They get so much better, and the dialogue between Spenser and his pal Hawk in the later novels is a joy. My advice to new readers would be to read the novels in order and have patience. Parker introduces Susan Silverman in, I believe, the third novel, and Spenser starts to take shape, and the relationship moulds him. This Spenser will sleep with whoever offers herself. His wisecracks are contrived and misplaced. Luckily i discovered him quite by accident with one of the later novels. To be honest, if this had been the first one I had read, I most probably wouldn't have read any more. Thankfully, a lot of the earlier have just been reduced in price for the Kindle. It's quite difficult to get the earlier ones in the UK, especially since Borders Books have closed down. When he sadly died a couple of years back, I resolved to read them all in order. I have read a great many Spenser novels by Robert B Parker, and in my mind the man is a genius.
(NB - I'm buying these old paperback editions secondhand as they're around half the price, delivered, of the electronic version and so I have something physical to keep and sell or pass on, as I choose.) I won't spoil the plot of this book, though, as it's less relevant than the quality of the writing. A one-woman man, despite the temptations and offers he seems to get! and he's deeply in love with the woman of his dreams, Susan Silverman, a highly intelligent and beautiful psychotherapist. So he dresses for the occasion, he cooks well, he punches and shoots people like nobody else. Parker's prose is tight, sparse and direct, yet he conveys mood brilliantly.Īmong Spenser's talents are his keen eye for clothes and a special appreciation of good food and drink. Spenser can slug it out with the best of them, be a wise guy to everyone in authority with his cynical humour, but then throw in an appropriate quote from Chaucer, Shakespeare or Keats so that people realise he's nobody's fool. Parker's style is a combination of first-person-detective-novel-narrative (like Raymond Chandler) and well-written literary fiction.
Set before the days of the internet and cell phones, it's from a time when gathering information for a gumshoe like Spenser means a day at the library looking through piles of microfiche records rather than searching Google or online databases. Buy a discounted Paperback of The Godwulf Manuscript online from Australias leading online. This is a classic from way back in the late-70s/1980. Booktopia has The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser by Parker. Not sure how it's taken me this long to discover him, and I'm now hooked on his work.
One of Robert Parker's early series of novels which I'm now working through, having started to read his later novels by chance last year.