Word: spenser
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trying to put anything over on anybody. Two years ago, he announced on the jacket of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, that he had written his doctoral dissertation on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Both of Robert Parker's novels, about a private eye known simply as Spenser, are filled with echoes of the masters. But Parker is really not a pirate. Instead, he resembles film makers like Jean-Luc Godard, who pay homage to great directors of the past with little vignettes so blatantly similar in style that no aficionado could miss or fail to savor them...
Pure Chandler. Take, for example, Spenser's reply to a smug and windy college president who wants to emphasize the "delicacy" of his predicament: "Look, I went to college once, I don't wear my hat indoors. And if a clue comes along and bites me on the ankle I grab it. I am not however an Oxford don. I am a private detective. Is there something you'd like me to detect or are you just polishing up your elocution for next year's commencement?" Pure Chandler. So is the president's riposte...
...Edmund Spenser...
...Spenser's grim comment was written 400 years ago, but the Irish drama seems to be eternal. The latest chapter in this unhappy story ended last week when the Executive, Northern Ireland's fragile coalition government of Protestants and Catholics, folded under the pressure of a devastating two-week general strike that had been called to preserve Protestant hegemony in Ulster. With the province near collapse, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was forced to reimpose direct rule from London, and British Tommies once again were on the alert to prevent Irishmen from killing Irishmen...
...ridiculously transparent pseudonym--Exeter--which it first received from a cousin of mine, a famous writer from that state who never used one word if he knew ten, and claimed in his brash youth to have registered in hotels in the area under names like "Benny Johnson," "Eddie Spenser" or "Al Tennyson." (He also described in one of his books "the most notorious whore-house in the state, located on a corner in my home-town where the public library now stands. I guess things have changed that much...