ROBERT B PARKER'S SUNNY RANDALL BY MIKE LUPICA: BLOOD FEUD

I have written before about what a thankless task it is to follow in Robert Parker’s metaphorical shoes. Ace Atkins has come the closest in his continuation of the Spenser series; he gets that the essence of it is a series of short scenes, told in dialogue, in which Spenser spars with foes and banters with friends, sometimes both. Michael Brandman’s Jesse Stone was more like the TV movies Brandman produced; Reed Farrell Coleman’s aren’t much like either the book or screen Jesse. Robert Knott’s Cole & Hitch are pared down and plot driven without Parker’s sharp eye for character.

Which left Sunny Randall, whom Parker created as a vehicle for the actress Helen Hunt. Parker wrote six novels featuring Sunny, who is perhaps less a female Spenser than a female Jesse Stone, which made it interesting when the two hooked up for a while before deciding they were unsuited for each other (perhaps because each was the other’s alter ego). Her character may be more like Stone’s, indeed both are obsessed with ex-spouses; but Sunny’s set up was closer to Spenser’s, a gay male Chingnachook to her female Hawkeye; she has a dog, Rosie, her version of Spenser’s Pearl, and she also, like Spenser, has close contacts with the Boston mob—in her case because her ex, Richie, is the son of a mob boss.

Parker wrote six novels with Sunny; Blood Feud was the first pastiche taken up by the New York sportswriter and crime novelist Mike Lupica (there are now two more). At this point Sunny is back together with Richie, sort of, but at a loss for work, when someone walks up behind Richie and puts a bullet through his shoulder, saying to him, as he lays on the street “sins of the father”. Of course this puts Sunny on the case, though neither Richie’s father Desmond, nor uncle Felix, nor the Boston cops really want her there.

Nor will the Providence mob nor the Providence cops, when the case takes her south to Rhode Island. Because as Sunny investigates she finds that Richie’s shooting, which leads to more, does indeed have family roots, and they may be roots the family itself does not want dug up.

Lupica has plotted his story very well, and he moves it along, though the finale may seem a little fortunate. His Sunny is best when she is interacting with the established characters, including her ex-cop father Phil, and Frank Belson, who’s one of Spenser’s police foils. Lupica works surprisingly well with the Sunny/Richie business: there is a surprising amount of adolescent angst in their relationship, as opposed to the psychological paradise of Spenser and Susan Silverman (to whom Sunny has been referred for therapy, and with whom she has banter worthy of Spenser’s), or the more sensitive Hemingway of Jesse Stone. Where Sunny does less well is in her moving between Richie’s family, rival Boston crime boss Tony Marcus and Providence godfather Albert Antonioni. There is too much ping-ponging, as the dogged Sunny pursues buried secrets, but also far too many threats; if she was really pissing off people as much as she is pissing off these guys, at some point the threats might turn more real.

Finally, though, there is an unmistakable sense of the outsider in Lupica’s writing, like a New York Yankee fan writing about the Boston Red Sox. There is the feel of the guide book in the places she goes out for meals or drinks, about the directions or descriptions. It’s harder to get the sense of someone who knows the turf the way Sunny is supposed to; indeed, they way she does. Lupica’s prose can be sharp and balanced as Parker’s; he gets that bit of the style. But can he learn to be Boston enough?

Robert B Parker’s Blood Feud by Mike Lupica

No Exit, £9.99 ISBN 9780857303820

note this review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

JESSE STONE DISCOVERS THE DEVIL WINS

A nor'easter hits Paradise, Massachusetts, and when the storm has passed, three bodies come to the surface, as it were. One is an unknown man, only recently killed, the other two are the skeletons of two young girls, gone missing on a Fourth of July some twenty-five years before. And as Jesse Stone discovers, no one in Paradise really wants to talk much about the girls, or their disappearance, not even Molly Crone, his best cop. It's a great set up, as Jesse has to work to get beneath the rubble of silence and memory, and the killers work to make sure he doesn't.

I've written before about the difficulties of continuing another writer's character, and indeed have reviewed Michael Brandman's Jesse Stone novels (you can link to the most recent here). Now Reed Farrel Coleman has taken up the mantle, and the result is again something different from Robert B Parker's original.

It's a bad situation: if you stray too far from the original, you risk alienating fans, but more importantly you risk losing what it was that made the character and the stories, compelling. I've just reviewed one of Max Allan Collins' Mike Hammer novels; Collins has the advantage of working from Spillane's starts or outlines or notes, and he stays pretty close to the original; his prose style is somewhat less direct, though the bigger problem is that Mickey's stories are generally set in times the reader doesn't necessarily identify with Hammer. Coleman's problem is somewhat different. Brandman's Stone was the one from the TV movies he produced; still large part Parker, but somewhat dominant over the supporting cast, whose parts became smaller largely because Parker was so good at delineating character in short scenes with compact dialogue.

Coleman has brought back some characters, but he also seems to have strayed further away from Parker's Stone. It's partly a question of writing: Coleman's style is not the swift clean prose that made Parker's stories flow and work; he does far more telling than showing. More importantly, his Jesse appears to have far less inner confidence to draw back on: Jesse Stone is like a part of Spenser, and he can do things Spenser can't, like enjoy other women while staying faithful to the idea of his ex-wife Jenn. Well, this Jesse Stone can't do that, and he's having more trouble with his drinking too. His shrink, Dix, is back, but this Dix isn't really as penetrating as Parker's. And most importantly, neither Molly, who is at the heart of this story, and Suit, who recovering from a shooting and therefore not patrolling, are drawn as fully as they should be; Molly should be because of her inner turmoil and also because Coleman seems to be foregrounding Jesse's attraction to her.

Coleman's big strength is plotting, and though some might find a few things easy to guess, there is a neat twist toward the end. In fact, a twist as neat as the one in The Will To Kill, the Spillane which was my previous review, and it helps the story to have it. 

Robert B Parkers's The Devil Wins by Reed Farrel Coleman
No Exit Press, £7.99 ISBN 9781843448464

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ROBERT B PARKER'S IRONHORSE BY ROBERT KNOTT

Ironhorse is the first of the continuations of Robert B Parker's Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch series of westerns, and as with the Jesse Stone novels, the Parker estate chose someone connected with the on-screen adaptations of the books to continue the series. Robert Knott is an actor who appeared with Ed Harris in Pollock, and co-wrote (with Harris) and co-produced the movie Appaloosa. Unlike TV producer Michael Brandman's version of Jesse Stone (see my review here), which reflects the Tom Selleck films as much as Parker's, Knott sticks much closer to the characters of Cole and Hitch. But he has a harder time than Brandman of matching both Parker's tone and his narrative drive. This is not to put down either of the screen adaptations, which work fine on their own terms. But it's no coincidence that the best of the post-Parker Parkers has been done by Ace Atkins, charged with continuing Spenser (see my review here), not just because he's a novelist, but because he brings no previous adaptation to the table.

Ironhorse begins on a train, with Cole and Hitch returning from transporting two Mexican conmen back to their own country. As they pass through the Indian Territory, the train is held up, by a well-organised gang who are unaware of what a deadly mistake they have made in their choice. After being driven back, they uncouple Cole & Hitch from both the engine and the rear carriages, making a temporary getaway. With them are the governor, and his two daughters, one of whom has already thrown up sparks with Hitch.

So far so good, but from this point the story complicates greatly, moving back down the line to a corrupt mining town with a cat house on every corner, then back up the line, with sidetracks for shooting various varmints as they appear or re-appear. The problem is not so much the prolix detail about trains and engines, or indeed about Virgil and his cigars---at times it feels like he's posing for a 19^th century version of Esquire—but more Knott's inability to draw in these many characters with the same broad but telling strokes that characterise Parker. Although many of them appear fascinating—not just the villains but two women and an Indian working on the railroad, a seemingly corrupt sheriff, a particularly adept whore named Rose, and of course the governor's daughters, a pair that matches perfectly Col. Munro's offspring in Last Of The Mohicans.

Instead of giving the villains, or these characters, the space they need to interact, the story bogs down in the middle, as our heroes plan, and get everything explained to them when one of the villains turns out to carry his press-cuttings with him. When the confrontations come, all of them, with the exception of the ultimate, become matter of fact—whereas Parker's shootouts are generally tests of personality.

Knott is good with Cole and Hitch, but once they get into analysis of Cole's relationship with Allie, who may or may not have taken up with a deputy while Cole has been away on marshal's business, there's something a bit too sensitive: Parker's Cole is another of the antitheses to Spenser; he's much closer to Stone, but without the ability to express whatever self-awareness he might have in regard to the opposite sex. There is no reason behind his love for Allie, yet he accepts its reality and thus acts as if there were, which for him is natural in the basic sense of the word. I'm not sure Knott gets that, or can follow the precision of Parker's portraits. But if he could maintain the tone and focus of his first third, he could produce a more fitting adaptation.

Robert B Parker's Ironhorse by Robert Knott

Berkeley Books, $9.99, ISBN 9780425267707

FOOL ME TWICE: MICHAEL BRANDMAN'S ROBERT B PARKER

Considering that this is Michael Brandman's second outing with Robert B Parker's Jesse Stone, it was bold to title the novel Fool Me Twice. But if anything, Brandman is making Stone his character, not Parker's. As I mentioned when I reviewed his first Stone novel, Killing The Blues (you can link to that review here), Brandman's Stone is more of a loner, more aggressive, and somewhat darker than Parker's Stone was. Parker could make Stone's sometimes flippant attitude work because he was a master of quick scenes and sharp patter, he also delineated supporting characters quickly and with far more efficiency than Brandman's able to do.

Instead, Brandman has blended together three stories, and in each of them Stone is able to crack wise with pompous figures of authority. A movie production has come to town, and the leading lady fears she's being stalked by her soon-to-be-ex husband. A spoiled teenaged girl is driving while using her mobile and Jesse, as is his wont, takes her on as a personal project (though he never refers her to a shrink, as Parker's Jesse might have). And most bizarrely, what starts out as a nuisance call from an old busybody, about her water bills getting bigger, turns into something far more complicated. The stories don't cross over, but their concerns reinforce each other to some extent, keeping the plotlines going. And of course there is a bit of romance for Stone, but this Stone has no pesky ex-wife haunting him, no Sunny Parker either, and we quickly learn that the last novel's entanglement has disappeared.

Jesse has always been Parker's most problematic lead character—he's Spenser in many ways, but with more id and less ego (or super ego), and more of a lone wolf. Spenser kept him entertaining with his baseball past, his drinking, and his multi-layered problems with the opposite sex, but Brandman has eliminated most of that, and Jesse's sessions with his shrink. He's gained a more forward-driven plot, but lost some of the relative complexity of the character, and in terms of women, frankly, turned him into Tom Selleck on TV.

Here he brings back Parker's Crow, a figure much like Spenser's Hawk, only without the repartee. Crow was more a construct than a character, and his backstory with Jesse's deputy Molly is ignored, partly because Molly has become a different sort of character too. Crow doesn't do much except play his part in the plotline, which is OK since he'snot very interesting, but with the state cop Healy rendered one-dimensional as well, it leaves only Jesse and his verbal sparring partners as characters.

Taking over someone else's character is a thankless task. Stick too close to the established formula and you're riding coattails, change it and you're messing with the master. I wrote about this with Don Winslow's taking over Trevanian (link here), but it seems to me that what Brandman is trying to do is gently make this Stone his own, or better, the Stone who was already there in the TV movies which he and Parker collaborated on. It's not a bad way to proceed, but he needs to go all the way, and fill in the missing blanks of character around Stone to really make it work.

Fool Me Twice by Michael Brandman

Quercus £18.99 ISBN 9781782064763

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

KILLING THE BLUES: MICHAEL BRANDMAN DOES ROBERT B PARKER

Michael Brandman's Killing The Blues is the first of the posthumous continuations of Robert B Parker's characters, being the tenth Jesse Stone novel (Ace Atkins will pick up the Spenser franchise) and it's interesting in the way in strives to match Parker's concerns, and tone. It's more successful in the former, especially once it gets going, because action is character and once Jesse begins trying to help out kids with problems we enter familiar Parker territory.

Brandman produced, and co-scripted with Parker a couple of Spenser TV movies starring Joe Mantegna, which attracted little attention around the turn of the century. He and Parker then did a remake of Monte Walsh, which starred Tom Selleck, which led to a quite good series of Jesse Stone TV movies, starring Selleck as Stone (I reviewed Stone Cold favourably years ago for Crime Time, and might revisit the series later here). In that sense, for Brandman it's a continuation, but when it comes to tone, there is a bit more of the Selleck Stone, and a lot more of the TV movie. Brandman's Stone is somewhat darker, a bit more confrontational, and much more aggressive, than Parker's. He's made his task a little easier by writing out Sunny Randall, and bringing a new girlfriend on the scene. She seems more like Jesse's long-lost Jen than a perfect mate for him, but as always in these series, one assumes things will evolve.

The biggest change is in Spenser's supporting cast: Molly, who's a mothering sort of figure with Parker, becomes an even sassier version of the TV movie character, and Suitcase Simpson's role seems diminished. It's as if this Stone is more of a TV series police chief, and needs an action sequence every now and again; the kidnapping and holding of a small-time gangster seems quite out of character for the old Jesse, but the new one is a man of action. Which also changes the nature of his sessions with Dix, the shrink (played wonderfully by William Devane in the TV movies) because Jesse seems far more in control and far less revealing.

The story itself is very much in the Parker vein, it moves well, and the scenes are delineated clearly. But what it most lacks is Parker's ability to draw a character quickly and concisely, to establish with just a small description and a couple of lines of dialogue, a person you could see and understand. It was his greatest talent as a writer, and it would be asking a lot of Brandman to match it. But while the story is constructed cleverly and delivers at the end, its most powerful scenes are not, as they would be with Parker, the one-on-one confrontations with mobster Gino Fish, because Fish's character just doesn't explode. But the single best scene may be when Fish sends his hitman, Vinnie Morris, off on a job, and when's he's done it he delivers Fish's message: 'always look on the bright side of life'. It isn't really Fish, or Morris, but it many ways it's pure Parker.

Killing The Blues by Michael Brandman
Quercus £18.99 ISBN 9781780872896

ROBERT PARKER'S SPLIT IMAGE

Split Image is the first Robert Parker novel published after his untimely death. It is the ninth Jesse Stone novel, and it also brings back Sunny Randall, who has featured in six novels of her own, but who works better as a foil to Jesse than she does on her own. Part of that is because originally she and Jesse faced the same psychological dilemma, being in love with people they couldn't live with, and each was in effect the perfect solution to the other's problem. Where the Spenser novels deal in relationships, the Stone books delve more directly into the world of sexuality--Jesse is every bit as irresisitible as Spenser, but his tragic devotion to his ex-wife doesn't extend to keeping him celibate. I've speculated before that Jesse is Spenser's id, with a less strong ego but not bound at all by Spenser's super-human super-ego.

This all makes for a rich concoction when Spenser is drawn into the case of a murdered mobster, Russian muscle who worked for one of two mob bosses 'retired' to Paradise, whose wives just happen to be identical twin sisters once known as the Bang Bang twins. The plot is a bit contrived, even for Parker's later work, but as usual there are one or two memorable characters, most notably the wife of the murdered Russian's wife, and as usual Parker's dialogue sets scenes quickly and gives them punch lines. It's odd, but when Stone delivers them he sounds more and more like Tom Selleck, who's played him in a number of made-for-TV movies. I still can't see Helen Hunt as Sunny, though.

Meanwhile Sunny is investigating a teenaged girl who has gone off to live with a group called The Bond Of The Renewal, who of course have their HQ in Paradise, and whose bonds are more than just spiritual. Sunny is good with disturbed teens and their even more disturbed parents, and just to round the circle off neatly, disturbed teen that she is, her therapist is Dr. Susan Silverman, the erstwhile partner of Spenser.

The contrivance of the story is not so much for the purposes of advancing the plot, as examining ideas about the human psyche. Because what Parker has done, especially since he settled Spenser and Susan in together after their memorable difficulties in the 1980s, is to use Stone and Sunny (and in many of the later Spenser novels, the characters thrown up by the case) to examine issues of human sexuality and relationships. It's all very Cambridge (Mass., not Cantab) all this discussion of needs and fulfillment and support and upbringing: a sort of psychological Ross MacDonald trip into the pasts of his characters, but written with the fast paced flippancy that reads like Raymond Chandler refined or distilled or condensed. There's nothing memorable at all about Split Image, but I didn't put it down, and that's as good a defintition of Parker's power as a novelist as I can think of.

Split Image by Robert B Parker
Quercus, £18.99 ISBN 9781849160735

ROBERT B PARKER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY, COMPLETED

My obituary of the great detective novelist Robert B Parker is in today's Guardian; you can link to it here. I read Parker from his very first novel, and probably read just about all of them, and the bit about the Chandler revival was true; those Ballantine editions with the glossy covers were very popular, and I wrote an essay at the time for a magazine called Starling, about discovering Chandler. Maybe I'll dig it out and reprint it here. I've written a lot about Parker over the years, and my attitude toward him is summed up in one of my favourite 'interviews'; a review of Trouble In Paradise which you can link to from the 'Bullseyes' section to the right, or by hitting the link here.

I felt unusually odd writing the obit because last month I finished an essay on Boston for Following The Detectives, a Maxim Jakubowski-edited anthology about various cities and their detectives, which was predominantly about George Higgins, Parker, and Dennis Lehane. And in November I reviewed his Spenser novel The Professional, linked to here, which is worth reading because it summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of his later work. But I could still hear what I'd written then echoing around my head, Parker's death was that unexpected.

The obit ran mostly as written, allowing for the usual oddities of style (Colby College became Colby college, though one would never see Oxford university in the British press; the actress Helen Hunt became an actor), but lost was one comment on why Parker's slighter work remained entertaining; the wise-cracking Spenser usually got the zingers to end each chapter--zinger was probably thought to need explanation.

More crucially, an entire paragraph on his westerns was cut. This was odd, because it reflected the earlier reference to Rich Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, because it connected Tom Selleck to the Jesse Stone films, which also thus go unmentioned, because Gunman's Rhapsody is an important work within his output, because Appaloosa was a quality film, and a successful one, and also because the forthcoming fourth novel in the Cole and Hitch series is mentioned in the final paragraph, but with no explanation, as if the previous reference had not been excised. Anyway, here's the missing bit, which was the penultimate graf in my copy:
-->

In 2001, Parker's novel Gunman's Rhapsody recast Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as Spenser and Hawk; which led to his working on the screenplay for the 2003 TV movie remake of the classic Monte Walsh, starring Tom Selleck. Selleck then played Jesse Stone in a series of TV movies between 2005-09, with one remaining unaired. Parker's 2005 western, Appaloosa, was made into an excellent film by the actor Ed Harris, and spawned two more novels featuring lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. 

I could go on about how the link between westerns and detective stories is so important, but mostly I'd like to end by remembering just how much pleasure Parker's writing brought me over the years, and how much we will miss him now that he's gone.

ROBERT B PARKER'S NIGHT AND DAY

Night And Day starts with odd sorts of crimes in Paradise; Jesse Stone is called out to deal with parents complaining about a a female school principal who's examined her girls' underwear before a school dance. This abuse bothers him. So does the fact that there are reports of a peeper in Paradise, and he's soon graduated to becoming 'The Night Hawk,' making home invasions and taking pictures of housewives naked. While investigating, Jesse discovers that sleepy little Paradise also harbours its own swingers club, which, despite his evident appeal to women of all varieties, Jesse doesn't feel tempted to join. Even though his ex-wife Jenn, after appearing to draw closer to Jesse, is all of a sudden offered her big break in New York, and just has to take it, and the producer who comes with it.

Sex makes problems for everyone, except Parker, who's a master of double-entendre dialogue, but not all his characters come equipped, like Jesse, with a drink, a shrink, and quip that makes you think. There are two stories here; the first is the criminal one, in which Jesse is most worried about children (and wives) being abused. The principal's actions are a reflection of a deeper problem, with her law-firm heading husband, while one of the girls most bothered by her actions is actually being harmed far more by her parents' swinging. Jesse will work these problems out, and suggest appropriate psychological help, as usual, while tracking down the Night Hawk, which proves surprisingly easy to do, even as his antics escalate in seriousness.

But the other story is Jesse's. It's odd that Parker's best scenes involve Jesse and Jenn; the shallow, totally self-centered, and fearful Jenn is revealed in just a few lines. In fact, her best scene is a message left on Jesse's answer machine, which is something I commented on being an effective metaphor when I reviewed 'Stone Cold' the first of the Tom Selleck Stone adaptations, back in Crime Time 49. Parker's Jenn is so fingers-across-the-blackboard bad it's always been hard to figure out exactly what Jesse continues to see in her, which I'm sure his shrink has been wondering for years as he rolls his eyes at the ceiling behind Jesse's back. Also difficult is trying to avoid visualing a Jesse who begins to seem more and more like the wisecracking Tom Selleck who plays him in the movies, and less like the more introverted guy who arrived in Paradise from LA (and isn't that an ironic formulation?). Faced with the finality of another Jenn dilemma, Jesse revisits some of his favorite old flames, retreats to the bottle, talks to his poster of Ozzie Smith, who seems better than a shrink, and finally turns to Sunny Randall, meaning the ultimate conflicted couple hook up again. And not before time!

The problem with the parallels here is that they are all made so obviously. Jesse and his shrink Dix (make of that name what you Freudians will!) play psychological ping pong so deftly that any subtle points are immediately hammered home and generally reinforced with a joke. I shudder to think what happens when Spenser and Jesse settle down for a chat some day, and I hope Susan and Dix get to make up the foursome. Jesse's powers of observation also seem to be waning. A woman who while still in high school had a daughter who's now 13 can't be 'about 40', unless she stayed back a whole lot of years in grammar school. But that would make her as thick as Jenn.

Still, it's hard to hate a novel where the creepiest characters are a big-shot lawyer, an academic, and an overgrown preppie husband, rather than the sex criminal himself. It's like night and day, when you think about it.

Night And Day by Robert B Parker
Quercus £16.99 ISBN 9781849160506

this review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk

ASK ROBERT PARKER WHAT MAKES US IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS

This could happen to any reviewer, any time.....

Stranger In Paradise
Robert B Parker
Quercus 16.99 ISBN 9781847242471

I was sitting in my office, thinking about whether Irish whiskey or Yuengling beer would slake my thirst better, when Robert B Parker walked in. He was wearing a leather jacket and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, which he kept on while he talked. He was carrying a bag of doughnuts, and two cups of coffee. He put one cup down in front of me.
‘Milk, no sugar?’ he said.
‘Got it in one,’ I said.
‘You’re a reviewer,’ he said.
‘Two for two,’ I said.
‘You review my books,’ he said. ‘Give them good reviews. I like that. Have a jelly doughnut.’
‘Don’t like them very much. Too sweet,‘ I said. ‘Jelly doughnuts, not your books. I like your books, though. No thanks necessary.’
‘But not the new one,' he said, putting the doughnut down on my desk in front of me anyway.
‘Well,‘ I said. ‘Lately they’ve been getting a bit light. Which I can’t say about those doughnuts. Soft center, soggy outside, powdered sugar. You’re carrying a bag of metaphors.‘
‘Dunkin Donuts could use you to write copy,‘ he said.
‘Want another one?’ I said. ’Metaphor, not doughnut. It’s all style, no nutritional value. No substance. Or the same old substance.’
‘You have a problem with that?’
‘Only as a reviewer,’ I said. ‘An hour and half of fun reading is nothing to be sneezed at.’
Then I sneezed. Powdered sugar must’ve gotten up my nose. ‘Lots of snappy dialogue. Large margins. Time just flies. But I don’t save them anymore.’
‘Save them?’
‘The books. You know, the way kids save baseball cards. Used to have them all on the shelf, lined up in order. Shelf got too small.’
‘These things happen,” he said. ‘I’m a writer. I write. I write fast sometimes.’
I nodded. We understood each other.
‘So why don’t you like my new Jesse Stone book?’
‘It goes nowhere new. You’ve already got Jesse. He‘s a conflicted Spenser. Spenser’s got a together-in-spades shrink girlfriend, and everything’s copacetic. Jesse’s got a problematic amibitious bimbo girlfriend PLUS a shrink. Spenser cooks and drinks. Jesse eats out and usually doesn’t drink, except sometimes, but he does get to indulge the women who seem to find him as irresistible as they find Spenser, who never indulges because he‘s true to his Sue.
‘Then you bring back this character, Crow, who’s the American Indian version of Hawk. Crow goes around Paradise killing people, with Jesse’s blessing, because they deserve to be killed, mostly. That makes Jesse God, which I guess fits in Paradise, where someone's got to be Him. Then Crow starts bedding women, displaying even less talk and more macho fantasy than Jesse does. Sort of ‘no harm, no foul’ sex. If Jesse’s like Spenser if Spenser had been a drunk, Crow’s like Jesse if his baseball career hadn’t ended and he’d started doing steroids.’
‘That’s a low blow.’
‘Maybe, but Crow being even more irresistible than the now seventy something Spenser and Hawk or Jesse himself is like a 1950s high school kid’s fantasy. “Me wantum girl, tell girl, girl say yes. Need to know if red man really good.“ It’s doing the Spenser and Hawk as Deerslayer and Chingnachook thing all over again, except with sex.’
‘Sex is good,’ he said.
‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘Like my grandfather said, “all good, some better.“ But what’s good sex for Crow is not automatically good sex for the reader. Crow’s a one dimensional character, two if you include sex, but since all the sex takes place offstage, he’s back to one dimension: a literary construct who’s geometrically impossible.’
“Geometrically impossible, I like that.’
‘Thought you might,’ I said, ‘but you know, I could almost accept all that except the story really doesn’t GO anywhere—most of it’s concluded offstage too, which I’ll concede happens in real life, but it doesn’t make for riveting fiction. You’ve got the Latino version of the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and the Miami gangsters, one of whom’s a pro like Crow or Jesse, and you get Jesse and Crow having heap macho pow-wows, where nothing much is said, and then there’s a bizarre shootout on a causeway and the Indian disappears back into nature. I think Leslie Fiedler called it the Vanishing of the Returned Native American.‘
‘Very cute,‘ he said. ‘A Fiedler pun. Most of you crime guys wouldn’t know Leslie Fiedler from Arthur Fiedler.‘
‘Who?‘ I said, and he actually laughed. I was on a roll. ‘And then it ends with Jesse having a youngster on his hands, a kid who needs to be taught life’s lessons, which I believe you’ve already done with both Spenser and Sunny Randall, whom I actually preferred paired up with Jesse, by the way. But how much of that Hemingway stuff needs re-repeating? Is this “Up In Massachusetts’? We’ve been there before and it’s stretching the limits of my suspension of disbelief.’
‘Suspension of disbelief, I like that,” he said.
‘Only not as much as “geometrically impossible.“’
He nodded. Like I said, we understood each other. ‘It’s like Walter Gibson, writing 283 Shadow novels. You write to a formula, you repeat yourself. You’re smart, you write great dialogue, use different characters, but they start to conform to the template.’
‘Template?’ he said. He wasn’t smiling any more. ‘Is this geometry again?’
‘Don’t put me on,” I said. ‘You taught literature. You know Leslie Fiedler. You know what I’m saying. You’re as much a prof as a pro‘.
‘Not quite as much,’ he said. He reached in his coat pocket, and pulled out a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson.
‘Don’t see those much anymore,’ I said. ‘Especially reviewing.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but the old formulae still work sometimes.’
He pulled the trigger. The force pushed me backwards, like a massive fist to the chest, then the chair bounced me forward, face down in the doughnuts. I was on a roll again, a jelly roll. I could smell the jelly; powdered sugar flew up my nostrils as I sucked for air. It really was up my nose. ‘I would’ve liked a plain cruller better,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I’ll remember that next time,’ he said to my corpse.