JEREMIAH HEALY: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Jeremiah Healy has been up at the Guardian online as of last Friday (while I was out of touch in the wilds of New Hampshire); I don't know if it's been in the paper paper or not. You can link to it here. It's pretty much as written: there was an odd addition that said the books were set in 'Beantown', a fictionalised Boston, but that was removed.

The bit mentioned from my essay in Following The Detectives, about demolishing a whole neighbourhood was actually a quote from Jerry, a joke, but one that established the location of Beth's cemetery perfectly for my essay. Jerry also spoke admiringly and knowingly of the other Boston writers who featured in the essay: Parker, Dennis Lehane and George V. Higgins--I mentioned this in my copy but it was edited out. I think there would be an interesting essay to be written about connections between Higgins and Healy and their fictions. And of course Spenser knows a cop named Healy...

I knew the Healy books well, but I can't pretend to have known Jerry. Yet I could have extended the obit much further from the personal comments of writers, critics and fans all of whom found him a fascinating and memorable person, as well as a dedicated and talented writer. It was for me a privilege to be able to write about him, and something that helped mitigate the sad circumstances of his death. I hadn't read the Terry Devane books, so I've ordered the first one, and hope to renew our acquaintance that way.

ROBERT B PARKER'S PAINTED LADIES

I.T. is back in Boston, more hommage to my contributions to Maxim Jakubowski's Following The Detectives, for by coincidence I followed the twenty-year old re-read of George V Higgins with the 39th of Robert B Parker's Spenser novels. Painted Ladies is the first to be published after the untimely death of Robert B Parker, and there is a lot that is familiar about it. Starting with the moment Spenser is hired, by the somewhat pompous art professor, Dr Ashton Pierce, to protect him as he delivers the ransom for a stolen painting, one of the eponymous females of the title. I'm still wondering who the other painted ones were. Now, apart from Spenser's having a bit of fun deflating his pomposity, which by now is a trope for the detective, the set-up is straight out of Raymond Chandler, though none the worse for that. The buy goes wrong, of course, and having failed his client, Spenser sets off to get some justice for him, and to redeem himself.

From there, the tale proceeds along equally familiar Spenserian lines, including an ambush escape that Spenser foils, once Pearl II has sniffed it out, using the same strategy he once used in another book, something Parker himself tells us before the Spenser anoraks out there flood the internet, or now indeed the afterworld, with complaints. He also avoids another killing through sheer chance, which seems to be stretching things. Spenser again gets to visit a college campus, to prove he's still attractive to coeds as much as anything else.

The story also relies on a few coincidences that ring false. Would one character's daughter would be having a class with another character's partner in fraud? Would dog-owners met randomly in the park really just happen to know the best art expert in the same field Spenser is investigating? I was so convinced that must be a set-up I was shocked when Susan Silverman got through the book without being kidnapped! It sometimes bends itself in service of its wisecrackings dialogue (would a Middlesex DA really be unaware that Spenser had killed two would-be assassins?). There is a very interesting villain, who sadly doesn't get enough of a part in the story, especially because his role becomes obvious fairly quickly. There are nice bits for the cops Healy, Quirk and Belson, who would have deserved a novel of their own one day.

What really makes this seem like by-the-numbers Spenser, however, are the dual romances. Yes, Pearl's Public Gardens flirtation with Otto from Central Park is nothing more than another Parker lesson in love. I know people often say 'love me, love my dog', and I might even be willing to do that. But when they tell each other that 'maybe we are the two most interesting people in the world' or 'you and I have something few people in the world are able to get,' you want to shout 'maybe you're not, and maybe more people in the world aren't so damn smug! So I really do hope that Spenser's last word really does not turn out to be 'Otto!'

Painted Ladies by Robert B Parker
Quercus £18.99 ISBN 9781849131312

Note: a slightly different version of this review will appear at Crime Time: www.crimetime.co.uk

GEORGE V HIGGINS' MANDEVILLE TALENT: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I picked up a copy of The Mandeville Talent in a charity shop recently. It's out of print, my original copy is in storage somewhere, but it was one of my favourites among George Higgins' novels, and I wrote about it recently, from memory, in my chapter on Higgins' and Robert B Parker's Boston for Maxim Jakubowski's Following The Detectives. I wanted to re-read the book, almost 20 years after it was originally published in 1991, to see how accurate my memory had been but also to gauge just how much two decades might have changed my appreciation of Higgins.

Turns out I had remembered the book well, and that it holds up rather better than I thought it might. The novel tells the story of Joe Corey, a up-and-coming New York mergers and acquisitions lawyer, whose wife takes a job as a professor at Mount Holyoke, up in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, near the town of Shropshire where her grandfather, James Mandeville, president of the local bank, was murdered just before Christmas 23 years earlier. Dissatisfied with his current life, Joe gets drawn into the unsolved crime, made to look like a suicide, and begins to investigate.

The novel tells two stories. One is the story of the crime, and the other is the story of how life actually works in the world where society still functions in terms of people. This was Mandeville's talent, to be the unprepossessing big-shot in his small town. Corey's volunteer efforts on the case impress a local DA, who puts him on to a retired investigator, Baldo Iannuci, who begins to take him through the few clues buried in the minutiae of the case. Meanwhile, Baldo initates Corey into the way a small town works, the give and take that makes it function. The two lessons interweave, of course, and it is through small things dropped casually into coversation, little facts, seemingly unimportant, that are the result of long-developed relationships, that Baldo and Joe begin to get close to the truth.

There is an element of the too-pat here, as one or two recollections come just too easily or coveniently, and occasionally you wish the voices telling the story were more distinctly individual. But meanwhile, Joe is learning why liquor store owners offer some customers discounts, and how real estate agents behave with their customers. 'The first principle,' Baldo says, '...is that people live up to your expectations. If you let them know you expect them to hammer you, well, they won't disappoint you--they'll do it.' It is a rough principle, but a fair one if you're treating people with respect.

Which of course is what Jim Mandeville never figured on. He had taken a loan to buy property; he'd guessed right and now his property was worth far more than the loan. In his world that wouldn't change the game. But for the man from whom he'd borrowed the money, the game was played differently, and it did change. This is also the game Joe Corey discovers he is leaving behind. Higgins ties all the ends together smartly, his two strands weaving together perfectly, and you almost expect 'here endeth the lesson' to pop up somewhere.

The reason I wondered how The Mandeville Talent would hold up was the nature of the changes we've seen in our world since then, and the way the zero-sum game of gangsters, merchant bankers and merger and acquisition lawyers has penetrated right down to small town America. Higgins left Boston for this story partly because he'd investigated a similar small town murder, but more importantly because he wanted to explain society's workings at the micro level. I think he saw the world changing quickly, and needed distance from the Hub, and the State House, and bigger time politics, to say what he wanted to say. Ten years later he would revisit western Mass, in A Change Of Gravity, by which time his recounting of local politics was already elegaic. Higgins knew that the give and take of life wasn't always, strictly speaking, legal, or in the wider sense, fair, but it followed certain rules, it made a certain sense, and things worked reasonably well. I wish I could say the same now.

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:
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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.