Machismo’s Captive: Robert B Parker’s Private Eye
Racking up some 70 books since his 1972 debut in The Godwulf Manuscript, Robert B Parker, the winner of an Edgar Grand Master Award for life-time achievement, was justly feted for reinvigorating the hard-boiled private eye tradition, especially in the 39 novels featuring his private eye hero, Spenser. Maybe Parker’s apparent facility and his very real success were resented (he sold over four million books worldwide). Yet as the years passed and the novels piled up, Parker came to be seen by some crime fiction cognoscenti as formulaic compared to younger talents like George Pelecanos and Stieg Larsson. As a verdict on a career, though, this judgement misses the mark by a wide margin.
One of the most striking features of Parker’s novels is their ability to switch across registers, blending the prosaically colloquial with the eloquently elegaic. Take his private eye hero Spenser’s adieu to Los Angeles in A Savage Place:
‘I got back in the MG and drove back to Candy’s apartment feeling friendly towards LA. It was big sunny buffoon of a city: corny, disorganised but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the dwindled fragment of – what had Fitzgerald called it? – “the last and greatest of all human dreams”. It was where we had run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us … ‘
Parker was an English professor before he became a writer, and he acknowledged that his stylistic agility owed something to his earlier career:
‘the PhD in English, while it didn’t teach me anything about writing, probably informed my imagination and maybe gave my writing what Chandler and Hammett lacked, ‘the sound of music from beyond the hill’.
In his early novels this ‘music’ adds resonance to his descriptions of the squalor of contemporary America, the sense of lost innocence, a departed Eden. But, as in the final paragraph of Gatsby, we find ourselves ineluctably borne back to a shabby and defeated present. In God Save the Child, driving out to Smithfield to investigate a case Spenser describes how:
‘The brick and asphalt and neon were blurred by distance and sunshine and beneath it I got a sense of the land as once it must have been. The silent mid-summer buzz of it and copper-coloured near-naked men moving along a narrow trail.’
All too soon he finds himself in ‘a sewer of commerce … a plastic canyon of sub-sandwich shops, discount houses, gas stations …’ We have not so much lost Eden as become trapped in a tacky cut-price hell.
At times Parker almost seems to taunt us with his literary references. The many books Spenser works through in his free time include Richard Slotkin’s study of violence in the American novel, Gunfighter Nation, and Bartlett Giamatti’sThe Play of Double Senses in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene. It is as if Parker is creating a post-modern echo chamber where particles and parallels from all sorts of unexpected quarters ping off one another in continuous ironical collision.
This makes Parker’s novels sound abstract and artificial. But that is not at all the final effect. Parker’s triumph is to weave these literary elements together with realistic social settings, peopled by vividly realised characters colliding in a gripping, hard-driving narrative. I defy anyone to read the night-time sequence in Valediction in which Spenser beats off a gang of pursuing thugs in an unlit scrap-strewn wasteland, alternately hiding and attacking, without a quickening pulse, or the passage in A Savage Place where he desperately tries to track down his abducted client Candy Sloan in the blackness of a deserted LA oil field surrounded by the sinister giant forms of the nodding donkeys.
Something else is striking about his work, a dominant note that lingers in the mind. Parker’s own summation of his achievement was that: ‘I present in relatively linear and comprehensible fashion a world in which a protagonist finds love and is not defeated’. Not defeated: it is that underlying note of optimism and buoyancy that underlies all Parker’s books, even the darkest of them. You cannot finish a Spenser novel without being encouraged and emboldened, feeling that life cannot only be mastered but also relished, whether through sex, friends, reading a good book, cooking a delicious dinner or drinking a glass of Amstel after a hard work-out. At the end of The Godwulf Manuscript, having seen off the villains and rescued the victim, Spenser rings up Brenda Loring, the girl he has been eyeing in the building opposite his office:
‘I said, ‘Hello, my name is Spenser, do you remember me?
She laughed, a terrific laugh. ‘With the shoulders, and the nice eyes, yeah, I remember.’ And laughed again. A good laugh, full of promise. A hell of a laugh when you thought about it.
That hell of a laugh, from the belly and the heart and the groin, echoes through all the Spenser novels and stays in the mind, strengthening and sustaining, long after they have been put down.’
The central figure in Parker’s idiosyncratic, literary-gritty universe is Spenser, a tough wise-cracking ex-boxer and ex-cop who works out of Boston as a private eye. Like Marlowe with whom he shares many traits, Spenser is a moral man in a mean world. Parker, however, extends and enriches his private eye’s persona. Alongside macho attributes such as running, boxing and weight-lifting Spenser is gregarious, warm and humorous; a gourmet cook and lover of fine ale; also (as we have seen) highly literate; a Massachusetts liberal sensitively attuned to the hurdles faced by women, minorities and adolescents. Traits such as these have led some commentators to characterise Parker’s riff on the traditionally tough private eye genre as ‘soft-boiled’.
But Spenser is just as tough as that of any of his fictional predecessors. He lives by a code grounded in coolness, self-possession and readiness to face risk. Spenser’s code is all about personal honour and, perhaps more fundamentally, individual autonomy. Spenser explains this to his psychotherapist partner, Susan:
‘See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business … And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some people take religion, or success, or patriotism, or family, but for a lot of guys those things don’t work. A guy like me. I don’t have religion or family, that kind of thing. So you accept some system of order and you stick to it … I don’t know if there is even a name for the system I’ve chosen, but it has to do with honor. And honor is behaviour for its own reason.’ (Mortal Stakes)
It is this strenuously sustained autonomy that sets him apart from the legion of losers and lost who step into his office, hesitantly or bumptiously, to buy his help. They – and, it is implied, most of America – are unaware and unresolved, shapeless and undefined, without any clearly worked out goals or moral boundaries.
Spenser’s code is both fixed and flexible. Spenser, who is a devoted sports jock, describes it as ‘a kind of serious game’. Watching baseball – the ‘Summer Game’ – in God Save the Child he defines its attraction as that of ‘order and pattern: discernable goals strenuously sought within rigidly defined rules’. This is picked up in the lines from Robert Frost that form the epigraph to the next novel, Mortal Stakes:
‘Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done,
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.’
The code’s values are shared implicitly by all the hard men in the novels, whether private eyes, cops, hired toughs or contract killers. The difference between Spenser and the other hard men is that he sets out actively to do good, going to inordinate, unpaid lengths to rescue clients and set them on the right track. Spenser is actively charitable. Although it is never spelled out in these terms, like Marlowe before him, he is a kind of secular saint, albeit one not averse to alcohol, breaking the rules and, when necessary, heads.
The young in particular attract his sympathy and elicit his most strenuous efforts. Innocence under threat and the need to rescue and redeem lost or stolen youngsters are recurrent themes. Explaining his career choice in A Savage Place, Spenser says ‘I got to be too old to be a boy scout. Susan at one point calls him ‘the ultimate father and the biggest goddam kid’, with them both agreeing later on a parallel with Holden Caulfield’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’.
In Early Autumn Spenser takes Paul Giacomin, the nerdy son of two shallow, warring parents, whom he has been hired to retrieve, into the wilderness to harden him and help him get into shape, both physically and mentally:
‘He needs to grow up quick,’ I said. ‘He needs to get autonomous. It’s the only hope he’s got. For him he’s gotta stop being a kid at fifteen. His parents are shit. He can’t depend on them any more. He’s gotta get autonomous … Spring is gone. It’s early Autumn for Paul.’
The early Spenser novels, however, are far more than a codification of a masculine role; they test it to destruction. The challenge to Spenser’s impregnability comes paradoxically not from his enemies but his love for Susan, which exposes him to jealousy, anxiety and the likelihood of loss. They first meet in God Save the Child (1974), where she is introduced as the school counsellor of the missing boy Spenser is trying to track down. Their relationship develops through subsequent novels,but by The Widening Gyre (1983) Susan has begun to detach herself from Spenser in pursuit of her own autonomy (‘I’m working up a self’). She goes off to Washington in to do a PhD, leaving Spenser functioning but bereft and drinking heavily.
Paul Giacomin puts his finger on Spenser’s plight, describing him as ‘machismo’s captive:
‘What’s happened to you is that you’ve let Susan inside, and you’ve let me inside. Before us you were invulnerable. You were compassionate but safe, you understand. You could set those standards for your own behaviour and if other people didn’t meet those standards it was their loss, but your integrity was … intact.’
In her pursuit of autonomy Susan often seems coldly egotistical, identifying the necessity to maintain a self-image as the root of all human behaviour, including their own relationship: ‘I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.’ But the parallels work both ways. If Susan seems self-centred in her analysis of human motives, Spenser is also forced by the end of that novel to admit the egocentricity at the heart of his love for Susan:
‘The way I feel about you is my problem, not yours. And it’s absolute. It can’t be compromised. It could exist without you.’ (My italics)
Is Spenser, by making her part of his code, also manipulating Susan in a roundabout way?If love is accorded too free-standing a value, does it not lose touch with object that aroused it in the first place? These are the paradoxes on which Susan and Spenser’s relationship turns and which are explored in the novels.
The next novel, A Catskill Eagle (1985) pushes deeper into the heart of darkness. In the course of it Spenser is called on to come to terms with his penchant for violence and the forces that made him what he is. The novel has a harsher, bleaker atmosphere throughout, a coldness that sits oddly with Spenser’s customary bantering and domesticity. ‘How the hell did we end up here?’ Spenser asks at one point during the plot’s twists and turns, commenting later that ‘the ways of the Lord are often dark …but never pleasant.’
There had always been a hard side to Spenser. But until now Spenser’s ruthlessness had been, as it were, hived off and concentrated in his alter ego Hawk – who is as Parker put it, ‘Spenser’s dark side’. Hawk and Susan are Spenser’s twin alter egos, with Susan’s affection necessary to counterbalance Hawk’s ruthlessness:
‘[Hawk] and I are part of the same cold place. You aren’t. You’re the source of warmth. Hawk has none. You’re what makes me different from Hawk.’
Hawk, grimly humorous and ‘as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving’, is ready unlike Spenser to injure or kill without hesitation or pangs of conscience if circumstances or money requires it. But, as Hawk points out, Spenser has been trying to have it both ways and now the moral chickens are coming home to roost:
‘You spent your life in a mean business, babe, trying not to be mean. And so far you got away with it mostly. But there’s stuff on the line that never been on the line before.’
The plot goes through many twists and turns as it tracks the efforts of Spenser and Hawk to prise Susan from the grip of one Russell Costigan, the dare-devil son of Jerry Costigan, a wealthy industrialist. They eventually manage to rescue Susan but discover she is a semi-willing captive who still questions Spenser’s commitment to her:
‘I was the thing you used to help yourself. You projected your strength and love onto me and used it to feel better. In a sense I never knew if you loved me or merely loved the projection of yourself … ‘
Wavering between her two lovers, like metal between two magnets, Susan is forced to choose by Spenser and finally opts for him. Strangely, Russell accepts this, sensing a way to supplant his father of whom he is oedipally jealous. He leads Spenser to the Costigans’ hideout in an Idaho mineshaft, where Spenser shoots Jerry.
The novel bundles together a whole quiver of contrasts and parallels: not only between Spenser and Hawk and Susan but also – in their rugged individualism – between Spenser and Jerry Costigan, and – in their freewheeling taste for danger – Spenser and Russell Costigan. Russell senses this underlying kinship: ‘You hate my ass but there’s this connection. Right? There’s this special connection’. Spenser calls Russell was described by as ‘sort of a dangerous child’, but, as Susan had said, Spenser as well as being ‘the ultimate father’ is also ‘the biggest goddam kid’. Spenser, we have been told, is a motherless child brought up in an all-male household by his father and uncles, which has left its mark, giving him strengths but also constraining them.
Underscoring these parallels are interconnected strands of imagery relating to reflections, infancy and immaturity. Spenser’s tortuous groping down the dark tube leading to the Costigan mineshaft hideout is wonderfully realised in hard physical terms but also conveys the sense of a journey into childhood fairy tale world (‘It was darker where I was than the inside of a dragon’) ending when he penetrates the womb-like mirror-world of the Costigans (‘The door opened and I stepped through the looking glass’). Spenser emerges from the evil psychodrama in the Costigan family lair symbolically reborn, paradoxically releasing himself by a redemptive act of violence, killing Jerry, the destructive father figure who is also Spenser himself.
At the earlier point in the novel when Susan had finally committed herself to Spenser, an odd, many-edged image was used to describe their bond:
‘The connection between us was palpable. It seemed almost to seal away the rest of the world, as if we were talking inside one of those sterile rooms that immune deficient children grow up in … ‘
This image conveys a complex mix of messages: closeness and ‘elective affinity’ certainly but perhaps – more negatively – childlike solipsism, egoisme a deux and a continuing fragility needing to be treated. A Catskill Eagle addresses these issues, tries to drag them into the light and grapple them into sense. It was to be the last of the Spenser novels to do so.
Then something seemed to happen in the sequence of novels. Parker backs off. Maybe he felt he had taken his exploration of the macho psyche and a male-female relationship as far as he could. The change is marked by a much flatter, more compressed, dialogue-driven style. In an interview Parker commented on what he saw as a way of distilling and concentrating meaning:
‘I guess probably I am the great economist. I don’t waste too much in the way of language. Was it Harold Pinter that they called the great compressionist? I would lay claim to that in my own area of expertise. It is probably what I do best. Say a lot in a little. Put the most meaning in the fewest words.’
Surface becomes all in the later novels. But it is a wonderful reflective surface! Spenser’s inner journey may be a thing of the past, but we move to an outward journey that uses the crime genre to explore and capture the social realities of contemporary America and especially of the various ethnic communities at the bottom of the pile.
Parker provides a bleak picture of the world of the black ghettoes in two of his later books, Double Deuce and Small Vices. Parker also delves into the world of Chinese immigrants in Walking Shadow and of Hispanics in Thin Air. The latter’s plot turns on Spenser’s search for Lisa Belson, a cop’s wife, who has been abducted by her former lover, Deleon, an aspiring, semi-psychopathic Chicano gang leader, and on the rivalry between Deleon’s gang and an established operation in his neighbourhood. Its cataclysmic final scene takes place in the rain-sodden tenement in which the gang and its women and children have barricaded themselves. Under the weight of accumulated water the building collapses, forcing Deleon out onto the street where he is inevitably gunned down by his rivals. We feel great sympathy we are made to feel for Deleon as he advances, with conscious, almost martyr-like deliberation to his doom. The scene is outstanding both as the vivid depiction of the building imploding under enormous pressure and as an image of social and psychological disintegration.
Parker was aware of the opportunities the crime novel in this direction, commenting in an interview that:
‘the detective novel is embedded in the fabric of the culture in so many ways. Because the detective story at the most elementary level is about human interaction. Somebody kills somebody, somebody steals something belonging to somebody else, and another person tries to find out about it and because the focus of the search is into the culture and into the community and into the social fabric, it allows the protagonist to move across the full range of society. It gives you the opportunity for social criticism, in ways which a novel which was not about this search for this hidden truth might not necessarily happen to [be].’
Parker died in 2010 of a heart attack in the course of one of the daily six-hour writing stints that he had maintained with iron self-discipline throughout his career. Afterwards two final Spenser novels appeared, Painted Ladies and Sixkill. In them, Spenser and Susan have worked their way through the tensions dogging their relationship and to have achieved a final equipoise that has come to terms not only with the bond that connects them but their separate individuality:
‘You could get out of this business,’ Susan said.
‘I could,’ I said.
‘But you won’t,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Because this what you are and who you are,’ she said. ‘And if you quit, you would like that even less.’
‘I’d still be with you,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t be enough,’ she said.
‘If you asked me to change,’ I said, ‘I’d change.’
‘I’ll never ask you,’ she said.
‘You’d be enough.’
‘We’re each enough for you,’ she said. ‘The rest is speculation.’
‘You’re a pretty smart broad,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Susan said. ‘You’re a pretty interesting guy.’
Susan is right: Spenser is a pretty interesting guy, in creating him Robert B Parker bequeathed a character and a world that significantly extends the thriller genre and one that will last.