SMALL VICES - I had bought and read all the Spenser books as
soon as I saw them in pb until Walking Shadow. I still pick
them up if I happen to see them used, but I haven't read
them. As this is Boston month and a couple of Rarae Aves had
said his recent books were better I read two.
It's clear that Parker has a complete record of the series'
plots and characters. In this book he mentions that Spenser
met Susan in 1974. I checked into that book, God Save the
Child. He says he is thirty seven. When he first sees Susan
Silverman he says,," [She] wasn't beautiful ...She had...a
thin Jewish face with prominent cheekbones. Tall... there was
a sense about her of intelligent maturity which put her on my
side of thirty." I don't know what a thin Jewish face is (but
my wife says she does and that I have one) nor a sense of
intelligent maturity, but this puts his age in 1997 at sixty
and her at about fifty five, and she has become beautiful
over the years. At that age how could she propose to adopt a
child along with Spenser even though they live on opposite
sides of the Charles River.? This becomes an anoying theme
for the first half of the book until one of Susan's friends
comes to visit with her bratty daughter Even worse is any
sentence devoted to Pearl, TWD.
Even today Parker doesn't treat Spenser as having aged much
more than into his early fourties and portrays as a Susan as
a fourty. year old who has mysteriously become beatiful as
time has gone by. If he wants to have his characters not age,
that's fine, but he doesn't have to provide dates that make
the image impossible. Spenser is his idealized image of
himself. Even Spenser and Susan not living together is
paralelled by Parker and his wife, Joan, who share the same
house but each lives in their own half.
In spite of the concerns above, about halfway through the
book I thought to myself this might be almost as good as the
early Spensers.Then I noticed the insistent chorus of his
allies and himself saying how hard to kill and good he is at
his profession. That praise seems excessive. Hawk warns him
there is a contract out for his life and later the hitman
comes over to warn him. Just to make sure Spenser will be
able to easily identify him, the hitman, who has gray hair,
always wears gray. How good can Spenser be if after this he
jogs alone on the little bridge from Harvard to Brighton in a
blinding snowstorm? I also thought the ending is an easy way
to easily resolve problems but is improbable.
HUSH MONEY - . I had a discussion with George Upper on this
list about Parker's never having a book to explore Hawk's
origins as did Robert Crais for Pike in LA Requiem. George
agreed, but someone else wrote to say Parker did in Hush
Money. George agreed but said he hated the book so he had
blotted it from his mind.
The book is not very good. There are two and a half pages
about Hawk's background that basically say he was a mugger
until he started boxing. Strange, when Spenser encountered
him in Promised Land he as an enforcer, not much of a change.
In the book Spenser initially takes on homosexuality and race
relations. In
another plot line he is to help a woman being stalked.
Of course, Spenser has Susan Silverman, who has a phd in
psychology to help him handle these sensitively, yet his
usual preferred method of solving a problem is beating
someone up. The stalking plot is just embarassingly bad. All
the named homosexuals stereotyped as physically weak.
Here is a short excerpt that I thought was especially
laughable:
"Susan put her knife and fork down, and folded her hands
under her chin and gazed at me in silence.
'Don't let them kill you,' Susan said.
'I won't', I said. She thought for a minute looking at me ,
and then said, 'No you won't, will you.'
'No'"
Mark
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