Robert B. Parker

I'm still trying to come to grips with the news of Robert B. Parker's death yesterday. He was certainly a great writer, one of the best of his genre. I believe there is no currently active mystery writer who is unacquainted with his work. Everybody who reads detective fiction seems to have an opinion on him and his books, especially the highly popular and influential Spenser series.

Parker blew life into the detective novel when such stories had fallen out of favor. Are any other writers mentioned in the same breath as Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald? He gave us such memorable characters as Spenser "That's Spenser with an 's', like the poet.", a romantic thug who likes to cook and read poetry, Susan Silverman, Hawk, Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and an extraordinary supporting cast.

Parker wrote 65 novels, an impressive output by any standard. Looking for Rachel Wallace is a classic of the detective genre, and, in my opinion, one of the books anyone who aspires to being a mystery writer must read. Not all of his books were great, but I never found one that wasn't readable and entertaining. Aren't those the goals we all strive for? Some people hated his stories, while others loved them. He has a lot of imitators. In the tributes to Parker that have appeared since the sad announcement, one word keeps coming up--stylist. He took great pains with his style, and even among all the imitators, his style is readily identifiable, especially in his dialogue and his use of white space.

I think his greatest contribution to the detective genre is Susan Silverman. The earlier detectives were all lone men and a few women, who, though they may have had frequent liaisons with the opposite sex, were incapable of entering complex, committed, loving relationships. The women or men with whom they did have relationships tended to be weak, one-dimensional characters. Susan was different. She was a match for Spenser in every way. She was beautiful, refined, intelligent and accomplished. She was better educated than Spenser and her professional practice surely brought in more money than Spenser's. Sometimes they were cloyingly cute, but when Parker was at his best, Spenser and Susan sparkled like Tracey and Hepburn. They explored many different, complicated aslpects of a relationship that lasted thirty-six years. Imagine that, a thirty-six year romance in a hard-boiled mystery series. God Save the Child, which introduced Susan in 1974 was a landmark book and the detective genre was changed forever. If your detective has an emotionally complex, if not satisfying, relationship with another character, thank Robert B. Parker for that.

Robert B. Parker was 77. He died at his desk. We'll miss him.

Mark Troy
http://hawaiian-eye.blogspot.com
http://www.marktroy.net

Aging Series Characters by Chester Campbell

The age of your character could become a problem if you’re writing a series. The best known current series character is Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. Since I don’t have the early Spenser books, I’m not too sure how old he was when he started out, but it was at least mid-twenties. The Godwulf Manuscript was published in 1974 and the 2009 model, The Professional, will appear later this year.

With thirty-seven books in as many years, that would make the wisecracking, rough-and-tumble private detective almost sixty years old. He’s pretty agile for that age, but I’ll go along with it. My new protagonist, Sid Chance, is fifty-nine in the first book, The Surest Poison. He’s physically big and tosses a couple of guys off the porch.

Lee Child’s rugged Jack Reacher should be mid-forties in the thirteenth book, Gone Tomorrow. He would have been around thirty when he got out of the Army six months before Killing Floor chronicled his first brush with the law and the world of bad guys. Who knows how long he’ll be able to continue his superhuman escapades in wiping out a host of nasties in each book.

Sue Grafton took a different tack in dealing with her smart and headstrong PI, Kinsey Milhone. Since A Is for Alibi came out in 1983, there have been twenty-one books, including U Is for Undertow, due for publication later this year. As far as I know, Kinsey is still in her thirties. I believe the books are set in the seventies, before cell phones and DNA and a lot of other forensic stuff. It works well for Kinsey as she ages slowly.

When I wrote Secret of the Scroll, published in 2002, I didn’t have writing a series in mind. I liked the characters, though, and decided to keep them around. But age was a problem. Greg McKenzie was sixty-five. I didn’t plan on him tackling the villains like a football player, but I wanted him to be a physical challenge. The Sue Grafton method seemed like a good solution.

Designed to Kill took place a year later. Since then, the stories have been separated by three or four-month intervals. Book two was set in November, Deadly Illusions the following March, The Marathon Murders in August. The fifth book, now underway, takes place in December of the same year. So in Greg and Jill McKenzie time, it’s still 2004.

How do you feel about aging characters? Should they follow the calendar, or take their own sweet time?

Too Many Killings? by Chester Campbell

How much killin’ is enough? You expect to find murders in a murder mystery, but do some authors go overboard?

Lee Child is one who knows how to knock ‘em off with abandon. Jack Reacher and his antagonists can be counted on to dispatch up to a dozen or more in every book. Reacher does it with a bit of flair, killing in just about every way imaginable.

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser has been known to knock off a few bad guys, though he usually keeps it to a fairly low number. I seem to recall in Potshot, however, that Spenser and his crew stirred things up out in Arizona on a level that outdid the O.K. Corral guys by far.

Of course, when the good guys are pulling the trigger, it isn’t murder, it’s self-defense. But sometimes, it seems, they can get pretty self-indulgent.

When the mystery involves a serial killer, it’s a given that there will be a string of bodies laid out all through the book. Some authors delight in giving us all the gory details of how it happens. But are we any more enlightened than when we only learn the basics of the slaughter from a detective’s perspective or an autopsy report?

I have described a few deaths in my books, but I keep the gory details to a minimum. How do you feel about killings in mysteries? Are there too many? Are they too graphic?

Chester Campbell
Mystery Mania