In Pursuit of Spenser (20 page)

Though Hawk often seems uninterested in racial politics, as he does here, he is decidedly not in the manner of the modest “good knee-grow,” the humble credit-to-his-race type—like, say, John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs, the black police detective introduced in the 1965 Edgar-winning mystery novel
In the Heat of the Night
(though it should be noted that both characters share a joy of reading off-topic. In that first book with Tibbs, we first come upon him reading a copy of James Conant’s
On Understanding Science
, and Hawk has been known to read up on scientific topics such as genomes, occasionally even partaking of soft-boiled mystery fare as well). I imagine Parker must have caught some grief as a then middle-aged white man writing a younger black character with Ebonics-style speech, delivered laconically. But the more frequently Hawk was featured in the Spenser novels, the less he appeared to be a one-dimensional stick figure, and the more his character became developed and defined.

Another example of Hawk’s development as a character can be found in
Double Deuce
. Hawk has been enlisted by a church group to find out who killed a teenaged girl and her child in a drive-by. He, in turn, recruits Spenser for backup. Much of the investigation takes place in the so-called Double Deuce housing project, where the two have
run-ins with the local gang, the Hobart Raiders, and their leader, Major Johnson.

“I know what you’re like,” Erin Macklin, a former nun turned teacher and community activist, tells Hawk at one point:

“I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you . . . Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”

Macklin suggests that Hawk’s duty is virtuous and admirable. Having seen the toll that gang violence has taken on her community, she lauds Hawk’s emotional balance, stripped down, as she sees it, “to the necessities.” Macklin’s words may very well speak to the core of Hawk’s character. Hawk isn’t one-dimensional; he just works hard to keep whatever angst and conflicting emotions he carries around like the rest of us buried. Let the extraneous shit eat at you and that’ll get in the way of your job, he might opine.

That mindset, and Hawk and Spenser’s relationship, are adroitly captured by Parker in an early scene from
Double Deuce
where the two are parked in the housing complex in Hawk’s Jaguar for all to see, including the gangbangers.

Hawk nodded. He was slouched in the driver’s seat, his eyes half shut, at rest. He was perfectly capable of staying still for hours, and feeling rested, and missing nothing.

“Something will develop,” Hawk said.

“Because we’re here.” I said.

“Un huh.”

“They won’t be able to tolerate us sitting here,” I said.

Hawk grinned.

“We an affront to their dignity,” he said.

“So they’ll finally have to do something.”

“Un huh.”

“Sort of like bait,” I said.

“Exactly,” Hawk said.

“What a dandy plan!”

“You got a better idea?” Hawk said.

“No.”

“Me either.”

From the mean streets to the suites, another of Parker’s mainstays was his riffs about his time in academia, and his send-ups of the self-important sort too often found within those hallowed halls. We get a taste of this, while also contrasting of Hawk against another pumped up character, in
Hush Money
. The plot involves a square African American English lit professor, Robinson Nevins, who comes to Hawk for help. He has been denied tenure over a rumored gay liaison with a graduate student who subsequently committed suicide. Nevins is the son of a man, Robert Nevins, who was something of a guiding force to a younger, greenhorn Hawk. As Hawk relates dryly to Spenser:

“Bobby sees something he likes and he takes me on, and when he finds out I’m not living anywhere special he takes me in, and I learn to fight and maybe along the way to use a fork when I’m eating. Stuff like that.”

The case brings Hawk and Spenser at one point to have a face-to-face with the self-important, would-be militant professor Dr. Amir Abdullah. This confrontation is foreshadowed when earlier in the book Hawk tells Spenser wryly, “Amir so down even I don’t understand him when he talk.”

At Abdullah’s off-campus office, the interview deteriorates quickly when the prof tries to clown our man, insinuating he’s a handkerchief head. Hawk’s patience finally runs thin:

He leaned across the desk and grabbed a handful of Abdullah’s saffron robes. Abdullah screeched for help and several of the hard young men in dark suits came dashing down the corridor. Hawk slapped Abdullah across the face forehand and backhand, hard enough to rock his head back.

Hawk’s outburst precipitates a dust-up with Abdullah’s men, and he and Spenser must use their experienced fisticuffs against the others’ dojo-learned kung fu. Afterward, Spenser questions Hawk’s reaction to Abdullah.

“You don’t have feelings,” I said. “I’ve heard blacks call you Tom, and whites call you nigger, and for all you cared they could have been singing ‘Louie, Louie.’”

“I know.”

“And all of a sudden you have a NO-BLACK-MAN-CALLS-ME-TOM fit and we’re fighting four martial arts freaks.”

“I know. Done good too,” he said. “Didn’t we.”

“We’re supposed to,” I said.

“What was all that wounded pride crap.”

Hawk grinned.

“Scrawny fucker annoyed me,” Hawk said.

Hawk being Hawk, there’s more to his irritation with Abdullah, as Parker reveals later in the book. Years before, Abdullah had sexually propositioned a younger Hawk. It wasn’t about the professor coming on to him, but about him
trying to exert power over someone he perceived as powerless, Hawk explained.

Across the Spenser novels, Hawk emerges from being Spenser’s darker reflection—the part to unleash when it’s Hammer time—to exhibit a distinct and individual persona. Someone who makes sure he’s not put in positions where he’s powerless. Yet we learn about Hawk the individual without ever encountering the more personal aspects of his life. In none of the Spenser novels do we see Hawk’s crib (though what with the leisure suit in his initial incarnation, it might then have been replete with black light posters, lava lamps, and bean bag chairs—well, not those, since if a man is shooting at you, they’re hard to get out of in a hurry), or learn what part of town he lives in, or where he shops. When it comes to Spenser, we know these details all too well. Hawk, in contrast, often just appears, like an apparition, outside Spenser’s office, or at some bar and grill where the two occasionally meet. People know how to get hold of Hawk, but I imagine his number isn’t listed. Whose name appears on his utility bills? But readers accept that a Spenser novel is not concerned with such banal details. Parker develops his characters—Hawk included—not by overdone exposition but by putting them into difficult situations and showing how they respond.

However, those situations are filtered through Spenser’s first-person reflections and ruminations. We understand Spenser not just through his behavior, but through his thoughts. We come to know the PI internally and externally, and we learn what drives him to make certain decisions that will have a psychological impact on him months and years later. Hawk we can only know externally. We know him from his actions, his dialogue—minimalist but
generally to the point—and by what Spenser thinks of him. And while Parker sometimes portrays Hawk one way on the surface, through Spenser’s observations, again it’s the choices Hawk makes that define him. In
Hush Money
, we read about Hawk’s inscrutable “Mona Lisa” reflection, but in
Cold Service
, we understand that Hawk, as Macklin observes in
Double Deuce
, feels duty-bound not only to ensure the safety of the remaining child of the man he failed to keep alive, but to rip off millions from the gangsters who shot him, not for personal gain, but to set funds up for the kid’s welfare.

I don’t know if there’s an interview where Parker covered this, but given that 1976 was when
Promised Land
was published, I have to think Hawk coming into being and beginning the journey he’d take to become the Hawk we experience in
Cold Service
and
Hush Money
, was influenced to a degree by Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft, the tough black PI who first saw life on the page in 1971. Him and those stick-it-to-the-man filmic figures like Jim Brown as the relentless ex–Green Beret, Slaughter, in two Blaxploitation-era movies. Chester Himes’ Harlem plainclothesmen, the circumspect Grave Digger Jones and the deformed, volatile Coffin Ed Johnson, with their don’t-give-a-damn attitudes and fearsomeness, are crime fiction forbearers for Hawk as well.

In this passage from Himes’
All Shot Up
, published in 1960, it’s as if Himes were describing the dual, dueling facets of Hawk’s nature through the relationship between the two characters:

Coffin Ed’s hair was peppered with grey. He had a crescent-shaped scar on the right-side top of his skull, where Grave Digger had hit him with his pistol barrel, the time he had gone berserk after being blinded by acid thrown into his face.

Hawk’s roots can also be found in the novels of Donald Goines and Roosevelt Mallory. Not particularly skilled as wordsmiths, these two are names probably not much known among today’s mystery reading community. I’m betting sure money both writers were unknown to Parker, but we can nonetheless see a trajectory from their characters to Hawk.

I believe Mallory only wrote four novels, all of them about his merciless hitman, Joe Radcliff. We’re told this, as with “Hawk,” is not Radcliff’s real name. What we do know is he’s a Vietnam vet who not unlike fellow former servicemen the Punisher and Mack Bolan, the Executioner (star of some 600-plus paperback vigilante adventures), is on a mission to wipe out the mob—albeit with the motivation of profit and not revenge. Like Hawk, Radcliff is muscle for hire, as seen in this description of Radcliff from 1975’s
Double Trouble
:

It’s Radcliff’s deadly little game plan, a game he devised in the jungles of Vietnam where he calculated that he was knocking off VC for only fifty bucks a head. He figured the underworld would pay him more for knocking off their own kind than the good guys would pay him for doing so. And the end result was the same—except for the bread.

And Radcliff’s women and off-duty silky life called for lots of bread. For Joe Radcliff
bread
is the name of the game!

After those four novels, Mallory dropped off the pulp landscape. Much more is known about Donald Goines, who has been crowned the “Godfather of Ghetto Lit”—the term used to describe the hardboiled tales that arose in the late 1980s, initially self-published crime novels with a hip-hop flavor featuring men and women looking to get over—to live large, to attain a warped, funhouse mirror version of the American Dream—via drug slangin’, thievery, killing, and other such
unsavory pursuits. Goines’ bio, like Parker’s, includes a stint in military service in Korea as a military police officer. There the similarity ends. Goines was a dope fiend, petty thief, and minor pimp. While in the joint on a stolen goods beef, the Detroit native stumbled on the works of a former for-real pimp, Robert Beck, a.k.a. Iceberg Slim. Beck’s fictionalized memoir,
Pimp
, inspired the convict to try his own hand at writing, given the fact that he and Beck shared the experience of being on the other side of the law.

Goines, Beck, and Mallory were first published in original paperbacks by the white-owned but “urban-themed” (as the euphemism goes) Holloway House, a now-defunct publishing enterprise in Los Angeles. Goines finished his first two books while still incarcerated. When he was released he got back on the needle and ground out fourteen more novels (five using the pseudonym Al Clark) between 1971 and 1975, until he and his girlfriend, Shirley Sailor, met their ends violently, shot to death in their apartment.

Daddy Cool
, published in 1974, is arguably Goines’ best effort. It’s about a ruthless hitman, Larry Jackson, known as Daddy Cool, whose one saving grace is his attempts to keep his wild teenaged daughter from falling under the sway of a flesh peddler. Jackson, forgoing the
Father Knows Best
-style, speaks to his daughter in this fashion:

“Hear this littl’ bitch,” he growled, and he didn’t recognize his own voice. “If you ever try speakin’ to me in that tone of voice again I’ll kick your ass so hard, you won’t be able to sit sideways in that goddamn Caddy, you understand?” Before she could shake her head one way or the other his hand moved in a blur. Twice he slapped her viciously across the face.

While we might imagine Hawk’s character addressing a wayward child in a similarly blunt manner, Hawk doesn’t resemble Daddy Cool nearly as much as another Goines character, Kenyatta, named for Kenyan revolutionary leader Jomo Kenyatta. Like the Russian insurrectionist V.I. Lenin, and presumably like Hawk, Kenyatta adopted his name as a nom de guerre. Kenyatta was a gang lord who became politicized and used violent means to rid the ghetto of crooked cops and dope peddlers alike, echoing Hawk’s evolution from gang muscle to thinking man’s enforcer.

Despite Hawk’s growing complexity and the literary new wave of African American protagonists in the crime and PI genres starting in the late ’70s, it appears Parker never seriously contemplated writing a solo Hawk novel, delving into his past as he’d done with Spenser throughout the series. I assume the subject must have come up when the television show
A Man Called Hawk
was spun off from
Spenser: For Hire
, with Avery Brooks embodying the muscle turned paladin, but it would have been hard to write a contemporaneously set Hawk novel in first person and still maintain the mystery of the character. Hawk’s inscrutability was purposeful on Parker’s part. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming about Hawk in interviews, and I’m sure that’s reflective, to a point, of his not wanting to explore or lay bare too much about the man. But he couldn’t have written the number of Spenser novels he did and not have made notations, intended only for him, as to who Hawk was. Parker claimed he wrote in a straight-forward manner—no rewriting—but you can tell that, when he was hitting on all eight cylinders, he gave a lot of thought to word choice and phrasings.