In Pursuit of Spenser (13 page)

I remember pretty much our entire conversation that evening. After a brief and awkward exchange of small talk, Bob asked, “So, Jerry, what can I tell you?”

I got right to the point and said, “What’s your best advice about making a living from writing mystery fiction?”

A sip of his beer. “That’s easy. You know much about real estate?”

Well, before that night, I’d bought one condominium, sold it myself, then bought another, also on my own, and as an attorney I’d represented a number of unit-buyers and-sellers. So, I said, “Some.”

“Okay, then.” Another swig of the Amstel, and Bob began warming to his subject. “You’ve probably heard about the three priorities in real estate.”

I nodded. “Location, location, location.”

Bob’s turn to nod. “Well, there’s a cousin to that priority system for the writer in the publishing game today.”

“Being . . .?”

Bob smiled so intensely that his eyes actually squinched shut from below. “Get an agent, get an agent, get an agent.”

Back in the day, an aspiring writer who didn’t yet have a literary agent could still—as I had—submit an entire manuscript directly to pretty much any editor at the thirty-seven (now, arguably only six) well-regarded publishing houses in New York City and beyond. (Another factoid: The expression “sent in over the transom” for an unsolicited manuscript came from the century-old practice of frustrated first-time novelists, whom an editor would not deign to see personally, literally hurling their manuscripts through the opened casement window at the top of the editor’s otherwise closed/locked door. For my money, though, at least that desperate practice was slightly nobler than the breach of etiquette a female literary agent shared with me maybe ten years ago. Attending a writers’ conference, she was sitting on a ladies’ room toilet only to first hear, and then look down to see, a manuscript being slid under her stall’s door.)

I fiddled some with my glass. “But, Bob, I’m an attorney who’s represented writers against their publishers, and as a professor I’ve even written a scholarly article about authors’ rights in book contracts. Why should I give a literary agent ten [soon to be fifteen] percent of my next advance?”

Now Bob shook his head. “You negotiated your own first deal yourself, right?”

“Right.”

“Did you think to retain your subsidiary rights?”

“Like for movie or television adaptations? Sure.”

Bob’s eyebrows went up. “Good. How about paperback reprint rights?”

Already happened. “The hardcover publisher and I split those.”

“Unfair to the writer, but typical of a publisher. Foreign rights?”

Embarrassingly, I hadn’t read my own publishing contract for nearly two years. “I think we split translation rights, too.”

Another shake of the head. “On those, you should get a hundred percent. How much did you get as an advance for the hardcover?”

I told him.

Bob asked, “And how much did your paperback reprint rights go for?”

There’d been an auction on those, so I answered, proudly, “My share was within a thousand dollars of my annual salary a decade ago as a first-year associate at a prestigious Boston law firm.”

A third sip of his beer. “Jerry, how
much
?”

I told him that, too.

Bob whistled. Softly, but still . . . “All right, now double your half share of the reprint auction and ask for an advance in that range, because your track record—granted, so far a pretty short one—proves your worth to a publisher worried about the bottom-line of profitability.”

I expect my expression was akin to a cow’s as the sledgehammer descends toward its forehead.

Benignly, Bob waved a hand. “Not to worry, but that’s what literary agents are for.” He took a full three swallows of the Amstel, as if pre-hydrating toward a long speech. “As a lawyer—and ‘scholar’—you probably do know more about how to interpret a specific paragraph in a publishing contract and then also how to convince a court you’re right. However, what you don’t know—and maybe even can’t know—is whether that paragraph is an iron-clad dealbreaker or whether it’s negotiable. You also don’t know what other provisions, helpful to you, aren’t in the house’s offer, and two minutes ago
you obviously didn’t have a sense of what you’d be worth to a publisher. Agents do have a grip on all three issues, because they’re in the New York market every day. Hell, they gather together for lunch probably once a month, minimum, to compare notes. And therefore agents also know which editors are leaving their current houses to work for a competitor but can’t take all of their valuable stable of authors with them. Or, maybe word’s leaked that an established writer is leaving his or her current publisher, and the bereft editor there now has an unexpected slot to fill in the next season’s schedule.” Another sip, nearly finishing the Amstel, and Bob glanced at his watch, cuing me to subtly signal our bartender for “my” check.

Then Bob sighed. “Another thing. Your literary agents will also have corresponding agents on the West Coast for those movie/TV rights you were smart to keep. And similar agents overseas for selling those foreign rights on future books you shouldn’t have shared on the first.”

A guy—early thirties, scribe-like—came through the grill’s front door, flicking his gaze around the place. Bob turned his head before turning back to me. “With any luck, that’s the reporter whose rag is treating me to dinner.”

Bob and I both left our perches and shook hands again.

I said, “Truly, thank you for all this. You’ve really broadened my whole approach to the industry.”

A twinkle in the eyes and the broad smile, once again seeming to close his lids from below. “Happy to help, but just don’t eclipse me, okay? I’m too old to find a real job now.”

As Bob walked toward the presumed reporter and I settled our tab, I stayed stuck on the “eclipse me” part, thinking,
Eclipse
you?
Please, Bob, just let this recovering lawyer ride lightly on your coattails
.

• •

Oddly enough, I don’t recall us talking that first evening about the actual process of writing or any secrets of craft. Those I had to learn, sometimes the hard way, by reading the Spenser novels and then trying to replicate—though never managing to duplicate—Bob’s kind of magic on my own pages.

Bob’s first novel,
The Godwulf Manuscript
, is set almost entirely in geo-political Boston, including a great confrontation scene in the opulent Copley Plaza Hotel (opened in 1907 by transplanted San Franciscans fearing another earthquake, the dowager is now called the Fairmount Copley Plaza Hotel but still lies kitty-corner to the original wing of the Boston Public Library, itself the first such governmentally supported library in the United States). In his debut, however, Spenser is a bit of a hound with the ladies, including having sex with both a mother and her daughter (though not, in the interests of discretion, simultaneously). That inspired me to turn the Cuddy character 180 degrees: he remains faithful to the memory of his dead wife, including visiting her gravesite and creating conversations over the headstone, until he finds another woman who might replace her in his life.

In Bob’s second novel,
God Save the Child
(set mostly on the suburban North Shore of Boston, where Joan and Bob lived while raising their sons), Spenser meets Susan Silverman. This is one path where I should not have followed behind Bob in lock-step. In my second novel,
The Staked Goat
, I gave Cuddy a new love interest, only to later realize I’d have had more creative freedom by keeping Cuddy a pure widower longer. That way, a reader coming upon any eligible, female character in a succeeding book could have been kept guessing whether or not she’d prove to be Ms. Right.

Mortal Stakes
, the third Spenser novel, is again set almost entirely in Boston. The private eye takes on probably the most sacrosanct of the city’s sports franchises, the Red Sox. To my
knowledge, this is the first time Bob as author identifies the real-life institution he exposes. And a bold uncovering it is: Spenser investigates the possibility that a star Boston hurler is throwing games rather than just pitches to opposing teams. The novel begins with Spenser watching some innings from the stands at the Sox home field, Fenway Park (opened April 20, 1912, or two years before the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field). The story moves quickly to the team’s broadcast booth, and Bob captures that rarified enclosure perfectly.

But how, you might ask, could I know that?

Well, a fan of mine, the late and much admired major-league pitcher Ken Brett, once invited me to sit, necessarily silently, in the visitor’s broadcast booth during a road game for his Anaheim Angels (mercifully, this was a decade before some geographically challenged, front-office twit decided to re-name the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). Before the national anthem, Ken and his broadcast partner showed me how everything—and everyone—functioned. Then I got to absorb the calm, measured atmosphere during their live calling of the game followed by the absolute bedlam during commercial breaks, when people are demanding—or misplacing, or just plain guesstimating—statistics, public-service announcements, etc.

In
Mortal Stakes
, Bob doesn’t hit a false note in describing the parallel scenario in the Red Sox booth, and the vigilante confrontation scene near the end of the novel taught me the crime-literature version of forcing the protagonist to face a dilemma of the “frying pan or the fire” variety, where there is no clean way to resolve the problem.

Bob’s fourth novel,
Promised Land
, is set mostly in the vacation/retirement nirvana of Cape Cod and the gritty under-belly of the city of New Bedford, both about seventy miles south of Boston. This book introduces the Hawk character
as an enforcer for the bad guys. Released in 1975, it was another brave decision by Bob to include a rough—indeed, homicidal—African-American male into a fictional Boston crime series during the city’s real-life public school racial-integration crisis. For those not familiar with that era, white parents in various neighborhoods literally threw rocks at the windows of yellow—and unmistakable—school buses carrying black children into traditionally white educational districts. Several of my military police officer basic classmates were in the Massachusetts National Guard, and they were both mobilized from their civilian jobs and deployed in uniform on our streets for nearly two years, keeping the peace by commanding platoons of forty armed MPs.

But Bob—bless him—by writing exciting fiction involving Spenser and Hawk, eventually as grudging allies, then as the closest of friends, was able to inject some rationality and tolerance into a real-world situation sorely lacking in both. And that authorial risk-taking led me to foster a wary relationship between Cuddy the private eye and “Lieutenant Detective” Robert Murphy (more on this designation later). The fictional Murphy is an African-American on Boston’s homicide unit who got elevated only because a bigoted but lackadaisical city councilor mistook the Irish surname on a departmental promotion list for the actual race of the officer involved.

As the above examples illustrate, Bob Parker had a great impact on yours truly. However, he had a much wider and deeper impact on Boston itself, establishing what might be America’s most insular, aristocratic bastion as a credible city of mean streets, where even the rich and famous could find a corpse on their doorsteps. Bob proved through each succeeding novel that you could set a private investigator series realistically in metro areas outside of Raymond Chandler/
Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, Dashiell Hammett/Sam Spade’s San Francisco, or Mickey Spillane/Mike Hammer’s New York City. Bob’s/Spenser’s groundbreaking in Boston’s fertile earth planted the seeds that grew to produce an entire crop of so-called “regional” mysteries in other cities as well. Think Sara Paretsky/V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago, Loren Estleman/Amos Walker’s Detroit, and Benjamin M. Schutz/Leo Haggerty’s Washington, D.C. Not to mention Linda Barnes/Carlotta Carlyle, William G. Tapply/Brady Coyne, and my own Cuddy eagerly following the Bob/Spenser lead in Boston itself.

I can’t speak for those other writers or their creative influences, but Bob taught me how to use Boston. Since neither of us had ever been a private investigator, we followed the mantra of fictional ones from the past (although when I once asked Bob what he had learned while researching, writing, and defending his doctoral thesis on Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, Bob replied, “Absolutely nothing”). Accordingly we both put our Boston knights of yore in situations that no sane, real-life private eye would even consider, including performing vigilante acts of violence where, legally speaking, self-defense would not have been available as a shield from criminal or civil justice-system jeopardy. In fact, one of my favorite exchanges in Bob’s books was a scene where a bloodied and bruised Spenser shows up at the Back Bay front door of a wimpy neo-Nazi who lives with his mother on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston’s second toniest address (after Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, where reside the fictional
Banacek
, played on television by the late George Peppard, the real-life medical-thriller author Robin Cook, and the almost-real-life U.S. Senator John Kerry). The vigilante exchange went something like this:

WIMP (cracking open the front door): I didn’t have nothin’ to do with your gettin’ beat up.

SPENSER (barging across the threshold): Pity I won’t be able to say the same about you.

• •

Another shared characteristic that I think informed—and perhaps even formed—Bob and me: Neither of us was a Boston native. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, about ninety miles west of the city, and attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine, about 215 miles north of Boston. I was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University in the same state, respectively about 220 and 270 miles southwest of Boston. Alas, as a result, each of us committed some ghastly authenticity gaffes related to our adopted city.