In Pursuit of Spenser (14 page)

Let me ’fess up first. I’ve found that the real subverter of authenticity is when you know you know something and therefore don’t bother to confirm it by independent research. For example, I had Cuddy credit the wrong architect for Boston’s (hideous) new city hall because, while once walking past it, a law firm client—himself an architect—gave me the wrong information. Another: I had Cuddy offhandedly allude to Salem, Massachusetts, twenty miles north of Boston, as the city where witches were burned at the stake. During an impressionable stage of my youth, I must have seen the movie
Joan of Arc
, because, as many readers later corrected me, that barbaric custom had not been imported via our European forebears. In the American colonies, women so accused suffered either hanging or trial by ordeal (the latter a lose-lose proposition for the defendant that involved drowning).

As to Bob, I recall two Bostonian errors he’d habitually make. First example: Spenser would be walking in the Back
Bay neighborhood, the only part of the city that follows a grid-pattern (like midtown Manhattan) in its lay-out. The Back Bay’s real-life cross-streets are named (like midtown Manhattan’s streets are numbered) in a strict, alphabetical order from A (Arlington) to H (Hereford). Yet, despite Bob’s choosing the Back Bay for both his private eye’s apartment (on Marlborough Street) and his office (on Boylston Street), Spenser would routinely skip over a cross-street, moving from say the C (Clarendon) to the E (Exeter), as though the D (Dartmouth) didn’t exist in between.

Okay, as errors go, the “street names” might be off-putting to a Boston local but not rise to the level of ghastly. However, Bob also had Spenser repeatedly meeting with (the fictional) Lieutenant Marty Quirk and his partner, Sergeant Frank Belson, in their homicide unit offices at the then–police headquarters (which, as indicated earlier, coincidentally was across the street from Bob’s and my initial rendezvous site, Grille 23).

There are four pretty substantive authenticity problems with that last sentence:

1.  Boston’s police department, when identifying a plain clothes officer, always designates both duty and rank, but also always places rank before duty. I know of no other major city that does so, but, as a result, Bob should himself have been using Lieutenant [rank] Detective [duty] Marty Quirk and Sergeant Detective Frank Belson.

2.  Bob always treated Quirk and Belson as partners. However, the real-life homicide unit doesn’t (and didn’t) work its cases through a two-detective team. Instead, Boston investigators work in squads of three detectives.

3.  During most of the Spenser series’ timeline, the city’s actual homicide unit was shoe-horned into the second floor of an evidence-processing garage in rough-and-tumble South Boston, about four miles from headquarters in the chichi Back Bay.

4.  Finally, in the mid-90s, the new Boston police headquarters opened on the corner of Tremont and Ruggles Streets in the mini-neighborhood of Roxbury Crossing. Named 1 Schroeder Plaza in honor of two police officers from the same family killed in the line of duty, the concept was to bring all the force’s major units, including homicide, together in one recently constructed building toward greater efficiency and synergy, both of which goals were actually attained. However, I don’t recall Bob, in any Spenser novel thereafter, having his private eye visiting Quirk or Belson in their modern, expansive suite on 2-N (meaning second floor, north wing).

• •

Notwithstanding our respective authenticity issues, I think Bob and I both realized that, in some ways, we were at an advantage in coming to Boston after growing up somewhere else.
Con
structing private investigator fiction is a bit like
de
constructing an onion, peeling off the layers one at a time, and often it helps the character and the reader for the author to have a different take on how the best onions are grown and, in this case, how the best stories unfold.

Occasionally, though, we Boston carpetbagger mystery writers would need a genuine city native to be sure an historical event would accurately come alive for our readers. Put simply, while most people don’t know many details about the homicide unit’s location or functioning, quite a few will
remember what occurred in their city during their lifetimes, and an author cannot afford to turn knowledgeable, devoted readers into reverse-apostles spreading the word that a given storyteller did not do his or her homework.

Case in point: It took me many years before I felt comfortable setting any important scenes in the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown (called—except for gentrifying realtors—simply, The Town). The reason for my reticence? I’d heard vague allusions to the code of silence in The Town. This code apparently mandated that a resident never reported a heinous crime (such as rape or murder) to the police, nor did any resident help the official investigation of that crime. Instead, you and some of your “people” (family, friends, etc.) would simply settle the score directly with the culprit in an eye-for-an-eye sort of way. A newcomer writer couldn’t possibly pick up the nuances of this unspoken rule overnight, but not knowing could temporarily destroy that author’s credibility with a reader.

I think this need for thorough research applies whether the event involved was devastating, mundane, or merely bizarre. The devastating: driving on a cold, late November Sunday morning in the early 1940s past the Boston City Morgue and seeing surviving family members of the half-thousand (not a typo) victims killed during the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, the survivors standing—and praying and crying—in blocks-long lines as they waited to identify the bodies of their relatives. The mundane: the assigned route number of the Boston bus that ran during the 1950s between Andrews Square in South Boston and Copley Square in the Back Bay. And the bizarre: a blue-collar tavern where, during the 1960s, well-intentioned (if misguided) construction workers would buy junior-high boys a “dimey” (one six-ounce draft beer costing a dime) to teach them how to hold their alcohol
early and thereby avoid the consequences of getting drunk later on in life.

And, speaking of history, Boston’s goes back nearly to the Mayflower pilgrims stubbing their toes on Plymouth Rock. Such a long span creates incredible diversity for the crime author to work into novels and even short stories.

We can begin with the architecture along those mean streets Bob Parker and his Spenser character made famous (okay, and infamous as well). Federalist Period homes (red brick and wooden shutters) on Beacon Hill, originally begun in the late 1600s and restored after the so-called Great Fires of the next two centuries. Victorian Age townhouses and mansions (granite with bay windows) in the Back Bay, constructed over fifty years beginning in the 1850s, as, bit by bit, the original Back Bay (Boston’s former sewage lagoon) was dredged and filled, soon providing five decades of architectural variety viewable by an easy twenty-minute walk westward from the Public (think, Botanical) Garden. Eighteenth century wharves that were built to last, with their customs houses and warehouses, an entire such wharf available in the 1970s for $10,000 to pay off tax liens, then refurbished into honeycombs of multi-million-dollar, harbor-view condos. Three-deckers (read, fragile wooden fire-traps) built for the waves of immigration that followed the pilgrims, sometimes by hundreds of years. The Irish and Lithuanians in Southie, the Italians in the North End, and the Portuguese in East Cambridge (technically outside geo-political Boston). Not to mention African Americans in Roxbury, with their stately mansions tracing back to the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad for escaping slaves, and a generation of Cubans who fled Castro’s communism to settle in the bow-front town-houses of the South End.

Bob’s and Spenser’s Boston also brought to readers the many languages matching this diversity: Irish (which we Americans tend to call Gaelic), Italian, Spanish, and French (a sure-thing bar bet: Can you name the largest identifiable ethnic heritage in Massachusetts? Answer: the Quebecois, who during World War I came down from their province to work in our commonwealth’s armaments factories). And novels also brought the reader the despicable, knee-jerk discrimination many of these immigrants suffered, like help-wanted ads in the classified sections of the city’s newspapers which too often ended with NINA (always in all caps, and standing for No Irish Need Apply; when the waves of Italian men and women began arriving in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the biased employers didn’t even have to change the acronym they hid behind).

Now combine these peoples and their cultures with the food, music, and sports they brought to Boston and then hybridized with pre-existing forms of American entertainment. Provide universities (eighty-five institutions of higher learning within a ten-mile radius of Boston’s Statehouse, despite the fact that nearly a hemisphere of said circle is comprised of the vast waters and tiny islands within Boston Harbor). Inject radically different modes of transportation (train and plane, subway and trolley, commuter ferries and water taxis), and it’s easy to see how and why Boston’s diversity in all aspects of life provides terrific fodder for any crime writer.

But Bob wasn’t just any crime writer. Well before his passing he’d become part of Boston’s more modern urban lore. In the early 1980s, a bookstore called Spenser & Marlowe opened on the Back Bay’s Newbury Street. The shop carried only titles of poetry and mystery, sagely promoting itself by borrowing the proper spellings of two actual poets’ names
(Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, both popular in 16th century England) and the (matching) proper spellings of two twentieth-century fictional private investigators. Talk about your four-cornered matrix of puns. The poetry side of the store didn’t last terribly long, but proprietor Andy Thurnauer kept the mystery spirit alive in the city proper for nearly twenty years more.

It was also Andy who first explained to me yet another aspect of Boston as crime-novel setting. Informally surveying independent mystery bookstores around the country (probably 125 in number during their heyday, but fewer than forty as we entered the second decade of the twenty-first century), Andy uncovered an interesting trend: Books set in a particular region sold best in that region’s cities (say, Rocky Mountain novels offered in Denver’s and Boulder’s shops); however, the second bestselling setting in almost every region was . . . Boston. In the end, Andy and I thought we’d figured out the reason for this quirk: So many people nationwide had come to Boston for some level of higher education—or even just an enlightening, walkable vacation—that they wanted to revisit those good memories via the classic landmarks, current events, and just plain buzz emanating from the pages of crime novels set in the city they’d come to love.

• •

During the 1990s through the mid-2000s, Bob and I, as Boston-based private eye writers, would appear together fairly regularly. I remember congratulating him after a vaguely worded press release announced the Spenser character would be made into a television series.

Bob shook his head. “Jerry, you don’t know the half of it,” he said, “I’m at home in Massachusetts and I get a call from my literary agent in New York, asking me to come down and
meet the star projected to play the Spenser role.” For clarity’s sake, your essayist will morph into theatrical-play mode to paraphrase, as accurately as I can remember, Bob’s recounting of what happened next.

PARKER
(still telephonically, but also a little confused): Well, who is it?

AGENT
(measured): I don’t want to tell you over the phone. I think a spontaneous, face-to-face talk would be better.

[A somewhat uneasy Parker travels by plane, arrives at Agent’s office, and is nudged by same into a conference room as Agent closes the door behind him.]

PARKER
(seeing only one other person, seated at the table): Well . . .

ROBERT URICH
(standing up and beaming a smile): How are you? I understand from your agent that we’re supposed to talk about my appearing in the pilot for our television series.

PARKER
(stage whisper to audience):
Our
series? I mean, I could get killed here, folks. Robert Urich? One of the kiddie-cops from
S.W.A.T.?
“Dan Tanna,” the slick dick of
VEGA$?
Not my image of Spenser, whom I’ve always pictured as a younger Karl Malden, not classically handsome, but rugged, with obvious scars from his prize-fighting days.

[Here yours truly harkened back to my own, off-the-mark, assumptions about Bob Parker’s appearance at our initial Grille 23 meeting.]

PARKER
(Having ended his audience aside and again addressing the actor): Excuse me a second?

URICH
: No problem.

[Parker leaves the conference room and closes the door behind him, thereby entering Agent’s office.]

AGENT
: Something wrong?

PARKER
: My contract with the television production company gives me a veto on the leading man, right?

AGENT
: It does.

PARKER
: Okay, so if I ding Urich as Spenser, do you know who the producer has in the on-deck circle?

AGENT
: I do. Erik Estrada, late of the motorcycle-police show
CHiPS
.

PARKER
(swallowing hard and forcing a smile): I think Robert Urich is a great choice.

Bob Parker was like that. He could be self-deprecatingly funny (“If I hadn’t been in Korea to qualify for the G.I. Bill, I never could’ve become an English professor or a crime novelist; hell, I’d be driving a bakery truck”).