Word: spenser
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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...
There are other bouquets. At one point Spenser even calls himself Nick Charles to relieve the tedium of an inquiry. His Boston office, a block or so away from the infamous bar in George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, could be Philip Marlowe's in Los Angeles: "Second floor front, one room with a desk file cabinet and two chairs in case Mrs. Onassis came in with her husband, mail slot and pile of mail." L.A. has long been the culture capital of suspense fiction. Boston may now be moving up. In Parker's God Save...
Parker, however, lacks George Higgins' obsession with the city and uses his local details more sparingly. He works a more middle-class milieu; the reader gets to know suburbs like Lynnfield and Marblehead too. He is also careful to keep his echoes just that. Spenser is not Marlowe or the Continental Op. He is a naturally optimistic and even-tempered fellow. In so far as he can afford it, he loves the good life. A bachelor at 37, he has a fine, selective eye for women. He is also an excellent cook, and Parker does not hesitate to halt...
...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...