In Pursuit of Spenser (27 page)

While I would not say that Parker rewrote the same book over and over, I do believe that he also explored similar themes and looked at the same question from different angles in his books. To refer once again to the 2005 interview: in it, the interviewer suggests that Parker was fascinated by the concept of how to take care of people who could not look out for themselves. To facilitate this exploration, he imbued his protagonists’ personalities with many common ingredients. So yes, on some level Spenser, Jesse Stone, and even Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch are all Hamlet, though they might not have been meant to be. They were created as protectors: as knights, Western lawmen, PIs, and cops. Any comprehensive reading of Parker’s canon would bear this out. Yet I believe that the scope of Parker’s works goes deeper than just
his broad theme of caring for people who could not look out for themselves. He explored, almost reflexively, questions of loyalty to self, job, code, and friends, and the results of the conflict between these often competing loyalties. He explored the implications of love, of love fading, of love lost, and of love recaptured—not themes usually associated with crime writing.

One of the great joys in revisiting Robert B. Parker’s writings in preparation for this piece was the discovery of so many things I’d missed the first time around, and it was a pleasure to read some of his novels that I hadn’t read previously. His characters, for all of their faults, flaws, and blind spots, are alive and as real and memorable as any in literature, and Parker was masterful at spinning those foibles into gold. His place is secure as one of the masters of PI and crime fiction.

| ED GORMAN |

AS THE REAL
West was being settled, numerous writers back East were penning adventures about a mythic West that fascinated readers of every age. It was good versus evil, it was slap leather and draw, it was saving the schoolmarm’s virtue and then marryin’ her to produce a whole passel of young ’uns.

These cowboys, lawmen, and quick-draws were not much different from the knights of old. They were virtuous, clever, brave, and fearless. They were perfect for inspiring the day-dreams of boys not only in America but around the world. Real Western figures were used to sell novels, too. Books supposedly written by Buffalo Bill became bestsellers of their day. That the derring-do the books described was fictional
didn’t matter. If Buffalo Bill said it was true, then, damn it, it was true.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dime novels dealing with the West faced competition from a new kind of hero. With the industrialization of America that followed the Civil War, detective Nick Carter and other urban heroes came to the fore. Carter and his imitators were forerunners of the James Bondian protagonist. They used a variety of gizmos to help them solve their crimes and triumph in the name of all that was good and holy. Carter also introduced American boys and girls to the wider world. Carter villains represented some of the real-life forces that troubled our country. Urban crime was much more complex and in many ways more vicious than the crimes of the mythic West.

But soon enough the Western dominated popular culture once again. In 1903 there appeared a twelve-minute film called
The Great Train Robbery
, and silent films and America were never the same. Folks knew the film was authentic because it was filmed right out there in the Old West itself—Milltown, New Jersey.

It is impossible to guess how many Westerns were filmed in the century just past. From the A pictures with big stars, such as
Stagecoach
with John Wayne,
High Noon
with Gary Cooper, and
Unforgiven
with Clint Eastwood, to B pictures with rooster-like scrappers such as Bob Steele, to glitzy singing cowboys such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry (though early on, Gene was a cowboy trapped in a terrible sci-fi serial called
The Phantom Empire
), lawmen, cowpokes, ranchers, farmers, and even preachers (Bible in one hand, six-gun in the other) took turns settling the mythic West.

The small screen had its turn at taming the Wild West as well; television was dominated by the genre in the ’50s and into the middle ’60s. There were some very good ones
(
Gunsmoke
and
Have Gun, Will Travel
) and some very bad ones (
Father Murphy
and
Here Come the Brides
). In general, though, TV Westerns weren’t any better or any worse than the hundreds of motion pictures the studios had produced.

I mention all this to demonstrate that there’s a straight line from the fanciful dime novels to the pulps and films we’ve come to see as “Westerns.” Even John Ford, certainly the most celebrated of Western directors, chose the mythic West over the real West until late in his career.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
is almost a repudiation of the themes Ford used in his earlier movies. In it he not only questions the veracity of legend and myth but is sardonic in the way he undermines it. James Stewart, a peace-loving man, must face down a very nasty Lee Marvin, who means to kill him. Somehow, against all odds, Stewart wins the gunfight and becomes a hero. Even Stewart believes he killed Marvin, but it is actually John Wayne hiding in the shadows behind Stewart who fires the fatal shot. I’ve never been a John Wayne fan, but the way Ford uses him here is unique, and powerful in Wayne’s final scenes. Fifty years after the movie appeared, critics still argue about what the film means in light of Ford’s earlier productions.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
was only one of the many movies and TV shows that chipped away at the mythic West. Earlier films, such as
The Ox-Bow Incident
,
The Gunfighter
,
The Naked Spur
, and numerous others, had already shown that the standard Hollywood depiction of frontier life was false. And only a few years after
Liberty Valence
, the first so-called Spaghetti Westerns began appearing in Italy and quickly throughout Europe. The Spaghetti Westerns demolished the Hollywood myth of the West but created one even more stylized and (in most cases) just as fraudulent. The Spaghettis created a West that was nothing more than drinking,
whoring, killing, and dying, all rendered in grim close-ups and accompanied by music that was often more thrilling that the films themselves.

Meanwhile, television had been at its own revisionism. On radio,
Gunsmoke
had been the most intelligent and violent of all Westerns. It was toned down somewhat for TV, but its adult themes and Old Testament sense of justice brought many brutal truths into the living rooms of America.
Maverick
toyed with the myths using humor. Gambler James Garner had two interests—poker and beautiful women—and wasn’t much for fighting or gunplay. In fact, in many episodes he ran from fights.
Have Gun, Will Travel
featured Richard Boone as a quite literate man of exquisite and expensive tastes who hired out to right wrongs. The liberal political beliefs of the show’s writers and producers were often on display in the scripts; many of them dealt with racism, religion gone awry, and rich people who virtually enslaved those around them. The ’50s and ’60s were the boom decades for the TV Western, and many changes—at least a few of them ludicrous—were wrought on the standard formulas.

This was the state of the popular culture Robert B. Parker grew up in. I have no idea if he was a fan of Westerns, but based on his Spenser novels I suspect he was. It’s not difficult to imagine many of the Spenser novels as Westerns. (The same can be said for Elmore Leonard’s crime novels.) Both Spenser and his sidekick Hawk are larger than life, and their mission is to bring justice to situations that might otherwise favor the dark side. They ride into town and make everything right, while having a lot of adventures in the process. The difference here is that the Spenser novels are nuanced in ways few Westerns ever were. One of Parker’s greatest strengths was his social eye. The Spenser novels offer a running commentary
on the foibles and excesses of middle and upper class American life.

Still, for all the reality in the Spenser series, it’s really about myth. For all his awareness and grumbly wisdom, Spenser is not much different from the private eyes in the pulps of the ’30s and ’40s. Much of what he does in the books would land him in jail for interfering with police investigations. The fights he gets into would result in lawsuits, if not arrests. And his ability to solve murders would make him a TV legend. Forget ESP; just give Spenser a gourmet meal, a glass of fine wine, and a night of blabber and sex with Susan Silverman, and the identity of the miscreant will be waiting for him in the morning.

This is by no means criticism. Parker just did what two centuries of American writers before him had done—created vivid romances involving derring-do and meting out justice. If it was good enough for Sir Walter Scott, it was good enough for Robert B. Parker.

Readers were surprised a few years ago when they heard Parker was publishing a Western. Why did this most urban of writers decide to ride the dusty trails of the traditional Western? Well, I would guess he liked the form and saw it as a challenge. Most importantly, he did with the Western what he’d done with the private eye novel: he reinvented it, made it completely his own. Yes, all the familiar elements of frontier tales were here—just as all the familiar elements of the private detective tale were in the Spenser novels—but with Parker’s intelligence, his worldview, and his style, he made the genre completely his own. There are no other Westerns like the five he wrote. And, no surprise here, Parker’s Westerns are very much like his Spenser novels, informed as they are by both violence and an entrenched melancholy.

Legend and myth had to have been on Robert B. Parker’s mind when he sat down to write his Westerns. Even though
his Wyatt and Virgil Earp in his first Western,
Gunman’s Rhapsody
, were involved in the gunfight at O.K. Corral, neither was the folkloric figure popular in dime novels. Yes, Wyatt was a lawman, but he was also a businessman. He was attracted to boomtowns at least partly because of opportunities to make money while wearing a badge. He often bought and ran saloons and sometimes whorehouses. His older brother Virgil, who was the Tombstone city marshal at the time of the O.K. Corral gunfight, spent much of his early years as an efficient and effective peace officer until, later on in Tombstone, outlaws collected in the street and fired on him, shattering his left arm. Wyatt became the star of the family because of a largely fictional biography written during his lifetime. We do love our heroic stories.
Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal
by Stuart N. Lake became a long-running bestseller.

The Wyatt myths have led to innumerable books and films. In the ’50s, Hugh O’Brien’s
Wyatt
was in the top ten most popular TV shows. Even back then it was kind of goofy and dull, without any of the darker aspects I’d enjoyed even at twelve years old. On the other hand, the Earp story gave John Ford material for his excellent movie
My Darling Clementine
. Excellent, that is, as drama. As history, it was less than accurate—Ford and his writers based their script on the Stuart N. Lake book, which was filled with fictional derring-do.

Welcome to the fungible, fictional world of the legendary Earp brothers.

These are the raw facts and assorted pieces of hokum that Parker faced when creating his own version of the mythic West. Now, I have no idea if he ever watched the HBO series
Deadwood
, which came along in 2004. By then Parker’s first Western was finished and he was well on his way to creating a successful and appealing new Western series with his own creations, Cole and Hitch. But
Deadwood
is important in
any discussion of contemporary Western fiction because it redefined the entire genre, just as Parker himself did.
Deadwood
and Parker’s Westerns are similar in many ways, in fact. They both depict the West as it was, a maelstrom of rich versus poor and politics as dirty as our own.

In
Deadwood
, the powerful families of the East paid surrogates to make them equally powerful—and rich—in the West. And as with any land that was being settled, Darwin’s laws applied absolutely. The strong not only survived but prospered. Read any serious book about daily frontier life and you soon real realize how many families were impoverished. These themes had been touched on in various ways by traditional Western writers, but few had dealt with it in any depth. In short,
Deadwood
is about barbaric capitalism in the Old West. And it trashed just about every mythic Western cliché that publishing and Hollywood had ever created.

These days the conventional wisdom is that the dime novel Western heroes were the basis for the private eyes who began appearing in detective pulps. What needs to be added to this point is that the private eyes and assorted tough guys were also unlike the heroic and squeaky-clean cowboy heroes. For instance, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams bragged about the psychopathic pleasure he took in slaughtering dozens of bad guys. And the milieu of the pulp tough guys was different, too. Their authors allowed them to see and react to the poverty, the injustice, and the violence that was endemic in cities. The one thing pulp cowboys and pulp mystery protagonists had in common was that they faced the same kind of political forces that ruled their environments. In the Old West, robber barons and other wealthy miscreants were often the culprits; in the cities the culprits were many and varied, reaching from the privileged domain of businessmen to the brass-knuckled ruthlessness of mobsters and ward healers.
The heroic spirit of the cowboy stars was replaced by the tough guys’ well-earned cynicism.