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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 9 |
 CAN YOU IMAGINE SPENSER GOING AFTER A BIG ENERGY COMPANY LIKE ENRON? |
ROBERT B. PARKER'S BAD BUSINESS  |
Spenser & Hawk team up
to solve corporate murders
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Robert B. Parker almost always lets Spenser, his Boston private eye, serve as our annual tour guide, showing us what's currently the worst thing wrong with America. In the new Spenser mystery, "Bad Business" (Putnam, $24.95), his target seems to be the decadent goings-on within a big energy company very much like the disgraced Enron.
The client who drags Spenser into his latest quest for truth is Marlene Rowley, who wants him to tail her wealthy corporate executive who who's husband and find out if he's cheating on her. Before too long, Spenser discovers he's crossing paths with another private eye who's been hired by the husband to tail his wife. When a third P.I. turns up working the same set of people, Spenser realizes there's something especially rotten going on in the ranks of the executives of the same company.
Then people start dying under suspicious circumstances, a hit man starts tailing Spenser and there's so much suspicion and intrigue going on that Spenser isn't sure which side he's on. Toss in a popular radio talk show "doctor" who seems to be running a wife-swapping service and you have another fine mess for Spenser, his sidekick Hawk, their mobster colleague Vinnie Morris and Spenser's long-time squeeze, Susan Silverman, to extricate themselves from without getting killed in the process.
As my readers must know by now, I think Parker is America's leading mystery writer and Spenser the evolutionary successor to Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer and all the great gumshoes of the American hard-boiled genre. Spenser, of course, is only hard-boiled on the outside. The process of evolution has made him politically correct and definitely in touch with his female side, so he's bound to be softer and gooier on the inside than all of his predecessors. He's also funnier than any of the rest of them. If he ever needs to bust somebody up pretty good, you can be sure he'll already have picked them to pieces with his boundless wit.
All that is present in "Bad Business," even though I don't think it's anywhere near as good a novel as Parker's 2003 Spenser--the awesomely enthralling "Back Story," which I rank among Parker's all-time best. Still, even lukewarm Parker is generally far, far better than most everything anybody else is doing because he's such a deft writer with the best dialogue of any contemporary detective writer.
Spenser often drives his clients daffy with his wisecracks. In "Bad Business," for instance, he introduces himself to snippy Marlene Rowley and she replies that she already knows his name. If she didn't know his name, she scolds, how would she have found him?
"I thought you looked up handsome in the phone book," says Spenser, "and my picture was there."
When she sarcastically acknowledges he's just "being cute," Spenser quite honestly admits, "It's my nature."
Some readers I know don't like this aspect of Parker. They think he churns out the Spenser novels so prolifically by leaving out substance and replacing it with smartass dialogue that fills up his rather brief chapters. That might be a fair criticism, except that I think we learn all we need to know about Marlene in those dialogue exchanges. She's a typical corporate "trophy wife" who knows she's beautiful because she's paid to have all the best "work" done on her face and figure. She also believes she's irresistible, although Spenser has absolutely no trouble resisting her. My feeling is Parker characterizes her so perfectly that using more words to explain her would be a waste of his vocabulary.
As for Spenser himself, Parker has carefully crafted him into an endlessly interesting hero through the 31 novels about him. If you're late coming to Spenser, you may feel things are missing. But it's all there and you'll realize it as soon as you read the other 30 novels and catch up with the rest of us. If I have a criticism, it's probably that Parker can't resist dragging in six or seven other running characters from past Spenser novels. There are, in fact, now so many running characters that I'm not sure I can even name them all.
In one very amusing chapter near the end of "Bad Business," Susan Silverman is trying to explain to Adele, a female corporate insider who's helping Spenser uncover financial problems in the company, why Spenser, Hawk, Vinnie and all their colleagues know and trust each other so well. She finally ends up describing Spenser and his pals as a sort of secret society.
"Susan," says Adele, "you sound like the rest of them."
"She is," cracks Spenser. "Wait'll she shows you the secret handshake."
Also essential to the Parker-Spenser formula is the brotherly relationship between Spenser, the big, tough white guy, and Hawk, the black sometime-assassin who's his constant companion in crime-fighting. They rag each other endlessly about race and all its permutations, yet two men couldn't be more bonded together than they are in these mysteries. Sexual bragging is a major part of it, so you'll be interested in learning why Spenser starts calling Hawk "Licorice Stick" toward the end of the new novel.
Spenser also has been the most-filmed private eye of the past 20 years, starting with the old ABC TV series starring the late Robert Urich, then the long line of made-for-TV movies starring Urich, then Joe Mantegna. He has never been on the big screen. It may be about time. Spenser is the definitive urban tough guy, but with the soul of a poet, the skills of a gourmet chef and the charm of an incurable romantic. Couldn't Hollywood use a hero like that about now?
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is ©2004 by Putnam.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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