Robert Parker: An appreciation

I don't remember when I got turned on to Robert Parker and Spenser.

Was it the "Godwulf Manuscript" from 1973 that got me started? Was it "Looking for Rachel Wallace" in 1979? Was it "Early Autumn" in 1980?

I just don't know how it started, but I'm thankful for whatever circumstance or whoever it was that made me pick up my first Robert Parker book featuring Spenser -- like "The Fairie Queen" poet Edmund Spenser -- but just Spenser, the Boston-based private detective.

Parker died at 77 on Jan. 18, at his desk, working no doubt on a book that included friendship, loyalty and love ... along with a few punches, maybe a shooting or two, and some of the sharpest dialogue you'll find.

In 37 novels by Parker, Spenser made things right -- not because he was paid to, and he often wasn't paid, but because he felt morally obligated to do so. He was loyal to doing the right thing for his friends, for his girlfriend (psychiatrist Susan Silverman) and for his clients.

Over the years Parker taught readers a lot about loyalty through Spenser. We watched over the years how feverishly in love and loyal he became to Susan Silverman and to his sometime partner Hawk and other characters.

Here's the thing about Parker. The Spenser series wasn't literature. A Spenser book wasn't going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was entertainment. It was witty -- you won't find bon mots as bon as Spenser dialogue.

Parker was prolific beyond Spenser, creating a series of books around female detective Sunny Randall and baggage-laden Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Mass.

It was my hope that in some future book Parker would somehow feature all three of his characters in one story. He'd hooked up Randall and Stone together, as collaborators on a case and, briefly, as lovers. But Spenser hasn't been in the mix with the other two.

Parker's Spenser series was turned into the "Spenser: For Hire" television series, which starred Robert Urich in the 1980s. The Jesse Stone novels became TV movies starring Tom Selleck in 2005. "Appaloosa," Parker's 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 movie starring Ed Harris. Parker created Sunny Randall at the request of actress Helen Hunt. Maybe there's a Sunny Randall movie in the works starring Helen Hunt?

I foisted Parker on my children as a way to help them get away from the day-to-day hub-bub. It was a way, in the still of the night, to clear your head, I told them. I heard from my son David on the day that Parker died. David told me "reading him at such an early age is probably the reason I became interested in film noir."

Parker was a gourmand, something he passed on to Spenser. Spenser is frequently cooking. Given my own interest in cooking -- and especially my interest in eating -- I always thought it might be fun to assemble a cookbook based on the recipes that Spenser cooked up during each investigation.

Personally, I loved the discipline of Parker's work: he wrote five pages a day, five days a week. That he died while writing is perfectly fitting.

There are books in the can apparently. Parker's next book, "Split Image," a Jesse Stone book, is due out next month. And, according to what his agent told the media, Parker had turned in several books that have not been published, including some in the Spenser series.

Parker is gone. But not entirely. Sunny Randall remains. Jesse Stone remains. Spenser remains. Loyalty remains.