Robert B. Parker has died at 77. What are we going to do? That's what a coworker and I asked each other when we heard the news earlier this week. We both love his books, and it was really sad to hear that he had passed and to know that we will no longer be able to read his books. He is best known for his Spenser novels about a tough, wise-cracking private eye, which inspired the TV series "Spenser for Hire."
Robert B. Parker passed away on Monday at age 77 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The reports say that he was at his desk working on his next Spenser novel when he suffered an apparent heart attack. He and his wife had eaten breakfast earlier that morning and she said he seemed fine. He went to his desk to write and his wife went for her walk and when she came back, she found him dead at his desk.
Publishing 65 books in 37 years, Mr. Parker was as prolific as he was well-read. He featured Spenser -- "spelled with an 's,' just like the English poet," he said -- in 37 detective novels. He also wrote 28 other books, including a series each for Jesse Stone, the police chief of fictional Paradise, Mass., and Sunny Randall, a female PI in Boston. "Jesse Stone" became a TV vehicle for Tom Selleck, and "Appaloosa," his 2005 Western, was made into a 2008 movie directed by and starring Ed Harris.
There are already 4 books at the publishers, so we still have some novels to read before there are no more. His latest book is "Split Image," part of the Jesse Stone series, and is due out next month, his agent, Helen Brann of New York said. There is also another book in the western series and 2 more Spenser novels.The reports said that he always wrote between 7 and 10 pages a day. This may be the reason he had so many books written ahead. While he was working on one novel, he had at least one or two already at the publishers.
In interview after interview, Mr. Parker refused the opportunity to make the idea of writing detective fiction seem mysterious.
"The art of writing a mystery is just the art of writing fiction," he told the Boston Globe magazine in 2007. "You create interesting characters and put them into interesting circumstances and figure out how to get them out of them. No one is usually surprised at the outcome of my books."
I guess I love the Spenser series the best. I loved the dialogue between Spenser and his side-kick, Hawk, and between Spenser and his psychiatrist girlfriend, Susan Silverman. I also love the way that he and Hawk never backed down from a challenge and never entertained the thought that they weren't going to win against the bad guys. I've seen them take down the baddest of the bad and reduce them to whimpering babies.
I started reading the Spenser novels about ten years ago when my boss introduced me to this series. I loved them and have read every one since then. What I haven't read are the earlier Spenser books. I think the first one is The Godwulf Manuscript. I think I'll go back to the very beginning and read them up to the point that I started several years ago. Heck, I might even decide to reread those.
