December 1999
Literary Analysis: Robert B. Parker and Style
By Arun Kristian Das
Robert B. Parker, famous for his fictional private detective Spenser, has been called the heir to Raymond Chandler, the creator of the fictional private detective Philip Marlowe. In fact, Parker completed Poodle Springs, an unfinished Philip Marlowe novel, and wrote a sequel to Chandler's masterpiece The Big Sleep. But Parker is a huge contributor to the private eye genre in his own right, having written 35 books, 27 of which feature Spenser, a Boston private eye. Parker is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the "sensitive" private eye. Parker has taken the style of the hard-boiled novels of the twenties and thirties and given it a more contemporary twist and flavor, a new style he has refined over his 26-year writing career, which had its debut in 1973 with the Spenser novel The Godwulf Manuscript.
Parker has recently broadened his palate by creating two new characters in the Spenser mold: Jesse Stone, an alcoholic small-town Massachusetts police chief, and Sunny Randall, a female Spenser, if you will. Parker's three most recent novels each star a different Parker foil: Trouble in Paradise (1998), a Jesse Stone novel; Family Honor (1999) with Sunny Randall; and Hush Money (1999), Spenser's latest outing. All three characters live in the same fictional world--Boston and its environs; many of the same supporting characters appear in all three series. Parker himself is a long-time Boston resident, and the city is almost as much of a character in his novels as the protagonists.
Hard-boiled detective fiction is meant to be hard-hitting, gruff, curt. The stories are about the darkness of the human soul, about what it means to be a man. In Parker's novels, especially in the Spenser series, moments of cruelty and harshness pepper an otherwise upbeat world. Spenser is basically a good man, and he is utterly devoted to one woman--almost the antithesis of the depressed, lonely and unemotional heroes of classic detective fiction. He likes to cook, he loves dogs but he--and Parker's newer characters--are still players in a tough business, and can be brutal when necessary. The traditional cliché.
Parker unveils these themes by mastering the hard-boiled tone and attitude almost to a fault. In Parker's world, people are very clearly good or bad--in terms of being on the right or wrong side of the law. But a good person can do bad things, and a bad person is capable of good--a central theme in Parker's works. In recent interviews, the author admitted that when starting out as a writer in the seventies, he was very focused on emulating Chandler and delivering hard-hitting sleuth fiction. But over the course of his maturation as writer, he became more concerned with the inner workings of the characters--with their psyches and personalities--and less concerned with plot. In fact, one could say that Parker has written very little fresh fiction of late; his novels seem to recycle the usual plots, adding a few new twists to get to know his characters deeper.
In this black-and-white-but-not-quite world that Parker paints, the themes emerge in a direct way. To achieve this effect, Parker's sentences are usually very short, very abrupt. He favors short chapters and paragraphs, emphasizing lines of dialogue instead of descriptive prose. It is not unusual for Parker's chapters to be only two or three pages long, consisting mostly of dialogue--and even at that the dialogue is fast-paced. And the books themselves are short, quick reads. Recent entries to his pantheon have featured a very airy book design so that the story can (just barely) fill up 300 pages and justify a $23.95 cover price.
Parker has a Ph.D. in English and is a professor emeritus at Northeastern University, so he is no stranger to literary writing. It makes it all the more interesting that he writes the way he does, relying so heavily on dialogue--much of it ranging from the very bleak to the very heavy-handed--and peppering it with simple description.
This excerpt from Hush Money is a typical exchange between Parker's characters, Spenser, the narrator, and his ally, Hawk. The characters engage in "tough-speak," using only essential words, leaving out articles and pronouns--they don't have time to waste on unnecessary words. It is more important to just say what you mean and mean what you say:
Hawk grinned.
"Scrawny fucker annoyed me," Hawk said.
"Well of course he did," I said.
"Hate phonies," Hawk said.
"Sure," I said. "It's the right thing to do. But if it comes up again, could you hate them on your time?"
Atlantic Avenue was generously dug up and intricately detoured as the Central Artery project lumbered ahead. I pulled in and parked in among some heavy equipment near the Harbor Health Club.
"Can't promise nothing," Hawk said.
Even in describing a violent scene, Parker's language is simple, almost devoid of sensationalism (and devoid of exclamation points). In this excerpt from Hush Money, the action comes off as a matter-of-fact aspect of Spenser's job, and again, leaves out unneeded "small" words.
I punched [Vincent] in the solar plexus with my right hand and he sagged. He tried to yell Betty again but he had too little breath. Behind me the door opened.
A woman's voice said, "My God."
"Call cops," Vincent gasped.
I stepped away. He tried to straighten up, still struggling to get air in, and I clipped him on the jaw with a good professional right cross and he sat down hard on the floor and stayed there.
"Stop it," Betty screamed, "stop it."
"Done," I said.
Parker's descriptions alternate between being straightforward, like the fight scene above, to the more flowery--perhaps in an attempt to be more literary or symbolic. Often these more drawn-out passages serve as chapter openers, such as this one from Family Honor, with the private investigator Sunny Randall as the narrator and protagonist:
I drove out to see Betty Patton through a much-too-early snowfall. The snow was accumulating on soft surfaces and melting as it hit the roadway. The streets were therefore wet and shiny as I wound through the west of the Boston boondocks, and the lawns gleamed whitely. It wouldn't last long; this kind of snowfall never did, and its transience was probably part of why it was so pretty.
This paragraph serves little purpose in the story other than to add to the ambience and tone of the scene; Sunny is on her way to a meeting she anticipates will be confrontational, and the drive provides a moment for her to reflect on her surroundings. It also gives Parker the opportunity to prove that he can, in fact, describe scenes with imagery rather than pure exposition--and perhaps inject some kind of symbolism into the fray. Transient snowfall foreshadowing a transition in the plot, perhaps? It is a little too obvious, but nonetheless provides a refreshing change in pace and tone for the reader.
The first two novels briefly analyzed here are written in the first-person voice--Parker's usual choice. But with the Jesse Stone series, he writes in the third person, featuring a different character's point of view for each chapter. In Trouble in Paradise, point-of-view shifts from Jesse Stone, the hero, to James Macklin, the villain, from chapter to chapter. While the reader is slightly more detached from the protagonist in this novel, Parker provides glimpses into the character's thoughts and feelings, which also add to a scene's tone and atmosphere. While he still relies heavily on dialogue, it is important to note that when his expository and descriptive prose is effective, it remains true to his tone:
Jesse nursed his drink. The bar was only half full. It was midweek, and the after-work crowd hadn't drifted in yet in force. Jesse liked quiet bars. He liked them best in the middle of the afternoon, air-conditioned and nearly empty, where everything was desultory and you could play old Carl Perkins stuff on the juke box and watch people as they came in out of the outside brightness and paused for theirs eyes to adjust. He liked the lucent way the bottles looked, arranged along the back of a good bar with the mirror reflecting the light from behind them. It was a little too late to be perfect, but it was still a good place to be. For two drinks.
The preceding passage accomplishes a few things. First, despite the third-person voice, the point-of-view is clearly Jesse's and reads almost as if it were written in the first-person. Secondly, it gives the reader insight into Jesse's character in terms of how he thinks and what he observes. And finally, it gives the chapter ambience. It is important to note Parker's use of fairly long (for him) sentences describing the setting, closing with the three-word sentence fragment. This re-grounds the reader in the familiar Parker style, with such phrasing tempo a frequent device in his books.
In addition to being so quick to read, Parker's fiction is apparently also quick to write. Since 1997, he has published two novels per year, and with the debut of his latest series (the Sunny Randall franchise), Parker expects to deliver three books per year. It seems that over the years and over the course of writing so many books, Parker's style has become almost stylized: his sentences have gotten so abrupt, his chapters so short, that Robert B. Parker is almost trying too hard to be Robert B. Parker. Almost. ###