In Pursuit of Spenser (25 page)

Regardless of Parker’s intentions, the question remains: Is Jesse Stone simply a thinly disguised and stripped-down incarnation of Spenser? Or, like Prufrock and Hamlet, who both suffer from an inability to make decisions—Prufrock:
Do I dare disturb the universe?
Hamlet:
To be or not to be
—do Stone and Spenser share certain common features that render
them only superficially similar? And, in spite of those similarities—some obvious, some less so—do they maintain their own integrity as distinct characters or, at a distance, do they blur together?

As the preceding quote from the late Parker indicates, Jesse Stone was, at least in part, more invention than inspiration; a sort of literary test bed for Parker’s experimentation with third-person narration. Aware of this, a reader might assume that Parker would not treat his writing of Stone with the same level of care and aplomb with which he approached his treasured Spenser, but Robert B. Parker was a consummate professional and a master craftsman. It is doubtful he would give less effort to any of his projects based on the inspiration versus invention quotient. The sharp, spare writing of the Stone series bears this out. Even an experienced mystery reader would be hard-pressed to divine from the Stone series that Parker was any less invested in Jesse Stone than he was in Spenser.

Convenient invention or not, Jesse Stone is an interesting construct because, although Parker specifically claimed to want to explore a cop, as opposed to a PI like Spenser, in the midst of Stone’s development into a more fully formed person, like Spenser, Parker chose to give Stone a classic PI backstory. Stone, as the reader discovers early on in the originary Jesse Stone novel
Night Passage
, is a hotshot LAPD homicide detective fired due to a fondness for alcohol. A cop with a drinking problem! Go figure. This is such a popular convention in the genre that it borders on cliché. Well, no, it is cliché. And the apparent clichés don’t stop there.

Stone is neither a zealous, wide-eyed rookie just out of the academy wanting to do good and to set the world right, nor a grizzled old veteran with one eye on the calendar counting down the days until he can retire to fish the rest of his life away on a lake in Idaho. Stone is thirty-ish, a ten-year man: on the job long enough to have learned all the tricks and to have seen all there is to see, a man with regrets, but not so embittered by his life or police work that they render him useless. Sounds like the perfect résumé for a hard-boiled PI.

Jesse Stone also suffers from a stage four case of that classic hardboiled illness, Bad Blonde Girl Disease. This is not at all surprising given that Parker was such a devotee of Raymond Chandler. A discussion of
Poodle Springs
,
Perchance to Dream
, or any of Parker’s other Chandler-related works is for another time and place. Suffice it to say, however, that Raymond Chandler’s famous line from
Farewell, My Lovely
—“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”—does a neat job of describing Jesse Stone’s wife, Jennifer. For about half of
Night Passage
, Jennifer, an aspiring actress, is in lockstep with the blonde from
Farewell, My Lovely
: scheming, ambitious, unfaithful. To Parker’s credit, however, he imbues Jennifer with some redemptive qualities, and not only does she exhibit the ability to grow, as the book progresses she actually becomes a steadying influence on her ex-husband.

Parker’s Jesse Stone recipe also includes a healthy—or, depending on your perspective, unhealthy—dose of what I’ve come to think of as the Woe-Is-Me-I-Coulda-Been-A-Contender Syndrome. It seems Stone was a minor league baseball player, a shortstop in the L.A. Dodgers organization, with potential to have made the major leagues. Jesse Stone is often wont to raise a glass of scotch to a photo of Hall of Fame
shortstop Ozzie Smith. If you read between the lines and listen very carefully, you can almost hear Jesse say, “Ozzie, I may never have been as good as you, but I coulda been a contender.”

After all, you can’t have a good old hardboiled detective setup without a protagonist who is haunted by something. That something, as in my Moe Prager series, can be a secret that, if exposed, can wreak havoc upon the detective and his family. Sometimes, as in Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series, it can be as profound as the accidental death of an innocent victim. Quite often the haunting is the direct result of loss. That loss can be the loss of career, a spouse, or a loved one, or, as with Jesse Stone’s baseball career, the loss of what could have been rather than what was. In many ways, the haunting of potential unfulfilled is more insidious than the loss of the tangible. Parker apparently concurred, as he used this same conceit twice in the Stone series. Jesse’s friend and state police homicide commander, Captain Healy, is also a minor league baseball player who coulda been a contender.

Whatever the haunting, whatever the loss, the genre convention is that one loss leads to more loss and often to self-destructive behavior—usually drinking to excess. And Jesse Stone is the poster boy for all of the above. He feels his marriage slipping away, begins drinking heavily, and loses his shield in L.A. and his wife. His theme song might as well have been “I (Who Have Nothing).” And I think that’s Parker’s point here. He uses the time-tested hardboiled formula to isolate Jesse Stone. To totally drive him away from familiar territory, to remove him from his support system, whether that support system was functional or not. The momentum of loss and self-destruction is the engine that propels Stone’s move from one coast to the other. First Mr. Parker isolates Stone, then Stone, doing a reverse Horace Greeley by taking a chief of police job in a tiny New England town, isolates himself.

It is Parker’s willingness to use cliché, to tinker with it and to use convention in unconventional ways, that underscores his fine craftsmanship and depth of knowledge of the genre, but he doesn’t stop there. Convention would have Stone landing the job as chief of the Paradise police because of his competence as a homicide detective. Convention would have him get the job in spite of his drinking. Here, Parker throws us another curve. Jesse Stone gets the job not in spite of his drinking, but precisely because of it. His new bosses assume drinking has made him weak and pliable, that whatever competence he once displayed has been drowned in a sea of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. And why wouldn’t they believe it? Stone’s record indicates he was fired for cause, and he shows up to his job interview blotto.

As I reread books from the series, Stone’s troubles with the drink resonated with another book I’d read or movie I’d seen. I tried hard, thinking back to all the
noir
, hardboiled PI novels, police procedurals, and other crime novels I’d read, but the answer remained elusive. I searched movie databases to see if that could shake my memory loose. It was only after catching a few minutes of
The Ox-Bow Incident
on a classic movie channel that I realized I’d been looking in the wrong place. Jesse Stone may have come east, but I should have been looking west or, to be more exact, at Westerns. What I was remembering or misremembering was Robert Mitchum’s portrayal of the drunken sheriff in
El Dorado
. Because of Parker’s love of Westerns—books and movies—I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s what put the burr under his saddle to write Jesse Stone as a drunken lawman. That is pure speculation, but there is little doubt that the Western heavily influenced Parker’s writing.

Readers of the crime genre are very familiar with the line of thought that holds that the modern PI/police novel is simply an iteration of the classic Western and that the Western novel
is an iteration of the tales of medieval knights. All three traditions often feature lone men with strong personal codes of ethics—codes that are frequently in conflict with the social norm—who pursue their missions with a single-mindedness of purpose and zeal, not because it is personally advantageous to do so. In fact, it is usually quite the opposite: because it is just and it is right. Think Galahad’s grail quest,
High Noon
,
The Long Goodbye
. In the aforementioned 2005 interview, Parker alludes to Spenser having “a knight-errant dimension about him.” So, how did we get from Robert Mitchum’s drunken lawman to Jesse Stone to Sir Galahad to Spenser and Marlowe?

In chapter seven of
Night Passage
, Parker throws in a few lines about Jesse Stone’s taste in movies that might seem fairly insignificant to the casual reader but are very telling about both author and protagonist: “But he [Jesse] didn’t pay much attention to movies. He thought they were boring except for westerns. Of which there weren’t many new ones.”

This establishes a link between Parker and Jesse Stone and a link between Jesse’s situation as the new lawman in town and the classic Western, but what of Spenser? One need only search Robert B. Parker’s official website to find the link, no pun intended. When you click on “The Spenser Series” under “Books,” the next page starts with a clickable title: “Spenser’s favorite restaurants, movies, and ball players.” Here’s where you cover your eyes and try to guess the five movies listed.

SPENSER’S TOP 5 MOVIES

Shane

Ulzana’s Raid

The Magnificent Seven

The Searchers

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Okay, you can open your eyes now and look. Did you have any luck? As we’re in the guessing mood—for those of you born after 1975—would you like to take a stab at what genre all of these movies fall into? That’s right, Westerns. Classic Westerns. Four of these movies,
Ulzana’s Raid
being the exception, are arguably among the top ten classic Westerns ever made. Parker may see Spenser in terms of a knight, not a sheriff, but he clearly sees a connection between the two.

These films also share a common thread that jibes with the earlier discussion of the knight-lawman-PI tradition. Each of the films features a protagonist who is given or elects to perform a thankless and dangerous task. (Although
The Magnificent Seven
, based on Akira Kurosawa’s classic
Seven Samurai
, seems to have several protagonists, the character played by Yul Brynner is the leader of the seven and the one who initially commits to defending the peasants against marauding Mexican bandits.) And in spite of the fact that each of the protagonists is beset by conflicting moral dilemmas, they carry on with their duties, which often leads to dire consequences.

These five films are listed as Spenser’s favorites, mind you, not Parker’s, although one suspects Parker very well might have agreed with Spenser’s big screen tastes. Now recall what the narrator of
Night Passage
tells us about Jesse Stone’s taste in movies. As far as a person’s values are reflected by his or her tastes, preferences, and choices, it would seem undeniable that Stone and Spenser share a very similar moral center. As an interesting side note, a heading on this webpage purports to list Spenser’s five favorite movies that aren’t Westerns—but no movies are listed, as if to underscore the importance of the classic Western to Spenser’s value system.

You needn’t rely solely on my interpretations or extrapolations concerning the classic Western as playing a central
role in the moral compasses of both Jesse Stone and Spenser. Parker may no longer be with us, but Ace Atkins, the author entrusted to continue the Spenser franchise by Putnam and by the Parker estate, is. I wrote to Atkins and asked him to comment on the classic Western aspect of the commonality between Spenser and Stone and on the knight-Western-PI continuum.

“I find Stone is that bridge between gumshoe and gunfighter,” says Atkins,

He’s that link from the Western to the urban landscape. I find him much more in line with the Western hero—he did come east from California. But he’s slow to speak and acts with great patience. He’s the Wyatt Earp of the modern day. With a few things changed here and there, Paradise, Massachusetts, could be Tombstone. He’s the sheriff hired to clean up the town.

Parker definitely tossed out those references to Westerns and knights of old in his books. I think what we continually read is men living by a code. Whether it’s Spenser or Stone or Doc Holiday or Sir Gawain, they are men drawn to righting wrongs and restoring order. We could get into a larger discussion of someone like Sam Spade, who is immoral and realizes the world is without redemption. Spenser, Stone, and Marlowe do see the world for what it is—but they all have hope. Spade had little illusion of hope.

This classic Western tradition is not only an intellectual undercurrent in the novels, but has a direct impact on how the protagonists go about their business. In the very beginning of Parker’s Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch novel
Appaloosa
, Virgil Cole, a small-town marshal, confronts a man called Bear on a dusty street outside a saloon. Bear, as described
by Hitch, Cole’s partner and the narrator of the novel, is “a big man, fat but strong-looking with a black beard and long hair,” and is bleeding from the side of his head where Cole has struck him with his revolver. Cole is trying to arrest Bear, a buffalo skinner, who has threatened to gut a whore he claims hasn’t given him his three dollars’ worth. In spite of Cole’s calm demeanor and repeated requests for Bear to go peaceably, Bear refuses—and not very politely. In the end, Cole shoots Bear and chases off his supporters.

Compare this with a scene from chapter fourteen of
Night Passage
, in which Jesse Stone confronts Jo Jo Genest at the residence of Genest’s ex-wife. Genest, a weightlifter and steroid user whom Parker describes as “hulking,” “a rhinoceros,” “Tarzan,” or “one of the apes,” has assaulted his ex-wife as he has many times in the past with apparent impunity. When Stone tries to reason with Genest, Jo Jo basically laughs at him and says he can take his ex whenever he wants. She’s his property. When Stone reminds Jo Jo that his ex-wife has an order of protection, Jo Jo again dismisses Stone and the power of law enforcement to restrain his activities. At this point, in front of Jo Jo’s ex and a subordinate cop, Jesse Stone kicks Genest in the groin. He lectures the incapacitated Jo Jo, holds his .38 to the bridge of Jo Jo’s nose, and threatens to shoot him if he comes anywhere near his ex-wife or their children.