Maybe it was my post a few days back where I referenced Hawk and Spenser for Hire, but I picked up one of my old Robert B. Parker paperbacks the other day and was amazed, again, at how great his prose is, and of the connections and themes that are tied together in his treatment of the basic detective novel.
Now Parker has written a metric ton of books, and they've spawned numerous TV shows, made for TV movies, and most recently, Appaloosa, starring Ed Harris, which wasn't half-bad. In the past bit of time his work has aimed a little lower, I think, than the days of A Catskill Eagle, or A Savage Place, where there was a whole subtext going on beyond the main action. The reference to Melville and Moby Dick for example in A Catskill Eagle is present throughout. As is, in Valediction, the nod toward the Donne poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and the conceit of the poem. These devices make the early Parker exceptional on a number of levels.
As an aside, I always think it is interesting how Elmore Leonard started with Westerns and has gone toward crime fiction, whereas Robert B. Parker started with detective and has written a handful of Westerns in the past years.
And I have been reading a lot, a lot, of Leonard lately as I work on some fiction and try and get my ear right for plot twists, dialogue, and character development from the limited third-person point of view.... but re-reading these old Parker paperbacks has me in awe of his craft again and has me remembering what drew me to him in the first place.
Plus, some of these old paperbacks I have owned for twenty years... and I have read twice as many times as that. They are like talking to an old uncle or something for me. Starting to read Robert B. Parker at 11 (after chewing through Fitzgerald, Hem, Salinger and others) had as much impact on me in some ways as my family and friends did in my development as a teenager and a young adult.
If you want a treat, try out these Robert B. Parker titles: Promised Land, Early Autumn, A Savage Place, and Valediction. There are parts of these stories that are embedded in me and explain some of the clockwork of my mind (you can blame de Kooning, Nancy Cole, and Al Eidsvig among others for some of it too). They are also true testament to Parker's inheritance of Raymond Chandler's prose and in furthering popular fiction by using the device of a mystery novel as a launching pad into social exploration a la Ross Macdonald (only better).
These books are part of what made me want to be a writer.
Above, see the starting credits of the old tv show. You guessed it, it was nowhere near as good as the books. But I love that horn.
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