sniffling myself.”
He won’t, but he feels that way. And he’s not afraid to express it, even if it does come veiled in a wisecrack. Humor is an important part of how Spenser expresses intimacy.
For instance, in a restaurant where he takes Rachel, Spenser encounters Susan sitting at the bar next to a young man who is trying to pick her up.
“This is Tom,” she said. And then with the laughing touch of evil in her eyes she said, “Tom was nice enough to buy me a glass of Chablis.”
I said to Tom, “That’s one.”
Susan gets it, but Tom is confused. Spenser tells him it’s the tag line to an old joke, but he doesn’t tell him the joke, which could practically be a parable from The Taming of the Shrew: A man and his new bride are riding home on a donkey. The donkey stumbles, the man says, “That’s one.” The donkey stumbles again, the man says, “That’s two.” The donkey stumbles a third time, and the man takes out a gun and shoots him dead. The wife, horrified, berates her husband for his cruelty. He waits until she’s finished, then points at her and says, “That’s one.”
This is typical Spenser, not sharing the joke with Tom but enjoying it as an in-joke with Susan. In two words, their relationship is succinctly defined. They have a companionable intimacy that allows each of them to understand what the other is thinking. Spenser would not have taken the guy out and shot him, and they both know it. Still, he is Susan’s protector, and she is comfortable with that and loves him for it, in spite of the violence within him and the violent lifestyle that being with him exposes her to. She’s also comfortable and conversant with his sense of humor.
When Susan Silverman catches him watching a girl in a white T-shirt and no bra walking away, she says, “That a suspect?”
Despite the implication that he is a sexist pig, his response is not the least defensive. He quips: “Remember I’m a licensed law officer. I was checking whether those cut-off jeans were of legal length.”
And Susan is not offended by the remark, because she knows for all his macho joking, he is actually a feminist at heart.
Humor is also a key part of Spenser’s relationship with the other most important person in his life: Hawk.
Hawk wasn’t always Spenser’s friend, of course. They started out as respected adversaries, back in the days when Hawk was an enforcer for mob boss King Powers. In Promised Land, Spenser warns Hawk of a police setup. Later, Hawk refuses his boss’s order to kill Spenser.
After it all goes down, Susan asks him, “Why not, Hawk? I knew you wouldn’t but I don’t know why.”
Hawk shrugs: “Me and your old man there are a lot alike. I told you that already. There ain’t too many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there’d be one less. I’d have missed him. And I owed him one from this morning.”
The wry end of his explanation only underscores their similarity.
Once Hawk becomes Spenser’s best friend, his former mob connections sometimes prove humorous; it is a joke shared between them. In Early Autumn, when they are working out on the speed bags at the Harbor Health club, Hawk gets a phone call from Harry Cotton, the mob boss Spenser taunted, who has just put out a contract on Spenser’s life. Hawk comes back rather amused. Spenser asks:
“That him on the phone?”
“Yeah. He want me to whack you.” Hawk’s smile got wider. “He ask me if I know who you are. I say, yeah, I think so.”
I did a left jab and an overhead right.
“How much he offering,” I said.
“Five Gs.”
“That’s insulting,” I said.
“You’d have been proud of me,” Hawk said. “I told him that. I said I wouldn’t do it for less than ten.”
That isn’t the only subject that should be sensitive between them but isn’t. Hawk often falls into parodies of racial stereotypes when talking to Spenser, who gives it right back. In The Judas Goat, Spenser picks up Hawk in the airport:
I saw him leaning back in a chair with his feet on a suitcase and a white straw hat with a lavender band and a broad brim tipped forward over his face. He had on a dark blue three-piece suit, with a fine pinstripe of light gray, and a white shirt with a collar pin underneath the small tight four-in-hand knot of a lavender silk tie. The points of a lavender handkerchief showed in his breast pocket. His black over-the-ankle boots gleamed with wax. The suitcase on which they rested must have cost half a grand. Hawk was stylish.
I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Fetchit, I’ve seen all your movies and was wondering if you’d care to join me for a bite of watermelon.”
Hawk didn’t move. His voice came from under the hat. “Y’all can call me Stepin, bawse.”
But where Spenser and Hawk often kid like that, Spenser is sensitive to racial slurs from other people, and even before he and Hawk are friends, he is ready rush to his defense. In Promised Land, he tells Susan,
“I got no special interest in playing Russian roulette with Hawk. Shepard called him a nigger.”
Susan shrugged. “What’s that got to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wish he hadn’t done that. It’s insulting.”
“My God, Spenser, Hawk has threatened this man’s life, beaten him up, abused his children, and you’re worried about a racial slur?”
Spenser has his own code of honor—even though others don’t always understand it, and even though he frequently sounds as if he doesn’t take it seriously. At one point in Early Autumn, Spenser beats up the thugs trying to kidnap Paul. As they slink away, one taunts Spenser for not killing them, as if it is a fault: “You never were a shooter . . . It’s what’s wrong with you.”
The boy asks Spenser why he doesn’t kill people. Spenser says, “Something to do with the sanctity of life. That kind of stuff.”
Except Spenser actually believes what he’s saying. He’s expressing a moral code he actually agrees with, while at the same time scoffing at it as a silly idea. Which, of course, is actually ridiculing the notion that the sanctity of life is a silly idea.
Spenser is always complicated. In Pastime, he finds himself confronted with Jerry Broz, a small-time mobster determined to kill him. Ordinarily, this would be no problem, because Jerry isn’t good enough to do it. Spenser could easily take him out. But Jerry is the only son of Joe Broz, a crime boss who in the past has ordered Spenser killed himself. Joe feels Jerry is honor bound to kill Spenser and will not let his son back down, even though he knows Jerry isn’t tough enough. Spenser doesn’t want to kill Jerry, not because he’s afraid of what Joe might do, but because he feels sorry for him and doesn’t want to have to kill his son.
Susan says,
“You are the oddest combination.”
“Physical beauty matched with deep humility?”
“Aside from that,” said Susan. “Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusions than anyone I’ve ever known. And yet you are as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty.”
Spenser sees himself as a protector, a knight errant. As Susan explains to Rachel in Looking for Rachel Wallace:
“What he [Spenser] won’t say, and what he may not even admit to himself, is that he’d like to be Sir Gawain. He was born five hundred years too late. If you understand that, you understand most of what you are asking.”
“Six hundred years,” I said.
Spenser makes a joke, but tellingly, he doesn’t disagree with her.
Despite his often contentious relationship with Rachel, once hired, Spenser considers himself to be responsible for her. He never backs down defending her person and her honor against all comers, often against her will, until, finally fed up (with his actions, not his words), she fires him. Needless to say, he does not take firing personally, or at all, really, and when Rachel is kidnapped because she has no bodyguard, he still feels morally obliged to find her.
Spenser’s role as the knight errant takes an unusual turn in Promised Land, in which Spenser is hired by Harvey Shepard to find his wife, Pam, who has run away. He finds her, talks to her, ascertains that she is healthy, happy, and not being held against her will, and then refuses to tell Harvey where she is. Spenser has decided Pam is better off where she is and the husband will only make her life miserable. On the other hand, he is willing to defend Harvey from the mob’s chief enforcer, Hawk, who is, at the time, if not a personal friend, at least a respected adversary. This is not the action of the ordinary PI, but Spenser has his own code of ethics that he will not violate.
In not betraying Pam to her husband, Spenser is confident he made the right choice but he isn’t happy about it. He feels he’s failed them both. As he tells Susan, “I’ve been with two people whose lives are screwed up to hell and I just can’t seem to get them out of it at all.”
Susan, who understands him perfectly, has no problem putting it in perspective, with a humorous edge: “Of course you can’t . . . You also can’t do a great deal about famine, war, pestilence, and death.”
Spenser immediately counters with a quip: “A great backfield.”
Why does he care? It’s not his problem. Is it because he took the job for the husband and failed to do it? Because his duty is to his client, but he can’t bring himself to betray his client’s wife?
He’s hard on others who don’t share his same sense of honor. Later in Promised Land, Spenser meets up with Pam, who has gotten involved with militant feminists who robbed a bank and shot and killed the guard. She is wearing large sunglasses, which she also wore for the robbery. Spenser tells her to ditch them, because they are no longer a disguise, they are a means of identification. The woman, feeling stupid about not having realized that, says, “I never thought—”
Spenser isn’t about to let her off the hook.
“No, probably you don’t have all that much experience at robbery and murder. You’ll get better as you go along.”
His scathing irony is doubtless due to the fact that she deserves it, but probably also out of the frustration he feels from realizing if he had told the husband where she was, he would have come and gotten her and she wouldn’t have been involved in the robbery.
Susan tries to defend Pam: “She feels bad enough.”
Which only frustrates Spenser more: “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel anywhere near bad enough. Neither do you. You’re so goddamned empathetic you’ve jumped into her frame. ‘And you thought you felt you had to stand by them. Anyone would.’ Balls. Anyone wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.”
In tracking down evidence in Mortal Stakes, Spenser encounters a pimp named Violet, who refers him to Patricia Utley, the madam of a high-priced call girl service, who owns a four-story townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan. She talks of taking an eighteen-year-old hooker under her wing and teaching her how to talk to people, how to use makeup, how to dress.
“You and Rex Harrison,” Spenser says. He doesn’t mention My Fair Lady, but later in the same context calls her “Pygmalion,” making his meaning clear. The literary allusions have an edge, ironically equating a sex-peddler with a professor of phonetics. And he doesn’t let up, even though the woman is cooperating and giving him the information he needs. He sticks it to her for exploiting the girl: “You keep telling yourself you’re a businesswoman and that’s the code you live by. So you don’t have to deal with the fact that you are also a pimp. Like Violet.”
Spenser is so rude to the woman she has her goon throw him out. And yet he will turn to her years later, when faced with another moral dilemma: what to do with another teenage prostitute, April Kyle.
Spenser is often faced with moral dilemmas. He does not let them thwart him. As much as he may moralize them intellectually, he deals with them pragmatically. In Ceremony, he introduces April to Patricia Utley, the madam he denounced so eloquently for employing a teenage prostitute in Mortal Stakes. We have Spenser the panderer, enabling a teenage hooker—in effect, pimping for her. Has he changed his moral position? Not in the least. The one girl had a chance at a better life. The other did not. April would be turning tricks regardless. In Spenser’s estimation, it would be better for her to be turning fewer tricks for a high-society madam, who would look after her health, than be a crack whore for some sleazeball who would beat her. Realizing this, Spenser doesn’t hesitate to endorse a life of prostitution for the girl that he has worked so hard to save. As Susan points out during Spenser’s struggle with Jerry and Joe Broz, Spenser’s code is idealized; his view of the world is not.
In Mortal Stakes, Spenser empathizes with the baseball pitcher who is hopelessly conflicted because gamblers are threatening to reveal secrets about his wife’s past unless he throws games. The man is torn between wanting to protect his family and not wanting to hurt his team.
As Spenser tells Susan,
“I know what’s killing him. It’s killing me too. The code didn’t work.”
“The code,” Susan said.
“Yeah. Jock ethic, honor, code, whatever. It didn’t cover this situation.”
“Can’t it be adjusted?”
“Then it’s not a code anymore.”
Yet that code is not inflexible. Though he believes in the sanctity of life, Spenser admits to Paul in Early Autumn that he has sometimes killed people: “I had to. I don’t if I don’t have to. Nothing’s absolute.”
“What do you mean?” Paul asks.
Spenser answers, “I mean you make rules for yourself and you know that you’ll have to break them because they won’t always work.”
This is Spenser, plain and simple, the pragmatist, the knight in shining armor, the man with principles and ethics and a code of behavior who would readily toss it all out the window if the situation required. Unapologetically, and without making excuses. As he tells Paul, “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, boy.”
Spenser says it ironically, self-deprecatingly, mocking his bravado, and yet for him it is true. It is inherent in his code that a man has to do what he believes is right, no matter how difficult that may be. At the same time he sees the humor in that code, sees himself as a parody of a heroic figure, a lone knight championing a just cause, who won’t back down, even from impossible odds. Despite his self-awareness, he is that which he mocks, a noble PI, armed and humorous, fighting valiantly to uphold his code of honor.