| JEREMIAH HEALY |
WRITERS OF CRIME fiction tend to be cooperative—even collaborative—as opposed to competitive. When I broke into the mystery field during the mid-’80s, however, this “we all live in the same village” ethos within a profession was, quite frankly, surprising to me. An illustration: If Author A was contacted by a library to give a talk, A—as part of the village protocol—would suggest the inclusion of Authors B and C as well, usually with diversity of gender and sub-genre, so that all three authors could appeal diagonally to members of the audience who might have attended to see only one of them.
By then, I’d already experienced mini-careers as a sheriff’s officer and military police lieutenant, trial attorney and law professor. Each of those vocations stressed team-first, yes, but given the fields involved, daily life became a confrontational, us-versus-them dynamic (including, even, the law professor/student one, which uses confrontation in order to meld the latter into the best advocate he or she can be). Over time, though, my reaction to our crime-writers’ village evolved from surprised to reassured, especially when a marquee author was not just willing, but actually enthusiastic, about sharing the ephemeral spotlight.
Looking back, of all my colleagues, the one who did the most for my own career was Bob Parker. And, for the record, it was always either Bob or Mr. Parker, never Robert. In addition, although many of us think of him as the iconic Robert B. Parker, I never heard the man say or saw him write his middle name, which was Brown.
• •
The first decade of our twenty-first century proved tragic in terms of losing American giants of crime fiction: Ed McBain (formally, Evan Hunter, though, by birth, Salvatore Lombino) and Dennis Lynds (a.k.a. Michael Collins), Tony Hillerman and Donald E. Westlake (a.k.a. Richard Stark), James Crumley and Mickey Spillane, William G. Tapply and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
And, so suddenly on January 18, 2010, the giant I knew best: Robert B. Parker, who set most of his many Spenser novels in and around our shared city of Boston.
Appropriately, there have been numerous obituaries published and posted since Bob’s death. And by age seventy-seven, he’d certainly excelled in many spheres: Army service in Korea; marriage to the love of his life, Joan; the fathering of two sons, David and Daniel; and, lastly, becoming—and even more difficult, remaining—a bestselling crime author.
I first discovered his novels in the winter of 1978 while frantically shopping at the Walden’s Books in Boston’s Center Plaza for paperbacks to read on the planes (four of them, each way) that would take my then-to-be-bride and me to and from the then-remote island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela, for our honeymoon. Prior to that day in the Walden’s, I’d certainly enjoyed the occasional mystery, but I’d never heard of Mr. Parker. The book that I picked up off the shelf and opened was his first Spenser from five years earlier, The Godwulf Manuscript. I remember laughing—loud and long—after reading just the first sentence:
The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse.
Thankfully, I was still a trial attorney then, wearing a three-piece suit, and therefore avoided arrest or civil commitment because of my outburst.
I could not, as they say, put Bob’s debut down. In fact, I re-read it twice during that stay on Bonaire, trying to figure out, in a lawyerly fashion, how he’d managed to pull off the most entertaining story I’d experienced over the prior twenty years. Six months later, I began teaching at the New England School of Law (now renamed “New England Law: Boston”) but continued to be a fan of Spenser. When assured I was going to receive tenure (the dream of every Irish-American male: lifetime employment, inside work, no heavy-lifting), I said to myself, “Okay, you’ve always wanted to write a novel, and you’ve been reading and enjoying private-investigator fiction (Marcia Muller, Bob Parker, and, stretching the category a little, John D. MacDonald). Maybe you’ll enjoy writing such a book and, even if you don’t succeed in getting it published, you’ll have had fun trying.”
Incorporating aspects of my law—and law enforcement—backgrounds, the writing of my first novel, Blunt Darts, was truly a blast. The selling, however? Eh, not so much.
I’d arrogantly concluded that any New York publishing house in its collective right mind would jump at the chance to provide its customers with a(nother) tough but sensitive male private eye operating out of Boston. I even naively submitted to the New England publishing house that was then bringing out Bob’s books about Spenser, an established main character who shared a lot of traits with my own embryonic private eye, John Francis Cuddy.
Twenty-eight rejections later, I was humbled but unbowed (as a trial attorney, you learn to put losses behind you and continue plowing forward). Then the late lamented doyenne of mystery editors, Ruth Cavin, offered me a contract for Blunt Darts. When the paperback edition was released, I timidly introduced myself to Kate Mattes (of the also late and lamented Murder Under Cover bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Kate was happy to schedule a future signing for my second, accepted (but not yet published) novel, The Staked Goat. However, she also encouraged me to speak during the interim with her friend, Mr. Parker, about how the mystery-writing industry really worked.
Bob graciously agreed to meet me at Grille 23, an upscale restaurant in a Boston neighborhood called the Back Bay. Coincidentally (or maybe not), the grill was on Berkeley Street directly opposite the then–Boston police headquarters building (now itself a fancy hotel with a downstairs bar, called Jury’s, perversely positioned right about where the recently collared would while away time awaiting arraignment in court). A reporter from a national magazine was later to interview Bob over dinner at the grill, and since I both lived and worked just blocks away, a drink with me beforehand seemed logistically sensible.
Not surprisingly, the prospect of meeting my writing idol made me a little jittery. Therefore, I arrived at the restaurant early, taking an empty barstool with a twin adjacent to it.
Funny, the trivial details that lodge in your data bank. As though it were yesterday, I clearly recall ordering a screwdriver (for the viceless: vodka and orange juice), though light on the alcohol, because I wanted to make a good first impression on Mr. Parker.
I’d brought a legal pad to jot down expected pearls of wisdom, but nothing to read, so I doodled a pretty elaborate floor plan and description of the bar and the restaurant behind it. Oddly, though, while I often try to capture as research settings that I’m visiting for the first time, I’ve never used Grille 23 in either a novel or a short story. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even previously alluded to the place.
As soon as Bob came through the grill’s front door, I recognized him—sort of—from his small, grainy book-cover portrait(s).
I’ll confess: While I don’t think I knew then that Robert Urich (since, tragically, deceased as well) was to be the first actor portraying Spenser (and more about this casting decision later), I suppose I did expect Bob Parker, life-sized, to fit my internal vision of his private eye character: Around six-foot-two, a raw-boned one-ninety-plus, with a nose broken and fixed so many times that, at different stages of his prior career as a prizefighter, its tip probably inclined toward each point of the compass.
Ah . . . no.
Envision instead a former college professor, about five-foot-eight and stocky, with close-cropped dark hair and a matching mustache framing and accenting the ruddy, moonlike face of a mischievous Buddha. If you, like me, were then a boxing fan, Bob could have been the older, shorter brother of George Chuvalo (Canada’s best-ever heavyweight, and one of the few athletes in all of pugilistic history to have fought over ninety bouts without once being knocked off his feet and onto the canvas).
Grille 23’s bar (and adjoining restaurant) being virtually empty, Bob homed in on me as well, perhaps helped a little by my hopping down off the stool and extending my right hand toward a manly shake.
His first words to me were, “Glad you’re already here, because you’re covering our bar tab.”
As Bob ordered an Amstel draught, I knew I’d just met not only my idol, but also my mentor for this new career of crime-writing, especially when he told me to call him Bob.
I remember pretty much our entire conversation that evening. After a brief and awkward exchange of small talk, Bob asked, “So, Jerry, what can I tell you?”
I got right to the point and said, “What’s your best advice about making a living from writing mystery fiction?”
A sip of his beer. “That’s easy. You know much about real estate?”
Well, before that night, I’d bought one condominium, sold it myself, then bought another, also on my own, and as an attorney I’d represented a number of unit-buyers and-sellers. So, I said, “Some.”
“Okay, then.” Another swig of the Amstel, and Bob began warming to his subject. “You’ve probably heard about the three priorities in real estate.”
I nodded. “Location, location, location.”
Bob’s turn to nod. “Well, there’s a cousin to that priority system for the writer in the publishing game today.”
“Being . . .?”
Bob smiled so intensely that his eyes actually squinched shut from below. “Get an agent, get an agent, get an agent.”
Back in the day, an aspiring writer who didn’t yet have a literary agent could still—as I had—submit an entire manuscript directly to pretty much any editor at the thirty-seven (now, arguably only six) well-regarded publishing houses in New York City and beyond. (Another factoid: The expression “sent in over the transom” for an unsolicited manuscript came from the century-old practice of frustrated first-time novelists, whom an editor would not deign to see personally, literally hurling their manuscripts through the opened casement window at the top of the editor’s otherwise closed/locked door. For my money, though, at least that desperate practice was slightly nobler than the breach of etiquette a female literary agent shared with me maybe ten years ago. Attending a writers’ conference, she was sitting on a ladies’ room toilet only to first hear, and then look down to see, a manuscript being slid under her stall’s door.)
I fiddled some with my glass. “But, Bob, I’m an attorney who’s represented writers against their publishers, and as a professor I’ve even written a scholarly article about authors’ rights in book contracts. Why should I give a literary agent ten [soon to be fifteen] percent of my next advance?”
Now Bob shook his head. “You negotiated your own first deal yourself, right?”
“Right.”
“Did you think to retain your subsidiary rights?”
“Like for movie or television adaptations? Sure.”
Bob’s eyebrows went up. “Good. How about paperback reprint rights?”
Already happened. “The hardcover publisher and I split those.”
“Unfair to the writer, but typical of a publisher. Foreign rights?”
Embarrassingly, I hadn’t read my own publishing contract for nearly two years. “I think we split translation rights, too.”
Another shake of the head. “On those, you should get a hundred percent. How much did you get as an advance for the hardcover?”
I told him.
Bob asked, “And how much did your paperback reprint rights go for?”
There’d been an auction on those, so I answered, proudly, “My share was within a thousand dollars of my annual salary a decade ago as a first-year associate at a prestigious Boston law firm.”
A third sip of his beer. “Jerry, how much?”
I told him that, too.
Bob whistled. Softly, but still . . . “All right, now double your half share of the reprint auction and ask for an advance in that range, because your track record—granted, so far a pretty short one—proves your worth to a publisher worried about the bottom-line of profitability.”
I expect my expression was akin to a cow’s as the sledgehammer descends toward its forehead.
Benignly, Bob waved a hand. “Not to worry, but that’s what literary agents are for.” He took a full three swallows of the Amstel, as if pre-hydrating toward a long speech. “As a lawyer—and ‘scholar’—you probably do know more about how to interpret a specific paragraph in a publishing contract and then also how to convince a court you’re right. However, what you don’t know—and maybe even can’t know—is whether that paragraph is an iron-clad dealbreaker or whether it’s negotiable. You also don’t know what other provisions, helpful to you, aren’t in the house’s offer, and two minutes ago you obviously didn’t have a sense of what you’d be worth to a publisher. Agents do have a grip on all three issues, because they’re in the New York market every day. Hell, they gather together for lunch probably once a month, minimum, to compare notes. And therefore agents also know which editors are leaving their current houses to work for a competitor but can’t take all of their valuable stable of authors with them. Or, maybe word’s leaked that an established writer is leaving his or her current publisher, and the bereft editor there now has an unexpected slot to fill in the next season’s schedule.” Another sip, nearly finishing the Amstel, and Bob glanced at his watch, cuing me to subtly signal our bartender for “my” check.
Then Bob sighed. “Another thing. Your literary agents will also have corresponding agents on the West Coast for those movie/TV rights you were smart to keep. And similar agents overseas for selling those foreign rights on future books you shouldn’t have shared on the first.”
A guy—early thirties, scribe-like—came through the grill’s front door, flicking his gaze around the place. Bob turned his head before turning back to me. “With any luck, that’s the reporter whose rag is treating me to dinner.”
Bob and I both left our perches and shook hands again.
I said, “Truly, thank you for all this. You’ve really broadened my whole approach to the industry.”
A twinkle in the eyes and the broad smile, once again seeming to close his lids from below. “Happy to help, but just don’t eclipse me, okay? I’m too old to find a real job now.”
As Bob walked toward the presumed reporter and I settled our tab, I stayed stuck on the “eclipse me” part, thinking, Eclipse you? Please, Bob, just let this recovering lawyer ride lightly on your coattails.
• •
Oddly enough, I don’t recall us talking that first evening about the actual process of writing or any secrets of craft. Those I had to learn, sometimes the hard way, by reading the Spenser novels and then trying to replicate—though never managing to duplicate—Bob’s kind of magic on my own pages.
Bob’s first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, is set almost entirely in geo-political Boston, including a great confrontation scene in the opulent Copley Plaza Hotel (opened in 1907 by transplanted San Franciscans fearing another earthquake, the dowager is now called the Fairmount Copley Plaza Hotel but still lies kitty-corner to the original wing of the Boston Public Library, itself the first such governmentally supported library in the United States). In his debut, however, Spenser is a bit of a hound with the ladies, including having sex with both a mother and her daughter (though not, in the interests of discretion, simultaneously). That inspired me to turn the Cuddy character 180 degrees: he remains faithful to the memory of his dead wife, including visiting her gravesite and creating conversations over the headstone, until he finds another woman who might replace her in his life.
In Bob’s second novel, God Save the Child (set mostly on the suburban North Shore of Boston, where Joan and Bob lived while raising their sons), Spenser meets Susan Silverman. This is one path where I should not have followed behind Bob in lock-step. In my second novel, The Staked Goat, I gave Cuddy a new love interest, only to later realize I’d have had more creative freedom by keeping Cuddy a pure widower longer. That way, a reader coming upon any eligible, female character in a succeeding book could have been kept guessing whether or not she’d prove to be Ms. Right.
Mortal Stakes, the third Spenser novel, is again set almost entirely in Boston. The private eye takes on probably the most sacrosanct of the city’s sports franchises, the Red Sox. To my knowledge, this is the first time Bob as author identifies the real-life institution he exposes. And a bold uncovering it is: Spenser investigates the possibility that a star Boston hurler is throwing games rather than just pitches to opposing teams. The novel begins with Spenser watching some innings from the stands at the Sox home field, Fenway Park (opened April 20, 1912, or two years before the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field). The story moves quickly to the team’s broadcast booth, and Bob captures that rarified enclosure perfectly.
But how, you might ask, could I know that?
Well, a fan of mine, the late and much admired major-league pitcher Ken Brett, once invited me to sit, necessarily silently, in the visitor’s broadcast booth during a road game for his Anaheim Angels (mercifully, this was a decade before some geographically challenged, front-office twit decided to re-name the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). Before the national anthem, Ken and his broadcast partner showed me how everything—and everyone—functioned. Then I got to absorb the calm, measured atmosphere during their live calling of the game followed by the absolute bedlam during commercial breaks, when people are demanding—or misplacing, or just plain guesstimating—statistics, public-service announcements, etc.
In Mortal Stakes, Bob doesn’t hit a false note in describing the parallel scenario in the Red Sox booth, and the vigilante confrontation scene near the end of the novel taught me the crime-literature version of forcing the protagonist to face a dilemma of the “frying pan or the fire” variety, where there is no clean way to resolve the problem.
Bob’s fourth novel, Promised Land, is set mostly in the vacation/retirement nirvana of Cape Cod and the gritty under-belly of the city of New Bedford, both about seventy miles south of Boston. This book introduces the Hawk character as an enforcer for the bad guys. Released in 1975, it was another brave decision by Bob to include a rough—indeed, homicidal—African-American male into a fictional Boston crime series during the city’s real-life public school racial-integration crisis. For those not familiar with that era, white parents in various neighborhoods literally threw rocks at the windows of yellow—and unmistakable—school buses carrying black children into traditionally white educational districts. Several of my military police officer basic classmates were in the Massachusetts National Guard, and they were both mobilized from their civilian jobs and deployed in uniform on our streets for nearly two years, keeping the peace by commanding platoons of forty armed MPs.
But Bob—bless him—by writing exciting fiction involving Spenser and Hawk, eventually as grudging allies, then as the closest of friends, was able to inject some rationality and tolerance into a real-world situation sorely lacking in both. And that authorial risk-taking led me to foster a wary relationship between Cuddy the private eye and “Lieutenant Detective” Robert Murphy (more on this designation later). The fictional Murphy is an African-American on Boston’s homicide unit who got elevated only because a bigoted but lackadaisical city councilor mistook the Irish surname on a departmental promotion list for the actual race of the officer involved.
As the above examples illustrate, Bob Parker had a great impact on yours truly. However, he had a much wider and deeper impact on Boston itself, establishing what might be America’s most insular, aristocratic bastion as a credible city of mean streets, where even the rich and famous could find a corpse on their doorsteps. Bob proved through each succeeding novel that you could set a private investigator series realistically in metro areas outside of Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, Dashiell Hammett/Sam Spade’s San Francisco, or Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer’s New York City. Bob’s/Spenser’s groundbreaking in Boston’s fertile earth planted the seeds that grew to produce an entire crop of so-called “regional” mysteries in other cities as well. Think Sara Paretsky/V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago, Loren Estleman/Amos Walker’s Detroit, and Benjamin M. Schutz/Leo Haggerty’s Washington, D.C. Not to mention Linda Barnes/Carlotta Carlyle, William G. Tapply/Brady Coyne, and my own Cuddy eagerly following the Bob/Spenser lead in Boston itself.
I can’t speak for those other writers or their creative influences, but Bob taught me how to use Boston. Since neither of us had ever been a private investigator, we followed the mantra of fictional ones from the past (although when I once asked Bob what he had learned while researching, writing, and defending his doctoral thesis on Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, Bob replied, “Absolutely nothing”). Accordingly we both put our Boston knights of yore in situations that no sane, real-life private eye would even consider, including performing vigilante acts of violence where, legally speaking, self-defense would not have been available as a shield from criminal or civil justice-system jeopardy. In fact, one of my favorite exchanges in Bob’s books was a scene where a bloodied and bruised Spenser shows up at the Back Bay front door of a wimpy neo-Nazi who lives with his mother on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston’s second toniest address (after Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, where reside the fictional Banacek, played on television by the late George Peppard, the real-life medical-thriller author Robin Cook, and the almost-real-life U.S. Senator John Kerry). The vigilante exchange went something like this:
WIMP (cracking open the front door): I didn’t have nothin’ to do with your gettin’ beat up.
SPENSER (barging across the threshold): Pity I won’t be able to say the same about you.
• •
Another shared characteristic that I think informed—and perhaps even formed—Bob and me: Neither of us was a Boston native. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, about ninety miles west of the city, and attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine, about 215 miles north of Boston. I was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University in the same state, respectively about 220 and 270 miles southwest of Boston. Alas, as a result, each of us committed some ghastly authenticity gaffes related to our adopted city.
Let me ’fess up first. I’ve found that the real subverter of authenticity is when you know you know something and therefore don’t bother to confirm it by independent research. For example, I had Cuddy credit the wrong architect for Boston’s (hideous) new city hall because, while once walking past it, a law firm client—himself an architect—gave me the wrong information. Another: I had Cuddy offhandedly allude to Salem, Massachusetts, twenty miles north of Boston, as the city where witches were burned at the stake. During an impressionable stage of my youth, I must have seen the movie Joan of Arc, because, as many readers later corrected me, that barbaric custom had not been imported via our European forebears. In the American colonies, women so accused suffered either hanging or trial by ordeal (the latter a lose-lose proposition for the defendant that involved drowning).
As to Bob, I recall two Bostonian errors he’d habitually make. First example: Spenser would be walking in the Back Bay neighborhood, the only part of the city that follows a grid-pattern (like midtown Manhattan) in its lay-out. The Back Bay’s real-life cross-streets are named (like midtown Manhattan’s streets are numbered) in a strict, alphabetical order from A (Arlington) to H (Hereford). Yet, despite Bob’s choosing the Back Bay for both his private eye’s apartment (on Marlborough Street) and his office (on Boylston Street), Spenser would routinely skip over a cross-street, moving from say the C (Clarendon) to the E (Exeter), as though the D (Dartmouth) didn’t exist in between.
Okay, as errors go, the “street names” might be off-putting to a Boston local but not rise to the level of ghastly. However, Bob also had Spenser repeatedly meeting with (the fictional) Lieutenant Marty Quirk and his partner, Sergeant Frank Belson, in their homicide unit offices at the then–police headquarters (which, as indicated earlier, coincidentally was across the street from Bob’s and my initial rendezvous site, Grille 23).
There are four pretty substantive authenticity problems with that last sentence:
1. Boston’s police department, when identifying a plain clothes officer, always designates both duty and rank, but also always places rank before duty. I know of no other major city that does so, but, as a result, Bob should himself have been using Lieutenant [rank] Detective [duty] Marty Quirk and Sergeant Detective Frank Belson.
2. Bob always treated Quirk and Belson as partners. However, the real-life homicide unit doesn’t (and didn’t) work its cases through a two-detective team. Instead, Boston investigators work in squads of three detectives.
3. During most of the Spenser series’ timeline, the city’s actual homicide unit was shoe-horned into the second floor of an evidence-processing garage in rough-and-tumble South Boston, about four miles from headquarters in the chichi Back Bay.
4. Finally, in the mid-90s, the new Boston police headquarters opened on the corner of Tremont and Ruggles Streets in the mini-neighborhood of Roxbury Crossing. Named 1 Schroeder Plaza in honor of two police officers from the same family killed in the line of duty, the concept was to bring all the force’s major units, including homicide, together in one recently constructed building toward greater efficiency and synergy, both of which goals were actually attained. However, I don’t recall Bob, in any Spenser novel thereafter, having his private eye visiting Quirk or Belson in their modern, expansive suite on 2-N (meaning second floor, north wing).
• •
Notwithstanding our respective authenticity issues, I think Bob and I both realized that, in some ways, we were at an advantage in coming to Boston after growing up somewhere else. Constructing private investigator fiction is a bit like deconstructing an onion, peeling off the layers one at a time, and often it helps the character and the reader for the author to have a different take on how the best onions are grown and, in this case, how the best stories unfold.
Occasionally, though, we Boston carpetbagger mystery writers would need a genuine city native to be sure an historical event would accurately come alive for our readers. Put simply, while most people don’t know many details about the homicide unit’s location or functioning, quite a few will remember what occurred in their city during their lifetimes, and an author cannot afford to turn knowledgeable, devoted readers into reverse-apostles spreading the word that a given storyteller did not do his or her homework.
Case in point: It took me many years before I felt comfortable setting any important scenes in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown (called—except for gentrifying realtors—simply, The Town). The reason for my reticence? I’d heard vague allusions to the code of silence in The Town. This code apparently mandated that a resident never reported a heinous crime (such as rape or murder) to the police, nor did any resident help the official investigation of that crime. Instead, you and some of your “people” (family, friends, etc.) would simply settle the score directly with the culprit in an eye-for-an-eye sort of way. A newcomer writer couldn’t possibly pick up the nuances of this unspoken rule overnight, but not knowing could temporarily destroy that author’s credibility with a reader.
I think this need for thorough research applies whether the event involved was devastating, mundane, or merely bizarre. The devastating: driving on a cold, late November Sunday morning in the early 1940s past the Boston City Morgue and seeing surviving family members of the half-thousand (not a typo) victims killed during the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, the survivors standing—and praying and crying—in blocks-long lines as they waited to identify the bodies of their relatives. The mundane: the assigned route number of the Boston bus that ran during the 1950s between Andrews Square in South Boston and Copley Square in the Back Bay. And the bizarre: a blue-collar tavern where, during the 1960s, well-intentioned (if misguided) construction workers would buy junior-high boys a “dimey” (one six-ounce draft beer costing a dime) to teach them how to hold their alcohol early and thereby avoid the consequences of getting drunk later on in life.
And, speaking of history, Boston’s goes back nearly to the Mayflower pilgrims stubbing their toes on Plymouth Rock. Such a long span creates incredible diversity for the crime author to work into novels and even short stories.
We can begin with the architecture along those mean streets Bob Parker and his Spenser character made famous (okay, and infamous as well). Federalist Period homes (red brick and wooden shutters) on Beacon Hill, originally begun in the late 1600s and restored after the so-called Great Fires of the next two centuries. Victorian Age townhouses and mansions (granite with bay windows) in the Back Bay, constructed over fifty years beginning in the 1850s, as, bit by bit, the original Back Bay (Boston’s former sewage lagoon) was dredged and filled, soon providing five decades of architectural variety viewable by an easy twenty-minute walk westward from the Public (think, Botanical) Garden. Eighteenth century wharves that were built to last, with their customs houses and warehouses, an entire such wharf available in the 1970s for $10,000 to pay off tax liens, then refurbished into honeycombs of multi-million-dollar, harbor-view condos. Three-deckers (read, fragile wooden fire-traps) built for the waves of immigration that followed the pilgrims, sometimes by hundreds of years. The Irish and Lithuanians in Southie, the Italians in the North End, and the Portuguese in East Cambridge (technically outside geo-political Boston). Not to mention African Americans in Roxbury, with their stately mansions tracing back to the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad for escaping slaves, and a generation of Cubans who fled Castro’s communism to settle in the bow-front town-houses of the South End.
Bob’s and Spenser’s Boston also brought to readers the many languages matching this diversity: Irish (which we Americans tend to call Gaelic), Italian, Spanish, and French (a sure-thing bar bet: Can you name the largest identifiable ethnic heritage in Massachusetts? Answer: the Quebecois, who during World War I came down from their province to work in our commonwealth’s armaments factories). And novels also brought the reader the despicable, knee-jerk discrimination many of these immigrants suffered, like help-wanted ads in the classified sections of the city’s newspapers which too often ended with NINA (always in all caps, and standing for No Irish Need Apply; when the waves of Italian men and women began arriving in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the biased employers didn’t even have to change the acronym they hid behind).
Now combine these peoples and their cultures with the food, music, and sports they brought to Boston and then hybridized with pre-existing forms of American entertainment. Provide universities (eighty-five institutions of higher learning within a ten-mile radius of Boston’s Statehouse, despite the fact that nearly a hemisphere of said circle is comprised of the vast waters and tiny islands within Boston Harbor). Inject radically different modes of transportation (train and plane, subway and trolley, commuter ferries and water taxis), and it’s easy to see how and why Boston’s diversity in all aspects of life provides terrific fodder for any crime writer.
But Bob wasn’t just any crime writer. Well before his passing he’d become part of Boston’s more modern urban lore. In the early 1980s, a bookstore called Spenser & Marlowe opened on the Back Bay’s Newbury Street. The shop carried only titles of poetry and mystery, sagely promoting itself by borrowing the proper spellings of two actual poets’ names (Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, both popular in 16th century England) and the (matching) proper spellings of two twentieth-century fictional private investigators. Talk about your four-cornered matrix of puns. The poetry side of the store didn’t last terribly long, but proprietor Andy Thurnauer kept the mystery spirit alive in the city proper for nearly twenty years more.
It was also Andy who first explained to me yet another aspect of Boston as crime-novel setting. Informally surveying independent mystery bookstores around the country (probably 125 in number during their heyday, but fewer than forty as we entered the second decade of the twenty-first century), Andy uncovered an interesting trend: Books set in a particular region sold best in that region’s cities (say, Rocky Mountain novels offered in Denver’s and Boulder’s shops); however, the second bestselling setting in almost every region was . . . Boston. In the end, Andy and I thought we’d figured out the reason for this quirk: So many people nationwide had come to Boston for some level of higher education—or even just an enlightening, walkable vacation—that they wanted to revisit those good memories via the classic landmarks, current events, and just plain buzz emanating from the pages of crime novels set in the city they’d come to love.
• •
During the 1990s through the mid-2000s, Bob and I, as Boston-based private eye writers, would appear together fairly regularly. I remember congratulating him after a vaguely worded press release announced the Spenser character would be made into a television series.
Bob shook his head. “Jerry, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, “I’m at home in Massachusetts and I get a call from my literary agent in New York, asking me to come down and meet the star projected to play the Spenser role.” For clarity’s sake, your essayist will morph into theatrical-play mode to paraphrase, as accurately as I can remember, Bob’s recounting of what happened next.
PARKER (still telephonically, but also a little confused): Well, who is it?
AGENT (measured): I don’t want to tell you over the phone. I think a spontaneous, face-to-face talk would be better.
[A somewhat uneasy Parker travels by plane, arrives at Agent’s office, and is nudged by same into a conference room as Agent closes the door behind him.]
PARKER (seeing only one other person, seated at the table): Well . . .
ROBERT URICH (standing up and beaming a smile): How are you? I understand from your agent that we’re supposed to talk about my appearing in the pilot for our television series.
PARKER (stage whisper to audience): Our series? I mean, I could get killed here, folks. Robert Urich? One of the kiddie-cops from S.W.A.T.? “Dan Tanna,” the slick dick of VEGA$? Not my image of Spenser, whom I’ve always pictured as a younger Karl Malden, not classically handsome, but rugged, with obvious scars from his prize-fighting days.
[Here yours truly harkened back to my own, off-the-mark, assumptions about Bob Parker’s appearance at our initial Grille 23 meeting.]
PARKER (Having ended his audience aside and again addressing the actor): Excuse me a second?
URICH: No problem.
[Parker leaves the conference room and closes the door behind him, thereby entering Agent’s office.]
AGENT: Something wrong?
PARKER: My contract with the television production company gives me a veto on the leading man, right?
AGENT: It does.
PARKER: Okay, so if I ding Urich as Spenser, do you know who the producer has in the on-deck circle?
AGENT: I do. Erik Estrada, late of the motorcycle-police show CHiPS.
PARKER (swallowing hard and forcing a smile): I think Robert Urich is a great choice.
Bob Parker was like that. He could be self-deprecatingly funny (“If I hadn’t been in Korea to qualify for the G.I. Bill, I never could’ve become an English professor or a crime novelist; hell, I’d be driving a bakery truck”).
• •
More seriously, though, the fact that Bob died just across the river from Boston, at his desk in the Cambridge home he shared with his wife, Joan, and while writing, would, I think, have given him at least some solace during what we can only hope was a mercifully quick passing.
Bob. Rest in peace. You earned it ten times over, and we will never forget you.