| GARY PHILLIPS |
Hawk appeared to be listening to the faintly audible ball game. And he was. If asked, he could give you the score and recap the last inning. He would also be able to tell you everything I said or Nevins said and how we looked when we said it.
—Hush Money
IN DASHIELL HAMMETT’S first Continental Op novel Red Harvest, the no name Op is summoned to Personville, a cesspool of a town called Poisonville by its inhabitants. Two factions, the capitalists and the gangsters, are competing to rule the place. The Op, charged with cleaning up the city, decides to set these factions against one another. He understands that tough choices have got to be made. “I’ve got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul,” he laments toward the end of the novel, after the violence he’s unleashed has taken its toll.
On first glance, Hammett’s Continental Operative is an unassuming-looking, pudgy, balding, middle-aged fellow who you might mistake for a shoe salesman. But if you went up against him, you found out this bastard was a cold-eyed son of a bitch with anthracite for a heart, an individual who, by his own admission, engaged in “necessary brutality.” Over more than seventy short stories and two novels, we don’t learn the Op’s real name, nor do we gain so much as a glimpse of insight into his personal life.
Hammett’s Op brings to mind another well-known enigmatic character—Hawk, the no-nonsense regulator in the Spenser novels. Robert Parker’s Spenser is in the same PI lineage as Marlowe and Archer (though unlike the latter PI, you can’t imagine Spenser turning sideways and disappearing, as Archer’s creator once said of him): they are all cynical, hard-bitten romantics in search of truths big and small, with their backgrounds fully fleshed out over time. But like the Op, Hawk’s background and personal life are rarely revealed in the novels. His name, too, echoes the anonymity of the Op, as there are hints “Hawk” is merely a hardcore moniker—like a persona a gangsta rapper or mixed martial artist devises—adopted initially to take on the guise of being a hoodlum. But the name comes to stand for more over the ensuing years in the novels. It would be incorrect to state that either character, the Op or Hawk, is merely a cipher. They are instead defined by their actions, the often brutal methods they employ to resolve the thorny problems they’ve been hired to fix.
I don’t know exactly what prompted Parker to introduce Hawk in the fourth Spenser novel, Promised Land, in 1976, though he did relate in an interview once that, “He is, racial pun intended, kind of Spenser’s dark side. And he gives me an opportunity to do my small riff on race relations.” Hawk is hired muscle working for gang lord King Powers (perhaps a character inspired by the infamous Whitey Bulger, then leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston). When we first come upon him, he’s wearing a powder blue leisure suit and a pink silk shirt with a fly collar unbuttoned to the waist, looking as if he’d been out the night before at the disco tossing the backgammon dice and checking out the honeys. While I cringe at Parker’s choice for Hawk’s vines—as the slang for clothes went then—I have to give him props for having him clean-headed, a la Isaac Hayes, years before brothers started sporting the look in the ’90s.
Later in the same book, Hawk tells a client who needs Spenser to look for his runaway wife that, “I’ll bet he can. He’s a real firecracker for finding things. He’ll find the ass off of a thing. Ain’t that right, Spenser?” In these initial scenes, Hawk’s taciturn persona is established via an economy of words that still manage to convey a lot of meaning.
It might be that at first Parker meant for Hawk to be a one-off. But in the next Spenser novel, The Judas Goat, Hawk is back, and enlisted to help track down the terrorists responsible for crippling a rich man and murdering his wife and children. The hunt takes Spenser to London and he enlists Hawk for his deadly combat skills. Now Hawk, like Spenser, has a code. But his is more of a Frank Castle, Punisher-like ethos: he’s a man willing to cold-bloodedly take life if such is the demand of getting the job done. It’s a matter of expediency to Hawk. As he tells Dr. Susan Silverman, Spenser’s psychiatrist girlfriend, in Promised Land, “I get nothing out of hurting people. Sometimes just happens that way.” He also suggests that he doesn’t see that big a gulf between him and Spenser: “Maybe he aiming to help. But he also like the work. You know? I mean he could be a social worker if he just want to help . . . Just don’t be so sure me and old Spenser are so damn different, Susan.”
Even so, in the earlier novels in which Hawk appears, there are times when Spenser seems to be as clueless about Hawk’s inner nature as we are. In The Judas Goat, Spenser ruminates:
In fact in the time I’d known Hawk, I’d never seen him show a sign of anything. He laughed easily and he was never off balance. But whatever went on inside stayed inside. Or maybe nothing went on inside. Hawk was as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving. Maybe that was what went on inside.
Based on this early description, Hawk is cool-headed to the point of being unfeeling. More than once, Parker draws our attention to Hawk’s inscrutable nature. In Hush Money, Spenser makes this observation: “Hawk nodded and smiled. When he smiled he looked like a large black Mona Lisa, if Mona shaved her head . . . and had a nineteen-inch bicep . . . and a 29-inch waist . . . and very little conscience.”
It’s Hawk’s contradictions that make the character come alive on the page. For the most part, Parker exercised deftness inserting Hawk into the Spenser stories. It wasn’t just about upping the amount of mayhem and murder. It was about the consequences that arose from Hawk’s actions and their effect on Spenser. With Spenser, Parker was consciously working in the Hammett tradition of ruggedness, tempered with shadings of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Spenser is a Korean War vet, ex-cop, former boxer, and gourmet cook. Hawk is also an ex-boxer, a supposedly brutish machine who is given more nuance over time, as Parker subsequently reveals hints of the person under the armor.
Parker once stated that Hawk has a ferocious practicality, which invites us to assume, based on Hawk’s street vet status and the warrior name he’s adopted, that his history has prepared him for navigating a hostile universe. We only get fleeting glimpses of Hawk’s backstory and have to read into him what we will. Some have dismissed the Hawk character as representing the stereotype of a big, bad, monosyllabic black man who lets his fists and gun do the talking. Had Hawk been around for only one or two outings—and had his sartorial selections not improved—that charge might hold water. But gradually, over the course of the Spenser novels from Promised Land forward, Hawk becomes more than just a cut-out.
In some ways, it’s cathartic to have a character who can act as the coldly efficient dispatcher of pain and life, seemingly untouched by it all. For once set in motion on a course of action, Hawk will do his best to achieve the designated outcome.
“I know Hawk. Something happens to you, he’ll be a royal pain in the ass till he gets it straightened out,” volunteers buttoned-down mob lieutenant Vinnie Morris to Spenser in The Widening Gyre.
Initially, I saw the Hawk character as a way for Parker to palm off the dicey work in a story, the ethically challenging shit that he couldn’t have his hero Spenser do. Sure, to some extent Hawk took on that role, just as Robert Crais’ Joe Pike did for Elvis Cole, Walter Mosley’s ever-volatile Raymond “Mouse” Alexander did for Easy Rawlins, and Bubba Rugowski did as the muscle for Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Dennis Lehane’s detective stories. But these cats are no slouches as writers, and each broadened and deepened our understanding of who these badasses were, as well as their relationships to the conflicted main characters. The further honing of these writers’ hard-bitten anti-heroes speaks to their skills, as well as to the demands of modern mystery readers, who respond to tough, but dimensional characters.
Spenser is an amalgam of the one-dimensionality of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Chandler’s richer, more introspective Marlowe. Parker admitted early on that Chandler was probably too much of an influence on him. It’s no mistake that Spenser was a man of violence, but understanding of alternative lifestyles and well read. He is a warrior-scholar called on to navigate the complexities of today’s world of high-rises and high tech, but also someone who understands that, beneath all the gloss and shine, we’re still animals who too often succumb to the reptilian parts of our brains.
Parker didn’t shy away from addressing the darker side of human nature, whether of the individual or of society. His Spenser novels, many of which took place or began in segregated Boston, set the scene for him to confront, slyly, issues of race and racism, as he did various times with Hawk. Take for example in Promised Land, when Powers, Hawk’s erst-while employer, orders him to kill Spenser and Hawk refuses. Powers calls him the “N” word, and not affectionately as in, “Hawk, you my nigga.”
Now and then, Parker would also contrast Hawk to other black characters, to show he was no “handkerchief head,” but his own man in his own way. For instance, in Crimson Joy, a serial killer going by the sobriquet Red Rose is slaying African American women in their 40s. Tony Marcus, a black crime figure, invites Spenser and Hawk to lunch to pick their brains about what they might know about this psycho. Spenser and Hawk, in their terse, smart-ass way, discuss his possible motive.
“Tony say he can help you with the Red Rose thing.”
“Why?”
Hawk shrugged. “Don’t like it that some guy’s killing black women.”
“Tony’s become an activist?”
“Tony been making his living from black women all his life,” Hawk said. “Maybe he don’t like seeing the pool depleted.”
At their lunch, Parker makes it clear that Hawk is not about posturing or posing.
Hawk put his glass down and leaned slightly forward toward Marcus. “Tony,” he said. “I ain’t black, he ain’t white, and you, probably, ain’t human. You want to look good down around Grove Hall, that’s your business. But don’t waste a lot of time with the black brother bullshit.”
Though Hawk often seems uninterested in racial politics, as he does here, he is decidedly not in the manner of the modest “good knee-grow,” the humble credit-to-his-race type—like, say, John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs, the black police detective introduced in the 1965 Edgar-winning mystery novel In the Heat of the Night (though it should be noted that both characters share a joy of reading off-topic. In that first book with Tibbs, we first come upon him reading a copy of James Conant’s On Understanding Science, and Hawk has been known to read up on scientific topics such as genomes, occasionally even partaking of soft-boiled mystery fare as well). I imagine Parker must have caught some grief as a then middle-aged white man writing a younger black character with Ebonics-style speech, delivered laconically. But the more frequently Hawk was featured in the Spenser novels, the less he appeared to be a one-dimensional stick figure, and the more his character became developed and defined.
Another example of Hawk’s development as a character can be found in Double Deuce. Hawk has been enlisted by a church group to find out who killed a teenaged girl and her child in a drive-by. He, in turn, recruits Spenser for backup. Much of the investigation takes place in the so-called Double Deuce housing project, where the two have run-ins with the local gang, the Hobart Raiders, and their leader, Major Johnson.
“I know what you’re like,” Erin Macklin, a former nun turned teacher and community activist, tells Hawk at one point:
“I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you . . . Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”
Macklin suggests that Hawk’s duty is virtuous and admirable. Having seen the toll that gang violence has taken on her community, she lauds Hawk’s emotional balance, stripped down, as she sees it, “to the necessities.” Macklin’s words may very well speak to the core of Hawk’s character. Hawk isn’t one-dimensional; he just works hard to keep whatever angst and conflicting emotions he carries around like the rest of us buried. Let the extraneous shit eat at you and that’ll get in the way of your job, he might opine.
That mindset, and Hawk and Spenser’s relationship, are adroitly captured by Parker in an early scene from Double Deuce where the two are parked in the housing complex in Hawk’s Jaguar for all to see, including the gangbangers.
Hawk nodded. He was slouched in the driver’s seat, his eyes half shut, at rest. He was perfectly capable of staying still for hours, and feeling rested, and missing nothing.
“Something will develop,” Hawk said.
“Because we’re here.” I said.
“Un huh.”
“They won’t be able to tolerate us sitting here,” I said.
Hawk grinned.
“We an affront to their dignity,” he said.
“So they’ll finally have to do something.”
“Un huh.”
“Sort of like bait,” I said.
“Exactly,” Hawk said.
“What a dandy plan!”
“You got a better idea?” Hawk said.
“No.”
“Me either.”
From the mean streets to the suites, another of Parker’s mainstays was his riffs about his time in academia, and his send-ups of the self-important sort too often found within those hallowed halls. We get a taste of this, while also contrasting of Hawk against another pumped up character, in Hush Money. The plot involves a square African American English lit professor, Robinson Nevins, who comes to Hawk for help. He has been denied tenure over a rumored gay liaison with a graduate student who subsequently committed suicide. Nevins is the son of a man, Robert Nevins, who was something of a guiding force to a younger, greenhorn Hawk. As Hawk relates dryly to Spenser:
“Bobby sees something he likes and he takes me on, and when he finds out I’m not living anywhere special he takes me in, and I learn to fight and maybe along the way to use a fork when I’m eating. Stuff like that.”
The case brings Hawk and Spenser at one point to have a face-to-face with the self-important, would-be militant professor Dr. Amir Abdullah. This confrontation is foreshadowed when earlier in the book Hawk tells Spenser wryly, “Amir so down even I don’t understand him when he talk.”
At Abdullah’s off-campus office, the interview deteriorates quickly when the prof tries to clown our man, insinuating he’s a handkerchief head. Hawk’s patience finally runs thin:
He leaned across the desk and grabbed a handful of Abdullah’s saffron robes. Abdullah screeched for help and several of the hard young men in dark suits came dashing down the corridor. Hawk slapped Abdullah across the face forehand and backhand, hard enough to rock his head back.
Hawk’s outburst precipitates a dust-up with Abdullah’s men, and he and Spenser must use their experienced fisticuffs against the others’ dojo-learned kung fu. Afterward, Spenser questions Hawk’s reaction to Abdullah.
“You don’t have feelings,” I said. “I’ve heard blacks call you Tom, and whites call you nigger, and for all you cared they could have been singing ‘Louie, Louie.’”
“I know.”
“And all of a sudden you have a NO-BLACK-MAN-CALLS-ME-TOM fit and we’re fighting four martial arts freaks.”
“I know. Done good too,” he said. “Didn’t we.”
“We’re supposed to,” I said.
“What was all that wounded pride crap.”
Hawk grinned.
“Scrawny fucker annoyed me,” Hawk said.
Hawk being Hawk, there’s more to his irritation with Abdullah, as Parker reveals later in the book. Years before, Abdullah had sexually propositioned a younger Hawk. It wasn’t about the professor coming on to him, but about him trying to exert power over someone he perceived as powerless, Hawk explained.
Across the Spenser novels, Hawk emerges from being Spenser’s darker reflection—the part to unleash when it’s Hammer time—to exhibit a distinct and individual persona. Someone who makes sure he’s not put in positions where he’s powerless. Yet we learn about Hawk the individual without ever encountering the more personal aspects of his life. In none of the Spenser novels do we see Hawk’s crib (though what with the leisure suit in his initial incarnation, it might then have been replete with black light posters, lava lamps, and bean bag chairs—well, not those, since if a man is shooting at you, they’re hard to get out of in a hurry), or learn what part of town he lives in, or where he shops. When it comes to Spenser, we know these details all too well. Hawk, in contrast, often just appears, like an apparition, outside Spenser’s office, or at some bar and grill where the two occasionally meet. People know how to get hold of Hawk, but I imagine his number isn’t listed. Whose name appears on his utility bills? But readers accept that a Spenser novel is not concerned with such banal details. Parker develops his characters—Hawk included—not by overdone exposition but by putting them into difficult situations and showing how they respond.
However, those situations are filtered through Spenser’s first-person reflections and ruminations. We understand Spenser not just through his behavior, but through his thoughts. We come to know the PI internally and externally, and we learn what drives him to make certain decisions that will have a psychological impact on him months and years later. Hawk we can only know externally. We know him from his actions, his dialogue—minimalist but generally to the point—and by what Spenser thinks of him. And while Parker sometimes portrays Hawk one way on the surface, through Spenser’s observations, again it’s the choices Hawk makes that define him. In Hush Money, we read about Hawk’s inscrutable “Mona Lisa” reflection, but in Cold Service, we understand that Hawk, as Macklin observes in Double Deuce, feels duty-bound not only to ensure the safety of the remaining child of the man he failed to keep alive, but to rip off millions from the gangsters who shot him, not for personal gain, but to set funds up for the kid’s welfare.
I don’t know if there’s an interview where Parker covered this, but given that 1976 was when Promised Land was published, I have to think Hawk coming into being and beginning the journey he’d take to become the Hawk we experience in Cold Service and Hush Money, was influenced to a degree by Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft, the tough black PI who first saw life on the page in 1971. Him and those stick-it-to-the-man filmic figures like Jim Brown as the relentless ex–Green Beret, Slaughter, in two Blaxploitation-era movies. Chester Himes’ Harlem plainclothesmen, the circumspect Grave Digger Jones and the deformed, volatile Coffin Ed Johnson, with their don’t-give-a-damn attitudes and fearsomeness, are crime fiction forbearers for Hawk as well.
In this passage from Himes’ All Shot Up, published in 1960, it’s as if Himes were describing the dual, dueling facets of Hawk’s nature through the relationship between the two characters:
Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with grey. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face.
Hawk’s roots can also be found in the novels of Donald Goines and Roosevelt Mallory. Not particularly skilled as wordsmiths, these two are names probably not much known among today’s mystery reading community. I’m betting sure money both writers were unknown to Parker, but we can nonetheless see a trajectory from their characters to Hawk.
I believe Mallory only wrote four novels, all of them about his merciless hitman, Joe Radcliff. We’re told this, as with “Hawk,” is not Radcliff’s real name. What we do know is he’s a Vietnam vet who not unlike fellow former servicemen the Punisher and Mack Bolan, the Executioner (star of some 600-plus paperback vigilante adventures), is on a mission to wipe out the mob—albeit with the motivation of profit and not revenge. Like Hawk, Radcliff is muscle for hire, as seen in this description of Radcliff from 1975’s Double Trouble:
It’s Radcliff’s deadly little game plan, a game he devised in the jungles of Vietnam where he calculated that he was knocking off VC for only fifty bucks a head. He figured the underworld would pay him more for knocking off their own kind than the good guys would pay him for doing so. And the end result was the same—except for the bread.
And Radcliff’s women and off-duty silky life called for lots of bread. For Joe Radcliff bread is the name of the game!
After those four novels, Mallory dropped off the pulp landscape. Much more is known about Donald Goines, who has been crowned the “Godfather of Ghetto Lit”—the term used to describe the hardboiled tales that arose in the late 1980s, initially self-published crime novels with a hip-hop flavor featuring men and women looking to get over—to live large, to attain a warped, funhouse mirror version of the American Dream—via drug slangin’, thievery, killing, and other such unsavory pursuits. Goines’ bio, like Parker’s, includes a stint in military service in Korea as a military police officer. There the similarity ends. Goines was a dope fiend, petty thief, and minor pimp. While in the joint on a stolen goods beef, the Detroit native stumbled on the works of a former for-real pimp, Robert Beck, a.k.a. Iceberg Slim. Beck’s fictionalized memoir, Pimp, inspired the convict to try his own hand at writing, given the fact that he and Beck shared the experience of being on the other side of the law.
Goines, Beck, and Mallory were first published in original paperbacks by the white-owned but “urban-themed” (as the euphemism goes) Holloway House, a now-defunct publishing enterprise in Los Angeles. Goines finished his first two books while still incarcerated. When he was released he got back on the needle and ground out fourteen more novels (five using the pseudonym Al Clark) between 1971 and 1975, until he and his girlfriend, Shirley Sailor, met their ends violently, shot to death in their apartment.
Daddy Cool, published in 1974, is arguably Goines’ best effort. It’s about a ruthless hitman, Larry Jackson, known as Daddy Cool, whose one saving grace is his attempts to keep his wild teenaged daughter from falling under the sway of a flesh peddler. Jackson, forgoing the Father Knows Best-style, speaks to his daughter in this fashion:
“Hear this littl’ bitch,” he growled, and he didn’t recognize his own voice. “If you ever try speakin’ to me in that tone of voice again I’ll kick your ass so hard, you won’t be able to sit sideways in that goddamn Caddy, you understand?” Before she could shake her head one way or the other his hand moved in a blur. Twice he slapped her viciously across the face.
While we might imagine Hawk’s character addressing a wayward child in a similarly blunt manner, Hawk doesn’t resemble Daddy Cool nearly as much as another Goines character, Kenyatta, named for Kenyan revolutionary leader Jomo Kenyatta. Like the Russian insurrectionist V.I. Lenin, and presumably like Hawk, Kenyatta adopted his name as a nom de guerre. Kenyatta was a gang lord who became politicized and used violent means to rid the ghetto of crooked cops and dope peddlers alike, echoing Hawk’s evolution from gang muscle to thinking man’s enforcer.
Despite Hawk’s growing complexity and the literary new wave of African American protagonists in the crime and PI genres starting in the late ’70s, it appears Parker never seriously contemplated writing a solo Hawk novel, delving into his past as he’d done with Spenser throughout the series. I assume the subject must have come up when the television show A Man Called Hawk was spun off from Spenser: For Hire, with Avery Brooks embodying the muscle turned paladin, but it would have been hard to write a contemporaneously set Hawk novel in first person and still maintain the mystery of the character. Hawk’s inscrutability was purposeful on Parker’s part. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming about Hawk in interviews, and I’m sure that’s reflective, to a point, of his not wanting to explore or lay bare too much about the man. But he couldn’t have written the number of Spenser novels he did and not have made notations, intended only for him, as to who Hawk was. Parker claimed he wrote in a straight-forward manner—no rewriting—but you can tell that, when he was hitting on all eight cylinders, he gave a lot of thought to word choice and phrasings.
I wonder if, in some safety deposit box on a street shaded by elms in a postcard-perfect Boston suburb, there isn’t a secret history of Hawk. But, even if Parker had written such a file, and I somehow got a hold of the keys and the location of the bank, I wouldn’t use them. I’d take a quick trip on the freeway from my house in Los Angeles to the beach and, standing at the edge of the ocean, toss those keys into the waves.
It’s better not to know too much about Hawk. He’s an elemental force who takes on the world in his own terms and that’s plenty.
As Hawk might say, “It be like that.”