Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Like a Death In the Family...

...when I read today that mystery novelist Robert B. Parker had died almost 10 days ago. I discovered Parker in the late-1980s -- after his books were adapted into the Spenser For Hire television series with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks, but before even half of what eventually became an almost 40-book series was realized. In the process, fictional Paradise police chief Jesse Stone -- of Tom Selleck, TV-movie fame -- and Helen Hunt-inspired, cop's-daughter Sunny Randall also became near-annual regulars. And, have you seen the movie Appaloosa?!

Using paragraphs often less than a line long, Parker wove intricate descriptions around morally-wound (and -wounded) leading men (and a woman or two), retailing quick, precise, allusive, and amusing dialog within a fast-paced plot which often seemed to move faster than its characters, who caught up with it at the end and set things right. There was never any doubt about the outcome of a Parker novel (the good guys win!), but the story was about the journey and the participants, so who cared?

The maddening thing about Parker was that his crisp dialog could make a 325-page book into a 3-hour read -- thoroughly delightful, but unsatisfying in the realization that it would be another year until the next title in the series. So, the advent of the Stone and Randall characters, and the throw-in Westerns, added the subliminal promise that the wait between publications would be lessened, as it was. I read Sandford, Connelly, maybe Patterson, and sometimes Baldacci or others, to pass the time till the next Parker issue.

He reputedly wrote five pages a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year. You do the math -- that's 3-4 books annually. In fact, reports are that two more Spenser novels reside with the publisher for future release, as does another western, and a Jesse Stone novel slated for next month. Needless to say, they will become first-edition reads here, but the unrealized handful of rarer texts may blaze beyond my pecuniary circumstances with his death -- an early magazine serialization which became a self-published, limited booklet featuring an early Spenser character, and a hard-to-find early novel with which he shared a byline with his beloved, 50+-year bride, Joan. Otherwise, I own every Parker title, and have a scattershot, correlative collection of signed copies and Advance Read proofs. While I have all of Connelly's Harry Bosch titles, and Sandford's complete Prey series, for no other author than Parker have I made a concerted effort to document the entire compendium. But, even with failure to net the missing pieces, I can't imagine parting with any of the books themselves.

Much more likely, I will start back at the beginning, and read them all again (not for the first time!). Which makes me believe that, while yesterday and today Robert B. Parker was a work-a-day, popular fictionalist, tomorrow he will become a piece of the American literary culture: the novelist who bridged Marlowe's film noir stories with today's modern culture and society -- without losing the beneficial assets of either one.

Robert Parker died at his writing desk, suddenly and without anticipation; which means that Spenser, Stone, Virgil and Everett, Hawk, and others will live forever. If you've not met them yet, be thankful that the meeting will be so long and entertaining.