| MAX ALLAN COLLINS |
AND
| MATTHEW CLEMENS |
IN 1973, WITH the publication of The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser put himself up for hire for the first time. This classic Philip Marlowe–style detective was wrapped in modern trappings that quickly built a major following for Robert B. Parker and his appealing hero. Almost immediately fans began to speculate on what actor might best portray the Boston knight in a big-screen or television incarnation. Similar questions were raised about supporting players Hawk, Spenser’s black sidekick (and id), and Susan Silverman, the detective’s love interest (and conscience).
That question would finally be answered on September 20, 1985, when ABC first aired a TV series based on the novels, adding a new household phrase to Parker’s already well-known detective—Spenser: For Hire. Though the show ran only three seasons, a modest success of sixty-five episodes, its impact was such that even some longtime readers of the series began to refer to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser: For Hire novels.
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The show snagged a decent time slot—Tuesday night, following the network’s up-and-coming spring replacement, Moonlighting, featuring Cybill Shepherd and somebody named Bruce Willis. Unfortunately, the Shepherd/Willis series was not yet a ratings juggernaut; though lead-in Moonlighting came in at number twenty-four in a year when The Cosby Show ruled the Nielsen ratings, Spenser: For Hire failed to crack the top thirty.
In season two, consigned to the no-man’s land of Saturday night where Star Trek had once been sent to fail, the program played out its run. Though the series had a devoted following and won critical favor, making the coveted cover of TV Guide on July 19, 1986, Spenser: For Hire never reached the Nielson heights. Still, Spenser was enough of a hit to last three seasons and even spawn a short-lived Hawk spin-off.
Yet even as lesser-known shows of the 1980s have found their way to home video, Spenser: For Hire has not, despite the wide built-in audience of Robert B. Parker readers. (Jesse Stone, anyone?) Though it aired during the boom of home video, the show was never released on VHS tape. And, although assorted clips can be found on the Internet, the series has practically disappeared—nowhere to be seen in syndication, no boxed seasons on DVD.
Five years after the demise of the series, however, the popular character returned in four Spenser movies running between 1993 and 1995 on the Lifetime Network (at that time, not yet “the Network for Women”). These again featured Robert Urich as Spenser and Avery Brooks as Hawk, though other supporting players did not make the transition.
In 1999, the character returned in the first of three TV movies (with Joe Mantegna as Spenser) produced for A&E. This trio of Spenser adaptations has also virtually disappeared, leaving only the four mid-’90s films as readily available evidence of a television version of Parker’s popular character.
Popular literary private eyes have often had a hard go of it in film and on TV for a reason tied to their source material: Robert B. Parker—like Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane before him—wrote in a distinctive first-person style that encouraged reader identification. These writers were fairly stingy with physical descriptions—yes, we know the private eye is a big guy who can handle himself (Spenser is a burly ex-boxer) but little else—and readers caught up in an effective first-person narrative create their own mental images of a protagonist.
Marlowe and Hammer went through a dizzying array of actors on the big screen. Hammer had two relatively successful runs with Darren McGavin and Stacy Keach TV incarnations in the ’50s and ’80s respectively, while Marlowe flopped in a 1950s network version starring B-movie actor Phillip Carey, with a more successful two-season cable run in the ’80s featuring Powers Boothe. Detectives whose adventures were told in the third-person by their authors have tended to fare better on screen—Perry Mason, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and especially secret agent James Bond.
As Parker himself said in a TV Guide article,
My novels are told in the first person. We see everything from Spenser’s point of view. Television is, by definition, third person. We see everything through the camera. In my novels, we see Spenser from the inside. On television we see him, as we must, from the outside.
A reader’s idea of a detective encountered in a first-person narrative can clash badly with the physical representation that an actor brings to bear. But while not every Robert B. Parker fan loved Robert Urich as Spenser, few would deny his appeal, and most would embrace him as a first-rate, even ideal, small-screen interpretation. A veteran of television and movies, the ruggedly handsome Urich earned stardom in a thirty-seven episode run of S.W.A.T. (1975–1976), then in sixty-nine episodes as private investigator Dan Tanna on Michael Mann’s successful Vega$ (1978–1981). To Spenser, Urich brought an easygoing charm and, due partially to his broad-shouldered physique, an understated menace. Though some thought him too affable for the role—he would, after all, later become captain of The Love Boat: The Next Wave—for many others, Urich was Spenser.
Like the detective he portrayed, Urich was capable, an adjective the actor himself once used to describe the character. Not merely able, “capable” meant that Spenser was a man to be reckoned with. Though plenty smart, he might not always be the brightest man in the room, or the biggest, or the strongest, but he was always the most capable. He could take it, dish it out, hold his own with fists or guns, and still find the time and summon the wit to crack wise as he did it. The part was perfect for Urich, and he proclaimed it the role he enjoyed most in his career.
Urich has an appeal in the intimate medium of series television that places him on that short list of casually charismatic actors who own the heroes they embody. It’s a list that includes the likes of James Garner and David Janssen, and perhaps half a dozen others. In TV terms, Urich was a “great” actor, and his feel for Spenser—at least the small-screen variation thereof—was largely what made the series work.
The actor in particular knew just how to toss off a Spenser wisecrack in a manner that seemed neither obnoxious nor unlikely—there was a wink and a self-deprecating touch to the delivery of these signature lines. It’s not hard to imagine readers picturing Urich as Spenser while reading the books and taking the smart-ass edge off many of Parker’s lines. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to the individual reader . . . and viewer.
Displaying his own brand of smoldering charisma, Avery Brooks brought to life Hawk, Spenser’s de facto partner and added muscle when needed. A respected acting teacher, Brooks had little television experience before Spenser: For Hire, but was so compelling and convincing in his role that he became a break-out star, leading to the 1989 spinoff series, A Man Named Hawk, which lasted thirteen episodes. (From 1993 to 1999, Brooks enjoyed even greater success on the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, appearing as Captain Sisko in all 173 episodes of its run.)
As Hawk, Brooks flirted with an over-the-top blaxploitation approach—Hawk really did seem at times to have wandered off the set of Shaft’s Big Score—but his swagger had a tongue-in-cheek nature that sold it without, surprisingly, making the character seem any less menacing.
The only other cast member to appear in all sixty-five episodes of Spenser: For Hire was character actor Ron McLarty, who ably portrayed world-weary Boston police detective sergeant Frank Belson. Having begun acting in the early ’70s, McLarty was a veteran of stage and television before Spenser. Since that show he has appeared in several films, worked on television, and become a popular reader of audio books by authors as varied as Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, and Clive Cussler.
In seasons one and three, Susan Silverman was portrayed by Barbara Stock. A school counselor, as in the books, Susan graduated from Harvard with her PhD and became a psychiatrist. After the 1985–86 season, producers decided Stock was out—suddenly Susan left for San Francisco to “find herself.”
Actress Carolyn McCormick was brought in as Assistant District Attorney Rita Fiore to provide Spenser with a new love interest. The writers had found little for Stock to do and even less for McCormick in her single season. When producers wanted Stock back for season three, it took a personal plea from Urich himself to bring about her return. He would later say it was a mistake not to have fought for Stock when she was removed from the show in 1986. Stock, for her part, appreciated Urich’s (somewhat belated) support.
The first two seasons also featured Academy Award nominee (Sometimes a Great Notion) Richard Jaeckel as Lieutenant Martin Quirk. Though credited through the third episode of the last season, Jaeckel disappeared from the show after that, for reasons never specified.
Of the show’s sixty-five episodes, only one—the two-part pilot—was based on a Parker novel: the 1977 Edgar-winner Promised Land. After that, Spenser’s cases came courtesy of top television writers, including producers John Wilder and William Robert Yates, and such pros as Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin.
In a TV Guide article, Parker said,
Some of the differences between their Spenser and my Spenser are dictated by the demands, real or imagined, of an enormous mass market . . . Thus, their Spenser is the spokesman for a Norman Rockwellesque version of apple-pie America, about which my Spenser would murmur, “Isn’t it pretty to think so” . . . But these are mere policy changes. Their Spenser differs fundamentally from my Spenser because television differs from books . . .
And what of me? As I watch the somewhat different characters on television, am I influenced to change the books? Their Spenser, Robert Urich, is big, graceful, good-looking, and young (a runner-up in the Robert B. Parker look-alike contest). Will I change my Spenser to match? No. The books are mine. They were here before the series, they will be here when it’s gone. Spenser: For Hire has no more effect on my writing than Monday Night Football.
In short, I like the show, and I like the novels. If I were you, I’d watch their Spenser and read mine and enjoy them both. A thing is, after all, what it is, and not something else.
The four mid-90s movies found Parker—initially—exerting more influence. Parker and his wife Joan wrote the first two scripts, and all four films were based on Spenser novels.
As noted, Urich and Brooks were back, but this time veteran Canadian TV actress Barbara Williams portrayed Susan Silverman in the first two films, Ceremony and Pale Kings and Princes, replaced by Wendy Crewson in Judas Goat and A Savage Place. All four movies are readily available on DVD from numerous sources, although a boxed set is out of print and pricy.
Ceremony is set in Boston’s “Combat Zone,” an area known for prostitution and its high crime rate. A student from Susan’s school is missing, and Spenser sets out to find the girl. He and Hawk encounter numerous lowlifes, some in high places. A straight-ahead tough guy movie, the film stays fairly true to the plot of the ninth Spenser entry. One major plot point differs from the novel but actually adds to the suspense, lending the film a particularly nasty final twist.
The script, credited to Robert B. and Joan Parker, is somewhat talky in the way many screenplays by novelists sometimes are, but it is nonetheless effective and surprisingly unflinching in treating its brutal subject matter. The couple’s son, Daniel, has a bit part (he appears in all four films in a rather typical TV-style humorous recurring character, a motor-mouth waiter). The version of the film available on DVD is apparently a variant cut intended for foreign release (perhaps theatrical) and includes nudity and a level of violence not seen in any other Spenser adaptation. Of the four, Ceremony feels the most like a real movie.
USA Today, in its review, said, “The movie script is better than the majority of the (Spenser: For Hire) TV episodes . . . crisp with classic Spenser one-liners that are such an integral part of the novels, but were often missing from the series. Robert Urich turns in his best Spenser effort yet.”
Filmed in Canada, due to budgetary constraints, Ceremony was at least made to look like it had been filmed in Boston, with some limited second-unit filming in the actual setting. To a lesser extent, the same was true of Pale Kings and Princes.
In the first film, the Spenser and Hawk take-on-the-world variety of Parker’s fiction is well-portrayed; in the second film, Spenser and Susan as Nick and Nora Charles is similarly well-portrayed, though the feel is more TV than film this time around, with the screenplay even talkier. Some of Parker’s one-liners go flat, even with Urich’s throwaway style (when a car explodes, Spenser’s comment that “There should be marshmallows” is an eye-roller); but on the whole it’s a tense, involving telefilm.
Spenser and Susan leave the city for the bedroom community of Wheaton, where they investigate the death of a reporter and the cocaine trade. Hawk helps, and together the group manages to save the life of a character who didn’t survive the original novel, as well as (of course) solving the crime.
Based on the fourteenth book in the series, this script was also penned by Parker and his wife. Some fans rate it as the finest of the four Lifetime movies (the writers of this piece would give the nod to the first, which holds its own with many a theatrically released crime film of the period).
Discussing his hero in a 1985 interview in Connecticut Post, Parker said, “Spenser may expound philosophically on things from time to time, but he always chooses—and I will always choose—the individual rather than the group.”
He added,
I would not sacrifice you for the greater good. I think it was E.M. Forster who once said that if he had the choice between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. I’ll buy that. Someone else, I think it was Pound, said that if there were a fire in a museum filled with great works of art and there was also a cat in there, he’d try for the cat. I agree with that, too.
This second film reflects Parker’s (and Spenser’s) point of view well. In its original review of the novel Pale Kings and Princes, a Newsweek critic wrote, “Like Philip Marlowe, Spenser is an honorable man in a dishonorable world. When he says he will do something, it is done . . . But it is the moral element that sets them above most detective fiction.”
Budgetary issues, including filming in Canada, became much more apparent after the second film. While the first two had at least attempted to reflect Boston and Massachusetts, the last two simply gave in to financial considerations, writing in Canada itself as the locale, no matter what the original novels had depicted. Also, the Parkers were no longer the sole screenwriters.
And, by the third film, The Judas Goat, Barbara Williams was out as Susan Silverman, replaced by fellow Canadian Wendy Crewson. Fresh from big-screen film roles in Corrina, Corrina and The Santa Clause, Crewson was likely seen as a bigger draw than Williams. As was the case with Barbara Stock in the original series, however, the writers found it difficult to find anything for her to do. Nonetheless, Crewson made a winning and intelligent Susan, and managed to do very well in a thankless role.
In the novels, Susan serves to draw out Spenser’s true nature, both for the reader and the character himself. In later books, her Harvard education allows her to make insights into the behavior of characters that actually aid Spenser in his investigations. With the exception of Pale Kings and Princes, those aspects of their dynamic are missing from the movies.
No fewer than five writers have credits on the DVD jackets of The Judas Goat. The Parkers are “writers,” while Nahum Tate and Carol Daley are credited with the teleplay. Monte Stettin receives credit under both headings.
The novel, the fifth in the series—and an especially strong entry—revolves around a wealthy businessman seeking justice against a terrorist group that killed his family, and involves a massive plot to disrupt the 1976 Olympic Games. Spenser and Hawk travel from Boston to London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and finally Montreal to root out the conspirators.
The film’s budget could not manage this kind of travel. Instead, we have an African ruler facing assassination (not in the novel), we lose the Olympics, and globetrotting is reduced to Ottawa, Canada. The theme becomes one of greed run amok, a frequent topic of Parker’s, and a nasty twist is added to the end.
While many avid readers of Spenser were frustrated by the significant reworking of the plot, the film, taken on its own terms, remains a strong, viable tale. As usual, Urich and Brooks shine while the supporting cast is able (if not “capable”), and Crewson does well with a role reduced to alternating between cheerleading and mere eye candy. It’s a strong telefilm with a crisp script that may strike some as tighter than the banter-heavy, novelist’s approach of the first two by the Parkers. The Judas Goat is perhaps more likely to appeal to Spenser: For Hire fans than readers of the novels.
The fourth of the mid-90s films, A Savage Place, once again alters the plot for the sake of finance, changing the novel’s Los Angeles setting to Toronto.
In the novels, Spenser sometimes broods about lives he is unable to save. He feels responsible for someone involved in the case getting killed when he thinks he could have—and should have—prevented them from dying. Just as he was spared that pain in the adaptation of Pale Kings and Princes, he dodges the bullet again in A Savage Place when a main character murdered in the book manages to survive the film.
One can only guess at the motives for changing these events—in one film Parker himself co-wrote the script, and in the second, he did not. Another change in the plot has to do with the client: a stranger introduced to Spenser by a mutual acquaintance in the book, she is transformed into a former flame for the movie, probably an ill-advised, even inane, attempt to help put some meat on the bones of Susan’s character.
Though this ploy should add tension to the story, it really doesn’t; the two women only share one scene that resolves nothing. The plot has the former flame, a TV reporter, being threatened but not going to the police, and behaving in an illogical, even stupid, manner throughout. Spenser seems to have wandered onto the wrong film set.
As with The Judas Goat, a veritable laundry list of writers receive credit: the Parkers and Monte Stettin as writers, while Nahum Tate and Carol Daley get credit for the teleplay along with Donald Martin.
Not quite a fiasco, A Savage Place represents an ignoble end for the entertaining version of Parker’s character and his world represented by Spenser: For Hire. That Urich retains his dignity—and Spenser’s—is the best that can be said for this somewhat sorry finish.
In 1996, Urich, filming his eleventh TV series (The Lazarus Man), was diagnosed with synovial cell sarcoma, a rare disease that assaulted his joints and tendons. The fifty-year-old fought the illness head on, changing gears and working hard to raise both money and public awareness, taking his fight against cancer to a wider battlefield.
On The Larry King Show, Urich said,
I cannot spend a second of time going into a “woe is me.” This is where I am and if this is going to happen to me, how can I find a way to make this a positive thing? Worrying is kind of a wasted energy, you know? It’s okay to be afraid—let that in, it’s part of the experience.
About his favorite television role, he said,
Spenser is an old-fashioned hero. He’s a throwback to the days of chivalry, knights in shining armor, and super-heroes. He believes in old-fashioned values and the family unit, and he deals with its disintegration . . . He represents what we would like to be when push comes to shove. We’d like to be loyal, doggedly determined, never to give up, and see things through to the end. That’s Spenser!
Urich succumbed to cancer on April 16, 2002.
Spenser’s screen counterpart, minus Urich, made three more appearances. These TV movies were created for A&E, and once again Robert B. Parker was writing scripts based on his novels.
The first, 1999’s Small Vices, was based on the twenty-fourth novel in the Spenser canon. Replacing Urich and Brooks were veteran actor Joe Mantegna and relative newcomer Shiek Mahmud-Bey.
Mantegna, whose professional career began in 1976, had appeared on many TV shows and in several films including The Godfather III and David Mamet’s House of Games. Though still a smart-ass, the Mantegna Spenser was more world-weary than Urich’s. Both actors brought interesting qualities to the character. It might be argued that Mantegna is a better actor than Urich ever was; it might also be argued that he was not the better Spenser.
The new Hawk, Shiek Mahmud-Bey, had just completed a nineteen-episode run on Profiler before Small Vices. Although he was a physical specimen, former Golden Gloves boxer Mahmud-Bey could not bring the gravitas to Hawk that Brooks so effortlessly had.
Marcia Gay Harden, already a Tony Award nominee, assayed the role of Susan Silverman. She had an easy chemistry with Mantegna, and the two seemed as close to the “at-home” Spenser/Susan dynamic as was ever achieved on screen. Within a year she would win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Pollock and in 2003 would collect another Academy Award nomination for her work in Mystic River.
In 2000, Mantegna and Harden returned for their second Spenser film, Thin Air. Based on the twenty-second Spenser novel, this one found Spenser searching for the kidnapped wife of Frank Belson. This was the only Spenser film not to have an appearance by Hawk. Joined by respected actors Jon Seda (Homicide: Life On The Streets), Miguel Sandoval (Clear & Present Danger, Medium), and Luis Guzman (three-time Screen Actors Guild Award nominee for Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Traffic), Mantegna and Harden slogged through a film most viewers considered merely average.
Still working backward, the third and final entry in the Mantegna/Spenser trilogy was Walking Shadow, based on the twenty-first Spenser novel. Investigating a murder in Port City, Spenser and Hawk—this time played by an unmenacing Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters)—have to deal with the Chinese underworld as well as Police Chief DeSpain, played by Eric Roberts (King of the Gypsies).
Although there are fans of these movies—including Dean James and Elizabeth Foxwell in their fine Robert B. Parker Companion—the Mantegna tele-trio seems little more than a blip on the Spenser radar. Mantegna, it should be noted, is a much admired narrator on a number of Spenser audio books.
Maybe the best way to explain Spenser on screen is to recall the words Parker put in Spenser’s mouth in Promised Land:
I try to be honorable. I know that’s embarrassing to hear. It’s embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.
Parker and Spenser both had that going for them—they lived life on their own terms.
So did Robert Urich.