In Pursuit of Spenser (19 page)

(serves 4)

1 pound of bay scallops

4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, divided

1 small leek, chopped fine

4 cloves garlic, chopped fine

2 Tbsp. Spanish brandy

1 cup of clam juice

½ tsp. lemon zest

8 ounces shitake mushrooms, sliced

2 Tbsp. all purpose flour

½ cup milk

½ cup heavy cream

½ cup shredded Gruyere

A pinch of nutmeg

A pinch of cayenne

2 Tbsp. fresh tarragon, minced

½ cup bread crumbs

Salt and pepper to taste

1. Take four large oven-safe ramekins and line them with butter.

2. Heat a large sauté pan with one tablespoon of butter and sweat the leeks and the garlic until soft and fragrant, about 8 minutes.

3. Add the scallops, brandy, clam juice, and lemon zest to the pan and poach the scallops, about 2–3 minutes until barely firm. Season to taste. Strain the contents over a bowl and reserve both the solids and cooking liquid.

4. Melt another tablespoon of butter in your empty pan and sauté the mushrooms, seasoning as you go, for 4 minutes or until tender. Add the mushrooms to the scallops and leeks.

5. Melt your remaining two tablespoons butter in your empty pan and cook the flour, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes, forming a roux. Whisking rapidly, add your poaching liquid and simmer until thickened, 3 minutes.

6. Stir in the milk, cream, Gruyere, nutmeg, cayenne, and tarragon, and season your sauce to taste. Continue cooking 1–2 minutes, until the sauce is fully incorporated.

7. Fold the sauce into the scallops, leeks, and mushrooms, and then divide in four ramekins, topping with bread crumbs. Crisp under the broiler for 2 minutes, until tops are golden brown.

This sounded, when I’d completed it, like a fantastic dish to me, and I was naturally eager to try it. However, I was regretfully forced to put that plan off, because my husband was working that night, and I was writing, and thus alone. Coquilles St. Jacques requires company and, like Spenser, I am much more inclined to cook for others than for only myself. I am happy to say that, when the proper day arrived and the dish was at last tested, it was entirely lovely. I can thus thank Spenser and, of course, the unforgettable Robert B. Parker for a meal that included fine fare, paired wine, and a loved one to share it with—the final essential ingredient.

| GARY PHILLIPS |

Hawk appeared to be listening to the faintly audible ball game. And he was. If asked, he could give you the score and recap the last inning. He would also be able to tell you everything I said or Nevins said and how we looked when we said it.

—Hush Money

IN DASHIELL HAMMETT’S
first Continental Op novel
Red Harvest
, the no name Op is summoned to Personville, a cesspool of a town called Poisonville by its inhabitants. Two factions, the capitalists and the gangsters, are competing to rule the place. The Op, charged with cleaning up the city, decides to set these factions against one another. He understands that tough choices have got to be made. “I’ve got hard skin all over what’s left of my soul,” he laments toward the end of the novel, after the violence he’s unleashed has taken its toll.

On first glance, Hammett’s Continental Operative is an unassuming-looking, pudgy, balding, middle-aged fellow who you might mistake for a shoe salesman. But if you went up against him, you found out this bastard was a cold-eyed
son of a bitch with anthracite for a heart, an individual who, by his own admission, engaged in “necessary brutality.” Over more than seventy short stories and two novels, we don’t learn the Op’s real name, nor do we gain so much as a glimpse of insight into his personal life.

Hammett’s Op brings to mind another well-known enigmatic character—Hawk, the no-nonsense regulator in the Spenser novels. Robert Parker’s Spenser is in the same PI lineage as Marlowe and Archer (though unlike the latter PI, you can’t imagine Spenser turning sideways and disappearing, as Archer’s creator once said of him): they are all cynical, hard-bitten romantics in search of truths big and small, with their backgrounds fully fleshed out over time. But like the Op, Hawk’s background and personal life are rarely revealed in the novels. His name, too, echoes the anonymity of the Op, as there are hints “Hawk” is merely a hardcore moniker—like a persona a gangsta rapper or mixed martial artist devises—adopted initially to take on the guise of being a hoodlum. But the name comes to stand for more over the ensuing years in the novels. It would be incorrect to state that either character, the Op or Hawk, is merely a cipher. They are instead defined by their actions, the often brutal methods they employ to resolve the thorny problems they’ve been hired to fix.

I don’t know exactly what prompted Parker to introduce Hawk in the fourth Spenser novel,
Promised Land
, in 1976, though he did relate in an interview once that, “He is, racial pun intended, kind of Spenser’s dark side. And he gives me an opportunity to do my small riff on race relations.” Hawk is hired muscle working for gang lord King Powers (perhaps a character inspired by the infamous Whitey Bulger, then leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston). When we first come upon him, he’s wearing a powder blue leisure suit and a pink silk shirt with a fly collar unbuttoned to the waist,
looking as if he’d been out the night before at the disco tossing the backgammon dice and checking out the honeys. While I cringe at Parker’s choice for Hawk’s vines—as the slang for clothes went then—I have to give him props for having him clean-headed, a la Isaac Hayes, years before brothers started sporting the look in the ’90s.

Later in the same book, Hawk tells a client who needs Spenser to look for his runaway wife that, “I’ll bet he can. He’s a real firecracker for finding things. He’ll find the ass off of a thing. Ain’t that right, Spenser?” In these initial scenes, Hawk’s taciturn persona is established via an economy of words that still manage to convey a lot of meaning.

It might be that at first Parker meant for Hawk to be a one-off. But in the next Spenser novel,
The Judas Goat
, Hawk is back, and enlisted to help track down the terrorists responsible for crippling a rich man and murdering his wife and children. The hunt takes Spenser to London and he enlists Hawk for his deadly combat skills. Now Hawk, like Spenser, has a code. But his is more of a Frank Castle, Punisher-like ethos: he’s a man willing to cold-bloodedly take life if such is the demand of getting the job done. It’s a matter of expediency to Hawk. As he tells Dr. Susan Silverman, Spenser’s psychiatrist girlfriend, in
Promised Land
, “I get nothing out of hurting people. Sometimes just happens that way.” He also suggests that he doesn’t see that big a gulf between him and Spenser: “Maybe he aiming to help. But he also like the work. You know? I mean he could be a social worker if he just want to help . . . Just don’t be so sure me and old Spenser are so damn different, Susan.”

Even so, in the earlier novels in which Hawk appears, there are times when Spenser seems to be as clueless about Hawk’s inner nature as we are. In
The Judas Goat
, Spenser ruminates:

In fact in the time I’d known Hawk, I’d never seen him show a sign of anything. He laughed easily and he was never off balance. But whatever went on inside stayed inside. Or maybe nothing went on inside. Hawk was as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving. Maybe that was what went on inside.

Based on this early description, Hawk is cool-headed to the point of being unfeeling. More than once, Parker draws our attention to Hawk’s inscrutable nature. In
Hush Money
, Spenser makes this observation: “Hawk nodded and smiled. When he smiled he looked like a large black Mona Lisa, if Mona shaved her head . . . and had a nineteen-inch bicep . . . and a 29-inch waist . . . and very little conscience.”

It’s Hawk’s contradictions that make the character come alive on the page. For the most part, Parker exercised deftness inserting Hawk into the Spenser stories. It wasn’t just about upping the amount of mayhem and murder. It was about the consequences that arose from Hawk’s actions and their effect on Spenser. With Spenser, Parker was consciously working in the Hammett tradition of ruggedness, tempered with shadings of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Spenser is a Korean War vet, ex-cop, former boxer, and gourmet cook. Hawk is also an ex-boxer, a supposedly brutish machine who is given more nuance over time, as Parker subsequently reveals hints of the person under the armor.

Parker once stated that Hawk has a ferocious practicality, which invites us to assume, based on Hawk’s street vet status and the warrior name he’s adopted, that his history has prepared him for navigating a hostile universe. We only get fleeting glimpses of Hawk’s backstory and have to read into him what we will. Some have dismissed the Hawk character as representing the stereotype of a big, bad, monosyllabic black man who lets his fists and gun do the talking. Had
Hawk been around for only one or two outings—and had his sartorial selections not improved—that charge might hold water. But gradually, over the course of the Spenser novels from
Promised Land
forward, Hawk becomes more than just a cut-out.

In some ways, it’s cathartic to have a character who can act as the coldly efficient dispatcher of pain and life, seemingly untouched by it all. For once set in motion on a course of action, Hawk will do his best to achieve the designated outcome.

“I know Hawk. Something happens to you, he’ll be a royal pain in the ass till he gets it straightened out,” volunteers buttoned-down mob lieutenant Vinnie Morris to Spenser in
The Widening Gyre
.

Initially, I saw the Hawk character as a way for Parker to palm off the dicey work in a story, the ethically challenging shit that he couldn’t have his hero Spenser do. Sure, to some extent Hawk took on that role, just as Robert Crais’ Joe Pike did for Elvis Cole, Walter Mosley’s ever-volatile Raymond “Mouse” Alexander did for Easy Rawlins, and Bubba Rugowski did as the muscle for Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Dennis Lehane’s detective stories. But these cats are no slouches as writers, and each broadened and deepened our understanding of who these badasses were, as well as their relationships to the conflicted main characters. The further honing of these writers’ hard-bitten anti-heroes speaks to their skills, as well as to the demands of modern mystery readers, who respond to tough, but dimensional characters.

Spenser is an amalgam of the one-dimensionality of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Chandler’s richer, more introspective Marlowe. Parker admitted early on that Chandler was probably too much of an influence on him. It’s no mistake that Spenser was a man of violence, but understanding
of alternative lifestyles and well read. He is a warrior-scholar called on to navigate the complexities of today’s world of high-rises and high tech, but also someone who understands that, beneath all the gloss and shine, we’re still animals who too often succumb to the reptilian parts of our brains.

Parker didn’t shy away from addressing the darker side of human nature, whether of the individual or of society. His Spenser novels, many of which took place or began in segregated Boston, set the scene for him to confront, slyly, issues of race and racism, as he did various times with Hawk. Take for example in
Promised Land
, when Powers, Hawk’s erst-while employer, orders him to kill Spenser and Hawk refuses. Powers calls him the “N” word, and not affectionately as in, “Hawk, you my nigga.”

Now and then, Parker would also contrast Hawk to other black characters, to show he was no “handkerchief head,” but his own man in his own way. For instance, in
Crimson Joy
, a serial killer going by the sobriquet Red Rose is slaying African American women in their 40s. Tony Marcus, a black crime figure, invites Spenser and Hawk to lunch to pick their brains about what they might know about this psycho. Spenser and Hawk, in their terse, smart-ass way, discuss his possible motive.

“Tony say he can help you with the Red Rose thing.”

“Why?”

Hawk shrugged. “Don’t like it that some guy’s killing black women.”

“Tony’s become an activist?”

“Tony been making his living from black women all his life,” Hawk said. “Maybe he don’t like seeing the pool depleted.”

At their lunch, Parker makes it clear that Hawk is not about posturing or posing.

Hawk put his glass down and leaned slightly forward toward Marcus. “Tony,” he said. “I ain’t black, he ain’t white, and you, probably, ain’t human. You want to look good down around Grove Hall, that’s your business. But don’t waste a lot of time with the black brother bullshit.”