GO EAST, YOUNG MAN

ROBERT B. PARKER, JESSE STONE, AND SPENSER

| REED FA RREL COLEMAN |

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .

—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Images MUCH AS ELIOT’S Prufrock is not meant to be Hamlet, Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone is not meant to be Spenser. In a 2005 interview, Mr. Parker stated, “I invented Jesse Stone so I could try my hand at third-person narration, and a guy who was nowhere near as evolved as Spenser. Jesse has problems with alcohol and his ex-wife, Spenser is complete. Jesse is a work in progress. I also liked writing about a cop and small-town police force.”

Regardless of Parker’s intentions, the question remains: Is Jesse Stone simply a thinly disguised and stripped-down incarnation of Spenser? Or, like Prufrock and Hamlet, who both suffer from an inability to make decisions—Prufrock: Do I dare disturb the universe? Hamlet: To be or not to be—do Stone and Spenser share certain common features that render them only superficially similar? And, in spite of those similarities—some obvious, some less so—do they maintain their own integrity as distinct characters or, at a distance, do they blur together?

As the preceding quote from the late Parker indicates, Jesse Stone was, at least in part, more invention than inspiration; a sort of literary test bed for Parker’s experimentation with third-person narration. Aware of this, a reader might assume that Parker would not treat his writing of Stone with the same level of care and aplomb with which he approached his treasured Spenser, but Robert B. Parker was a consummate professional and a master craftsman. It is doubtful he would give less effort to any of his projects based on the inspiration versus invention quotient. The sharp, spare writing of the Stone series bears this out. Even an experienced mystery reader would be hard-pressed to divine from the Stone series that Parker was any less invested in Jesse Stone than he was in Spenser.

JESSE STONE

Convenient invention or not, Jesse Stone is an interesting construct because, although Parker specifically claimed to want to explore a cop, as opposed to a PI like Spenser, in the midst of Stone’s development into a more fully formed person, like Spenser, Parker chose to give Stone a classic PI backstory. Stone, as the reader discovers early on in the originary Jesse Stone novel Night Passage, is a hotshot LAPD homicide detective fired due to a fondness for alcohol. A cop with a drinking problem! Go figure. This is such a popular convention in the genre that it borders on cliché. Well, no, it is cliché. And the apparent clichés don’t stop there.

Stone is neither a zealous, wide-eyed rookie just out of the academy wanting to do good and to set the world right, nor a grizzled old veteran with one eye on the calendar counting down the days until he can retire to fish the rest of his life away on a lake in Idaho. Stone is thirty-ish, a ten-year man: on the job long enough to have learned all the tricks and to have seen all there is to see, a man with regrets, but not so embittered by his life or police work that they render him useless. Sounds like the perfect résumé for a hard-boiled PI.

Jesse Stone also suffers from a stage four case of that classic hardboiled illness, Bad Blonde Girl Disease. This is not at all surprising given that Parker was such a devotee of Raymond Chandler. A discussion of Poodle Springs, Perchance to Dream, or any of Parker’s other Chandler-related works is for another time and place. Suffice it to say, however, that Raymond Chandler’s famous line from Farewell, My Lovely—“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”—does a neat job of describing Jesse Stone’s wife, Jennifer. For about half of Night Passage, Jennifer, an aspiring actress, is in lockstep with the blonde from Farewell, My Lovely: scheming, ambitious, unfaithful. To Parker’s credit, however, he imbues Jennifer with some redemptive qualities, and not only does she exhibit the ability to grow, as the book progresses she actually becomes a steadying influence on her ex-husband.

Parker’s Jesse Stone recipe also includes a healthy—or, depending on your perspective, unhealthy—dose of what I’ve come to think of as the Woe-Is-Me-I-Coulda-Been-A-Contender Syndrome. It seems Stone was a minor league baseball player, a shortstop in the L.A. Dodgers organization, with potential to have made the major leagues. Jesse Stone is often wont to raise a glass of scotch to a photo of Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith. If you read between the lines and listen very carefully, you can almost hear Jesse say, “Ozzie, I may never have been as good as you, but I coulda been a contender.”

After all, you can’t have a good old hardboiled detective setup without a protagonist who is haunted by something. That something, as in my Moe Prager series, can be a secret that, if exposed, can wreak havoc upon the detective and his family. Sometimes, as in Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series, it can be as profound as the accidental death of an innocent victim. Quite often the haunting is the direct result of loss. That loss can be the loss of career, a spouse, or a loved one, or, as with Jesse Stone’s baseball career, the loss of what could have been rather than what was. In many ways, the haunting of potential unfulfilled is more insidious than the loss of the tangible. Parker apparently concurred, as he used this same conceit twice in the Stone series. Jesse’s friend and state police homicide commander, Captain Healy, is also a minor league baseball player who coulda been a contender.

Whatever the haunting, whatever the loss, the genre convention is that one loss leads to more loss and often to self-destructive behavior—usually drinking to excess. And Jesse Stone is the poster boy for all of the above. He feels his marriage slipping away, begins drinking heavily, and loses his shield in L.A. and his wife. His theme song might as well have been “I (Who Have Nothing).” And I think that’s Parker’s point here. He uses the time-tested hardboiled formula to isolate Jesse Stone. To totally drive him away from familiar territory, to remove him from his support system, whether that support system was functional or not. The momentum of loss and self-destruction is the engine that propels Stone’s move from one coast to the other. First Mr. Parker isolates Stone, then Stone, doing a reverse Horace Greeley by taking a chief of police job in a tiny New England town, isolates himself.

It is Parker’s willingness to use cliché, to tinker with it and to use convention in unconventional ways, that underscores his fine craftsmanship and depth of knowledge of the genre, but he doesn’t stop there. Convention would have Stone landing the job as chief of the Paradise police because of his competence as a homicide detective. Convention would have him get the job in spite of his drinking. Here, Parker throws us another curve. Jesse Stone gets the job not in spite of his drinking, but precisely because of it. His new bosses assume drinking has made him weak and pliable, that whatever competence he once displayed has been drowned in a sea of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. And why wouldn’t they believe it? Stone’s record indicates he was fired for cause, and he shows up to his job interview blotto.

As I reread books from the series, Stone’s troubles with the drink resonated with another book I’d read or movie I’d seen. I tried hard, thinking back to all the noir, hardboiled PI novels, police procedurals, and other crime novels I’d read, but the answer remained elusive. I searched movie databases to see if that could shake my memory loose. It was only after catching a few minutes of The Ox-Bow Incident on a classic movie channel that I realized I’d been looking in the wrong place. Jesse Stone may have come east, but I should have been looking west or, to be more exact, at Westerns. What I was remembering or misremembering was Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of the drunken sheriff in El Dorado. Because of Parker’s love of Westerns—books and movies—I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what put the burr under his saddle to write Jesse Stone as a drunken lawman. That is pure speculation, but there is little doubt that the Western heavily influenced Parker’s writing.

Readers of the crime genre are very familiar with the line of thought that holds that the modern PI/police novel is simply an iteration of the classic Western and that the Western novel is an iteration of the tales of medieval knights. All three traditions often feature lone men with strong personal codes of ethics—codes that are frequently in conflict with the social norm—who pursue their missions with a single-mindedness of purpose and zeal, not because it is personally advantageous to do so. In fact, it is usually quite the opposite: because it is just and it is right. Think Galahad’s grail quest, High Noon, The Long Goodbye. In the aforementioned 2005 interview, Parker alludes to Spenser having “a knight-errant dimension about him.” So, how did we get from Robert Mitchum’s drunken lawman to Jesse Stone to Sir Galahad to Spenser and Marlowe?

In chapter seven of Night Passage, Parker throws in a few lines about Jesse Stone’s taste in movies that might seem fairly insignificant to the casual reader but are very telling about both author and protagonist: “But he [Jesse] didn’t pay much attention to movies. He thought they were boring except for westerns. Of which there weren’t many new ones.”

This establishes a link between Parker and Jesse Stone and a link between Jesse’s situation as the new lawman in town and the classic Western, but what of Spenser? One need only search Robert B. Parker’s official website to find the link, no pun intended. When you click on “The Spenser Series” under “Books,” the next page starts with a clickable title: “Spenser’s favorite restaurants, movies, and ball players.” Here’s where you cover your eyes and try to guess the five movies listed.

SPENSER’S TOP 5 MOVIES

Shane

Ulzana’s Raid

The Magnificent Seven

The Searchers

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Okay, you can open your eyes now and look. Did you have any luck? As we’re in the guessing mood—for those of you born after 1975—would you like to take a stab at what genre all of these movies fall into? That’s right, Westerns. Classic Westerns. Four of these movies, Ulzana’s Raid being the exception, are arguably among the top ten classic Westerns ever made. Parker may see Spenser in terms of a knight, not a sheriff, but he clearly sees a connection between the two.

These films also share a common thread that jibes with the earlier discussion of the knight-lawman-PI tradition. Each of the films features a protagonist who is given or elects to perform a thankless and dangerous task. (Although The Magnificent Seven, based on Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, seems to have several protagonists, the character played by Yul Brynner is the leader of the seven and the one who initially commits to defending the peasants against marauding Mexican bandits.) And in spite of the fact that each of the protagonists is beset by conflicting moral dilemmas, they carry on with their duties, which often leads to dire consequences.

These five films are listed as Spenser’s favorites, mind you, not Parker’s, although one suspects Parker very well might have agreed with Spenser’s big screen tastes. Now recall what the narrator of Night Passage tells us about Jesse Stone’s taste in movies. As far as a person’s values are reflected by his or her tastes, preferences, and choices, it would seem undeniable that Stone and Spenser share a very similar moral center. As an interesting side note, a heading on this webpage purports to list Spenser’s five favorite movies that aren’t Westerns—but no movies are listed, as if to underscore the importance of the classic Western to Spenser’s value system.

You needn’t rely solely on my interpretations or extrapolations concerning the classic Western as playing a central role in the moral compasses of both Jesse Stone and Spenser. Parker may no longer be with us, but Ace Atkins, the author entrusted to continue the Spenser franchise by Putnam and by the Parker estate, is. I wrote to Atkins and asked him to comment on the classic Western aspect of the commonality between Spenser and Stone and on the knight-Western-PI continuum.

“I find Stone is that bridge between gumshoe and gunfighter,” says Atkins,

He’s that link from the Western to the urban landscape. I find him much more in line with the Western hero—he did come east from California. But he’s slow to speak and acts with great patience. He’s the Wyatt Earp of the modern day. With a few things changed here and there, Paradise, Massachusetts, could be Tombstone. He’s the sheriff hired to clean up the town.

Parker definitely tossed out those references to Westerns and knights of old in his books. I think what we continually read is men living by a code. Whether it’s Spenser or Stone or Doc Holiday or Sir Gawain, they are men drawn to righting wrongs and restoring order. We could get into a larger discussion of someone like Sam Spade, who is immoral and realizes the world is without redemption. Spenser, Stone, and Marlowe do see the world for what it is—but they all have hope. Spade had little illusion of hope.

This classic Western tradition is not only an intellectual undercurrent in the novels, but has a direct impact on how the protagonists go about their business. In the very beginning of Parker’s Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch novel Appaloosa, Virgil Cole, a small-town marshal, confronts a man called Bear on a dusty street outside a saloon. Bear, as described by Hitch, Cole’s partner and the narrator of the novel, is “a big man, fat but strong-looking with a black beard and long hair,” and is bleeding from the side of his head where Cole has struck him with his revolver. Cole is trying to arrest Bear, a buffalo skinner, who has threatened to gut a whore he claims hasn’t given him his three dollars’ worth. In spite of Cole’s calm demeanor and repeated requests for Bear to go peaceably, Bear refuses—and not very politely. In the end, Cole shoots Bear and chases off his supporters.

Compare this with a scene from chapter fourteen of Night Passage, in which Jesse Stone confronts Jo Jo Genest at the residence of Genest’s ex-wife. Genest, a weightlifter and steroid user whom Parker describes as “hulking,” “a rhinoceros,” “Tarzan,” or “one of the apes,” has assaulted his ex-wife as he has many times in the past with apparent impunity. When Stone tries to reason with Genest, Jo Jo basically laughs at him and says he can take his ex whenever he wants. She’s his property. When Stone reminds Jo Jo that his ex-wife has an order of protection, Jo Jo again dismisses Stone and the power of law enforcement to restrain his activities. At this point, in front of Jo Jo’s ex and a subordinate cop, Jesse Stone kicks Genest in the groin. He lectures the incapacitated Jo Jo, holds his .38 to the bridge of Jo Jo’s nose, and threatens to shoot him if he comes anywhere near his ex-wife or their children.

Compare this to a confrontation Spenser has with a heavy machine operator named Eddie in chapter six of Promised Land. Spenser describes Eddie this way: “a big blond kid . . . He was a weightlifter: lots of tricep definition and overdeveloped pectoral muscles.” Spenser goes on to say that, “I’d have been more impressed with him if he weren’t carrying a twenty-pound roll around his middle.” Spenser is in a Cape Cod bar trying to find information on a runaway housewife named Pam Shepard, whom Eddie is alleged to have slept with. After bragging about his sexual prowess and the ease with which he bedded Pam, Eddie becomes belligerent. Spenser, a former heavyweight boxer, tries to dissuade Eddie from this course of action. When Eddie persists, Spenser embarrasses the bully by smacking him around and then finally hits him hard in the gut.

In all three instances, Cole, Stone, and Spenser are calm and act only when pushed to do so. These three scenarios are so profoundly similar that with the exception of minor details they are nearly indistinguishable. This is true not only on a manifest level, but on a deeper, fundamental level. You have women—a whore, a divorcee, a housewife who sleeps around—who act or have acted in some questionable ways and made some terrible choices, but who Parker’s protagonists defend with acts of reluctant violence. It is the nature of these scenarios that bears some analysis. Why are the dynamics of scenes like these so pivotal to Parker’s novels? Also note that all three examples take place in the early sections of their respective books in order to establish the nature of the protagonists.

First, let’s look at the players: the bad guy, the imperiled woman, and the hero. You can’t have a hero without a bad guy, but bullies are a particular kind of bad guy and Parker’s bullies are a particular breed of bully. They are all big men with big mouths who flaunt their disrespect for authority and the law. The accepted wisdom is that bullies are actually scared weaklings who pick only on those they are certain they can dominate.

So why bullies? They are convenient villains: easy to write, easy for the reader to root against, easy to hate. There are some sexy, loveable, charming, even sympathetic bad guys in the annals of fiction, but there’s nary a bully among them. Think of Silence of the Lambs. Who was the most detestable person in the movie? Hannibal Lecter? Buffalo Bill? No, it’s Dr. Chilton. Why? Chilton is a petty, insecure bully who taunts Lecter and interferes with Starling’s investigation. It’s easier to love a serial killer than a bully.

Parker’s bullies are also particular in their prey: women. In his choice of women to put in peril, Parker selects a specific kind of woman, a fallen woman. While it is clear the prostitute and the cheating wife fit into this category, it may not be obvious in the case of the divorcee, but through the course of Night Passage we find she never finished high school, isn’t the most diligent mother, and isn’t much motivated to change—so while she is not a fallen woman in the traditional sense, she’s still morally ambiguous.

The motivation behind Parker’s choices of women in peril is a little more complicated, however. I believe he chooses these fallen women because defending them and their honor says more about their defenders than it says about the women themselves. It’s as if Parker is saying that any man would defend a beautiful virtuous woman, but that it takes a special breed of man—a man who lives by a strict code of right and wrong—to rise to the defense of these women. Can someone say Don Quixote?

PSYCHO EX MACHINA

Deus ex machina—god from the machine—is a term derived from the tradition of Greek tragedy in which the playwright resorts to using a trick to get himself out of a seemingly insolvable plot conflict. It refers both to the physical equipment—a crane or riser—used to deliver the actor playing the god to the stage and to the god him or herself. In short, the use of a deus ex machina is cheating the reader or the audience. It’s the clue no one knew about or the character who swoops in at the last minute to resolve all the seemingly inexplicable plot conflicts.

Psycho ex machina is a phrase I coined several years ago to describe what I felt was a disturbing trend in the PI subgenre. I use it to refer to the sidekick who does the dirty work so that our protagonist can remain pure of heart and true to his code. I suppose this was an inevitable development as the PI novel evolved to reflect the society and culture at large. Would we find Easy Rawlins as likeable or as sympathetic a protagonist if he had to do the violence and murdering—some warranted, some not—that Walter Mosley has Mouse do? Would Matt Scudder be quite as appealing if there was no Mick Ballou, bloodied butcher’s apron and all, for Scudder to turn to in a tough spot? If Sherlock Holmes were in a fix and needed certain crucial information to save a client’s life, the current convention would have Dr. Watson torturing the person from whom Holmes needed the information. The most recent incarnation of the psycho ex machina is the genius computer hacker friend and ally that every modern PI seems to know. One might argue that Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larson’s Millennium series is Mikael Blomkvist’s psycho ex machina.

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series features Hawk, perhaps the most famous of all psychos ex machina. Hawk, introduced in Promised Land, is an African-American leg-breaker for a local crime boss named King Powers. Hawk and Spenser have known each other for years and share a professional respect, but they are by no means friends. Only after Hawk is sent after Spenser by King, and Hawk refuses to kill him, do Hawk and Spenser form a lasting alliance. Although Parker has Spenser describe himself as “a professional thug,” it is actually Hawk who is often given the dirty jobs to do. Both Hawk and Spenser live by their individual codes, but Hawk’s code is grounded more heavily in street morality than the code of the knight-errant. Parker intended Hawk to be the yang to Spenser’s yin, literally the black reflection of Spenser, and only a fool would argue that this wasn’t a very fortunate choice. If writing is about making choices, this was one of Parker’s best in terms of making the series a great success.

However, the underlying reasons for this yin/yang of Spenser and Hawk has probably less to do with sudden inspiration than with Parker’s abiding attachment to the tradition of the Chandlerian detective adjusting to the graying moral standards in the latter stages of the twentieth century. In other words, it would be impossible for Spenser—a happier, more fulfilled, better-fed version of Philip Marlowe—to keep to his code of ethics intact when encountering the cases he was apt to take on during the times in which the series played out. I believe Parker made a calculated and practical choice with Spenser and Hawk, much in the same way he did when setting up his bad guy/imperiled woman/hero confrontations.

And though it is difficult to bicker with success, I would argue that while the use of the psycho ex machina, Hawk in this instance, insulates Spenser, the hero-protagonist, from heart-wrenching or even impossible moral choices and allows him to remain true to his ethical code, it, like a governor on a truck engine, robs some of the potential energy from the series. This may be a further contributing factor to the creation of Jesse Stone. While it’s true that Spenser is a more “complete” person than Stone and is, unlike Stone, capable of carrying on a healthy long-term romance, and is quick to quote poetry or recommend a restaurant or good wine, I believe Stone is the type of man who would chafe at the prospect of a continuing relationship with a Hawk-like character. And, frankly, that makes Stone a more appealing character to me.

Stone and Spenser both may have started out as cops—Stone as an LAPD homicide detective and Spenser an investigator for the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, DA’s office—but from there their career paths diverge. Spenser strikes out on his own, whereas Stone loses his way and his job. As discussed earlier, Stone lands the chief of police job in Paradise, Massachusetts. The nature of Stone’s job would make a continuing relationship with a psycho ex machina very problematic but, beyond the constraints of his office, Stone is very much a man unto himself. I can’t see Jesse Stone, for all of his relationship woes and problems with drink, in need of a dark reflection or a negative image for dramatic purposes. For one thing, his own dark side is very much on display for the world to see. He does, after all, work in a small town, and it’s not like Stone’s issues are buried very deep. At most, Stone might have a continuing relationship with someone like Hawk as an informant, though I couldn’t see Hawk in that role.

None of this is to say that Stone wouldn’t be tempted, depending upon the situation, to make an alliance with a Hawk-like character if it were in the service of justice. Nor is it to say that Parker did not introduce Hawk-like characters into the Stone series to shake up Jesse’s world. In Stranger in Paradise, Jesse Stone is confronted by the Apache hit man Wilson “Crow” Cromartie. Cromartie was last seen in Paradise ten years earlier as a member of a robbery crew that had pulled off a huge heist at a wealthy island enclave. Not only has the statute of limitations expired on his crimes, but the women who were being held hostage during the commission of the robbery hail Crow as a hero, as the man who saved their lives while they were vulnerable and at risk.

Stranger in Paradise opens with Crow walking into Jesse Stone’s office and announcing his presence in Paradise. This would seem an odd course of action even given that the statute of limitations had expired on Crow’s alleged crimes, but of course there is a less obvious purpose for his coming to see Stone. Crow, who clearly respects Stone, is showing his respect by alerting him. He understands Stone has his job to do, but so does Crow. Crow is also indirectly asking Stone to help him do his job by staying out of his way. Interesting, given that Crow is basically a professional assassin, and Stone and his department try valiantly throughout the course of the novel to put together a case against Crow that will stand up in court.

Yet the respect between the two men is apparently mutual. Parker never wants us to lose sight of the fact that Crow and Stone share important qualities. Molly, one of Stone’s cops, compares the two men:

“He’s [Crow] is a little like you, Jesse . . . You have the same silent center. Nothing will make you turn aside. Nothing will make you back up. It’s . . . what do shrinks call it . . .?”

“Autonomy,” Jesse said.

“Yes. Both of you are, like, autonomous,” Molly said. “Except maybe you have scruples.”

“Maybe he does, too,” Jesse said.

Parker is very shrewd here in the way he peels away the onion skin for the reader. Notice that Molly, who through the course of the series is often Stone’s truth-teller and sounding board, uses the word “maybe” when assessing Stone’s moral compass. Maybe Jesse has scruples. That is a very telling statement. Jesse is so individualistic that his foibles are more evident to those who surround him than his values. Can you see the people surrounding Spenser having similar doubts about his scruples or lack thereof? And then to have Stone recognize a kindred spirit in Crow by using the same language to assess the killer is pretty amazing. Although Parker doesn’t describe Stone’s voice or his expression as he says, “Maybe he does, too,” I cannot help but see and hear Stone as wistful. This is heady stuff and once again shows how fine a writer Parker was. He drops a bomb on the reader, but not by shining neon lights and announcing, “Here it comes!” Rather, he reveals his character’s inner workings subtly, in a quiet moment of casual conversation. Wistful or not, kindred spirit or not, Jesse Stone is not destined to have a long-term relationship with Crow, at least not one in which Crow takes the tough moral choices out of Jesse’s hands on a regular basis.

STONE VERSUS SPENSER

It is said that many authors rewrite the same book over and over again. While that is too broad and simplistic a statement, there is the ring of truth about it. I do think the nature of writing is the investigation of haunting questions. Different writers are haunted by different questions, and their works are often defined by how they ask those questions of themselves and how they choose to explore those questions through setting, plot, theme, and character. Very rarely do we find satisfactory answers by asking the question once, in a single form, and exploring it in only one way. It wouldn’t be a very haunting question if it could be answered so easily.

Think here of Michael Crichton. It would not be hyperbole, I think, to say that Dr. Crichton was obsessed with the notion of humankind’s insignificance in the face of nature and the belief that humankind’s hubris and lack of respect in tinkering with the natural order of things leads inevitably to disastrous results. In other words, to quote an old TV commercial, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Crichton explored this notion again and again in novel after novel.

The Andromeda Strain: A space probe sent to capture samples of alien life forms—possibly to be used as biological weapons—returns to Earth carrying a microbe that threatens to destroy all life on Earth.

The Terminal Man: A man given to violent fits due to a brain disorder receives surgery that implants a computer in his brain. The computer, meant to alleviate his violent symptoms, actually leads to him being more violent than before the surgery.

Jurassic Park: Scientists discover a way to reconstitute the DNA of long-extinct dinosaurs and bring them back to life. A wealthy man creates an amusement park populated with dinosaurs, including predatory ones, and all hell breaks loose.

While I would not say that Parker rewrote the same book over and over, I do believe that he also explored similar themes and looked at the same question from different angles in his books. To refer once again to the 2005 interview: in it, the interviewer suggests that Parker was fascinated by the concept of how to take care of people who could not look out for themselves. To facilitate this exploration, he imbued his protagonists’ personalities with many common ingredients. So yes, on some level Spenser, Jesse Stone, and even Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are all Hamlet, though they might not have been meant to be. They were created as protectors: as knights, Western lawmen, PIs, and cops. Any comprehensive reading of Parker’s canon would bear this out. Yet I believe that the scope of Parker’s works goes deeper than just his broad theme of caring for people who could not look out for themselves. He explored, almost reflexively, questions of loyalty to self, job, code, and friends, and the results of the conflict between these often competing loyalties. He explored the implications of love, of love fading, of love lost, and of love recaptured—not themes usually associated with crime writing.

One of the great joys in revisiting Robert B. Parker’s writings in preparation for this piece was the discovery of so many things I’d missed the first time around, and it was a pleasure to read some of his novels that I hadn’t read previously. His characters, for all of their faults, flaws, and blind spots, are alive and as real and memorable as any in literature, and Parker was masterful at spinning those foibles into gold. His place is secure as one of the masters of PI and crime fiction.