In Pursuit of Spenser (6 page)

Afterward, I walked him out of the bookstore and asked him if it ever got old—the same questions, the same requests, the same signature, over and over.

He stopped. He cocked his head and looked at me with his deadpan face and walrus moustache. “How in God’s name,” he said, “could it ever get old, kid?”

I remember watching him cross Tremont Street and then turn down School Street and I thought, “That is one cool son of a bitch.” And then I thought, “How
could
it ever get old?”

Fifteen years later, I discussed that moment with Bob. He didn’t remember the signing (I hadn’t expected him to), and he didn’t remember the exchange. But he told me nothing had changed. We lucky, lucky few get paid to sit in a room and think shit up. We put that to paper and people read it and show up at bookstores to tell us thanks. Anyone who ever has a problem with that, in my opinion—and in Bob’s—needs to try a real job on for size. One where no one applauds you or thanks you for your effort or even notices you. We have one of the best jobs in the world. And I know it not just because it’s true but because he knew it and told me so when I was callow and knew nothing and needed to hear it.

Boston is, as I’ve acknowledged, an in-your-face town that values honesty and a lack of airs or pretension. But it’s also a provincial town with an insecurity complex about its own provincialism. The local media sometimes manifests this insecurity by refusing to give its local authors, actors, artists, or directors any kind of hometown pass, even if the pass is
clearly deserved. Boston talent, some have argued, are not babied by the Boston media, they’re targeted by it. Even when they do give a prop or two, it helps if they can do it at the expense of another in the same line of work.

So it was that in the early stages of my career, the headlines of some reviews of my books read “Move Over, Spenser” and the like. This became an elephant in the middle of the room Bob and I never talked about when we would run into each other at the annual Christmas party thrown at Kate’s Mystery Bookstore just outside of Porter Square in Cambridge. Kate Mattes, who founded and ran Kate’s Mystery Bookstore, threw that Christmas party every year, and every local mystery writer showed up to drink eggnog and beer and wine and schmooze with local fans who supported our work and supported Kate and were—and continue to be—the reason I’m not greeting you through the voice box at the McDonald’s drive-thru, asking if you’d like to super-size your order.

Kate’s was a very small store—it comprised, essentially, the living room and dining room of the first floor of a Victorian. Where the kitchen should have been was the shipping and receiving room. Where you’d put a mud room and washer and dryer, however, Kate had fashioned a small study at the back of the store. I have no idea what went on there during regular business hours, but during those annual Christmas parties, that room was a place to sign stock or step out of the dense crush of the crowd for a moment. And, if the gods aligned, it was the room in which to catch a Patriots game if they were playing that day.

The Christmas party in question, they were. It was 1998 and the game had potential playoff implications. I was (and remain) a serious Patriots fan. I don’t name my sons Bruschi or Ben-Jarvis Brady Lehane or anything, but I’ve missed only
one game in fifteen years and only because I was out of the country.

So this is a game that has a bearing on whether we enter the post-season or go home. And this is pre-Tom Brady. This is the Bledsoe years. The Pete Carroll years. The never-wona-Super-Bowl years. So I’m keeping in mind how lucky I am to be at the party, to have fans, to be rubbing elbows with the likes of Linda Barnes and Jeremiah Healy and William Martin and, of course, Bob Parker. Except Bob and I have sort of been avoiding each other of late because of those headlines and the pissing contest the local press seems determined to start between us.

There’s a child at the party. Well, actually there are several of them, but one is hard to miss because, while he’s only nine or ten years old, he’s kind of a prick. Actually, that’s not fair—strike “kind of.” He pushes through the crowd without ever saying “Excuse me,” and pushes his way back again the same way. He whines constantly to his parents—
When are we going home? I don’t like it here. This place smells. The food sucks. These people are boring. Books suck. I don’t like you
.

This is not impolite behavior. This is rude behavior.

To which his parents, well-meaning Cantabrigians that they are and thus choking on politically correct language to an Orwellian degree, mention that his behavior is verging on the “inappropriate” and ask him to “please respect the rights of others,” etc. But mostly they beg and bargain with him and tell him they “understand his feelings” and he’s being such a “trooper” putting up with boring adult things and they’ll be sure to buy him an ice cream on the way home.

No one else seems aware of how repulsive this is (we are in Cambridge, after all, where political correctness didn’t just find a home, it built a castle). I shouldn’t say “no one.”
I’m repulsed. And Bob, judging by the glances we keep shooting one another, is pretty mortified himself. As we go on about our business that snowy afternoon, there are lulls in the signings and the chitchat and during those lulls, I sneak into the back room and watch the game until the next commercial break. And I begin to run into Bob doing the same thing.

As the party winds down and we are relieved of our official duties, we both find ourselves back there, sitting on the couch, each with a Sam Adams in hand, watching a very tense game. And we are clearly in our element. And all the strange not-quite-tension-but-close that had managed to find its way between us begins to evaporate. Not because we “talked about our feelings.” We’re two Micks from working class backgrounds; talking about our feelings isn’t really on the dance card. But every time one of us gets up to get a beer, we ask if the other would like one, and a simple camaraderie begins to flavor the air in the room. So this is where we’re living, late in the fourth quarter, with the Pats clinging to a three-point lead when the Rude Kid walks in the room with his mother. The mother says, “He’s going to watch football with the manly men because he loves football.” And she leaves.

I say to Bob, “Did she say manly?”

Bob says, “She did.”

“Manly men?”

“Unfortunately,” Bob says, “I believe this too occurred.”

The kid says, “I hate football.”

Bob and I drink our beers and say nothing.

“Just a bunch of stupid guys throwing a ball.”

Bob and I drink our beers.

“Why would you even watch something like that? Must mean you’re stupid.”

Bob and I glance at one another and then back at the game.

The kid walks in front of the TV. “I mean, look at how stupid they all are. Look at it. I’m going to watch something else.”

And he reaches out to turn the channel.

“Kid,” I remember somebody who sounded a lot like me saying, “if you touch that button, I’ll break your friggin’ wrist.”

There must have been something in the tone of the guy who sounded a lot like me, because the kid visibly paled and looked back at me and then at Bob.

I nodded.

Bob said, “Oh, he’s serious.”

The kid dropped his hand. He scurried over to the couch by us. He asked if he could sit on the couch, and we both shrugged. He climbed up beside me.

Bob looked at me with a face so deadpan an F-16 couldn’t have shaken its cheeks. He said, “We should hang out more,” and clinked his beer bottle against mine.

For the rest of the game, the kid sat on the couch, attentive and well-behaved. During commercials, he’d ask mostly intelligent questions. The only time he became a nuisance again was when his mother came to take him away and he kicked up a fuss because he didn’t want to go.

At some point, though, as we all watched the game, Bob and I exchanged a glance, similar to the ones we’d exchanged when the kid was making a pain of himself during the party and his parents were wheedling and sniveling before him. It was a look that said something like,
Where we come from, there are rules to how a boy and then a man behaves. There aren’t too many rules and they’re not written down anywhere, but they’re inviolate
.

Spenser embodies those rules. I’d hope Patrick Kenzie does as well. And in that moment, their creators recognized kindred spirits.

Bob and I did hang out a few times between that moment and the last time I saw him, also at Kate’s Christmas party, in the final weeks of 2008, and they were always fine times.

I miss him because I liked him but also because I’m not sure what Boston fiction is without him. We have many outstanding writers working in the region, don’t get me wrong, but Bob embodied the flat, deadpan, self-contained sarcasm of our regional voice better than any writer I can think of. When he wrote, “I smiled. Time was, they [women] would have started to undress when I did that, but I guess the smile had lost a step,” or, “Hard to warm up to someone who didn’t like beer” (
Early Autumn
), he nailed a voice as distinctive as that of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit or Richard Price’s New Jersey. It was the voice of a city and maybe even a bit more than that; it was the voice of a time. And with his passing, that time has gone with him.

| LAWRENCE BLOCK |

INTERVIEWER
: Why do you think your work is so popular?

ROBERT B. PARKER
: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.

THAT’S A WONDERFULLY
quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.

Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.

• •

Ruth Cavin was a great mystery editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in the
writer. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.

And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.

• •

We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.

“I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.

A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.

A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer
is
a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.

A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audition for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”

“Yes.”

“
Caw, caw, caw
. You hear him?”

“I do.”

“The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”

• •

But writing is silent, isn’t it? It’s an act performed in silence, and its creations are appreciated in a similar silence. (The medium of the audiobook is an exception, in that one reads it not with one’s eyes but with one’s ears, and there are accordingly two voices involved, those of the writer and the narrator.)

“As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean,” wrote Coleridge, in his own unmistakable voice. We do, in fact, hear the voice of the writer, all the silence notwithstanding. It falls upon the inner ear. We hear it.

• •

Voice. Isn’t it just another word for style?

No.

Different people will define style differently. But I’m writing this, so I get to use my definition. Which goes like this: