In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler

becomes generic. It’s clear that Parker is intimate with his setting, as Chandler was with Los Angeles and Ross Macdonald was with all of California. The West Coast plays a prominent role in so much detective fiction (a calculatedone, in some cases; old-time Hollywood preferred to buy properties that could be filmed at home) that when cities like Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit began to show up in the second great wave of private eye tales that started in the 1970s, critics coined the phrase “regional mysteries” to define the phenomenon, as if Los Angeles and San Francisco were any less provincial than Springfield, U.S.A.
    Parker’s is not the city of Beacon Hill, Fenway Park, and baked beans—although with the exception of beans he would not overlook these threads in the local fabric. It’s a gritty, aging powderkeg, a place of private estates and public housing projects where the privileged and underprivileged classes cloister behind high walls, a place where speeding cars bent on dark errands thunder over streets stained with the blood of patriots, home of sinister family secrets and the Tenderloin. In his hands alone it has risen to a level in suspense lore beside Sax Rohmer’s Limehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street. He paved the way for the careers of fellow Bostonians Dennis Lehane, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Mark Wahlberg.
    Not that he spends much time on physical details, of his city or anything else. He’s a lean writer—gaunt would not be overselling the case—and in a publishing climate that encourages 500-page tomes on the theory of marketing by the pound, a typical Spenser weighs in at less than two hundred. For a while (it was during that bleak period when I suspect Parker had lost his taste for Spenser through over-familiarity), the production team at his publishing house introduced wide margins and a typeface nearly large enough for you to put your fist through the Os to keep the books from being lost among the travel pamphlets in bookstores. Later, when the Parker-Spenser love affair had begun all over again, the novels acquired more meat and a new energy level, but they never lost muscle or gained fat. In this area, Parker’swriting more closely resembles the rendered-down prose of Hammett, whose spare use of San Francisco landmarks could place his setting in 2012 as easily as 1925, than Chandler’s evocative descriptions of wooden oil derricks and flourishing orange groves in his period’s San Fernando Valley.
    Despite a Best Mystery Novel Edgar and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as his towering stature in the community, Parker’s books rarely involve mysteries in the traditional sense, i.e., raising a compelling question (most often “whodunit?”) that is answered in the closing pages. They’re more suspenseful than puzzling, and belong more to the action genre than to the conventional detective story. Spenser acquires the information necessary to complete his assignment less by assembling physical clues and comparing timetables than by cornering those who have the information and pressuring them to divulge it, usually by dint of his formidable physical presence. To this end, the amount of time he spends in the gym and doing road-work, his healthy eating, his moderation in drinking, and his long-ago success in quitting smoking are tools crucial to his vocation rather than just tropes to define character. (One wonders, a la the old Batman-versus-Superman debate, how the chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling Marlowe would fare in a toe-to-toe slugfest with Spenser. Certainly, Hammett’s suety Continental Op would be forced to rely more on his world-weary wits than on his brawn.)
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    Spenser has been a part of the landscape so long it’s difficult to imagine a time when he was unknown. It’s like watching Wyatt Earp introducing himself in the first reel of a Western and getting no reaction from the rest of the cast. But I doubt