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CORRIDOR
OF MYSTERY |
DARK CORRIDORS Volume 1, No. 7 |
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Creator of 'Spenser' |
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Parker talks about TV's new round of 'Spenser' movies and all those years with the Boston P.I.
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By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Don't ever bother asking Robert B. Parker what he thinks about
all those mystery critics -- like me, for instance -- who keep
saying his Spenser is the greatest American detective hero of
his time. He pays no attention to such things.
"I don't read about myself," said Parker. "I don't read reviews and I don't read articles."
"So you're not even aware that lots of us are calling you the dean of American mystery writers?" I asked him.
Parker laughed over that one, then mumbled an aside: "The Dean never liked me that much."
Maybe not, but one suspects the academics at Boston's Northeastern University, where Parker was teaching literature when he began writing his first Spenser novel back in 1971, most likely brag a lot about him now. Since then, Parker has published 27 novels about Spenser, which R.W.B. Lewis, in the New York Times, described as "one of the great series in the history of the American detective story."
Though Parker concedes his wife, Joan, does read the reviews and the articles about him, "just to keep track of whether I'm missing something or not," he insists he won't even look at a tape of one of his TV appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." It's all part of his determination to not start seeing himself as a celebrity of some kind, to not start changing his ways to appeal more to critics or talk show hosts.
"I just think it's better for me," he explained. "It exteriorizes me and I think I'm better off not paying attention to that. I don't want to be doing what other people want me to be doing."
Parker knows lots of other writers in his field, of course, but also claims he doesn't read many of them -- on purpose.
"It's hard for me to enjoy," he said, "because I'd look at them the way a carpenter looks at houses somebody else built."
However, Parker does make one major exception: He snaps up every new book by Elmore Leonard, a good friend who frequently shows up for Parker's book signings in his hometown, Cambridge, Mass., to cheer him on. Parker likes to drop in on Leonard's signings in Detroit, Mich., to offer the same kind of support.
"I very much admire and look forward to every book by Dutch Leonard," said Parker, who shares Leonard's skill at writing crisp urban dialogue. He especially likes Leonard's female characters, saying, "He's got some good women in there!"
As bizarre as it may sound, Parker's general abstention from reading novels by other writers also extends to his own. He claims he never reads any of his own novels unless he has to go back and look up something in particular.
This I discovered when I asked Parker how Spenser had changed over the years between "The Godwulf Manuscript" and last spring's "Hugger Mugger."
"I don't know because I don't read the books," he said. "I write them in little five-page segments, so I have a totally different relationship to them than the people who consume them in one day during a flight to New York."
But Parker later explained that he'd gone back and looked at some of the earlier Spenser novels while trying to decide which should be the next one to adapt for an A&E network movie. He said the Spenser he found during that excursion into his literary past was "brasher, much more of a wiseguy and more inclined to have a punch in the mouth be his answer to everything."
On the whole, said Parker, "I didn't like him anywhere near as much as I like him now."
Devoted readers of the Spenser novels recognize the fact that the tough Boston private eye is a much more mellow man today, perhaps the result of all those years he's spent in the company of his "main squeeze," psychologist Susan Silverman. Parker contends Spenser surely has grown along with him, maturing in many ways.
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"I've grown up and I think he's grown up," said Parker.
Many critics have spent lots of time drawing cozy parallels between Parker's life and that of his fictional private eye. One good example: He and Joan separated briefly in the early 1980s -- then so did Spenser and Susan Silverman. Parker thinks it's only natural for a writer who writes about the same character for nearly 30 years to draw from his own life. But, he says, "there's nothing conscious" about the process.
"Certainly he doesn't see the world in a way I can't imagine seeing it myself," said Parker. "He's probably a bit tougher than I am and what he thinks isn't exactly what I think, but who I am and what I believe certainly would form what I write."
If there ever was a model for Spenser, it probably was a fictional one: Raymond Chandler's private eye Philip Marlowe. Parker has always been a great admirer of Chandler's writing and openly admits Spenser drew heavily from Marlowe. Parker himself wrote his graduate thesis on Chandler's writing, so it was only natural that the Chandler Estate came to him when it wanted to find a top writer of detective fiction to complete "Poodle Springs," the unfinished Marlowe novel Chandler left behind when he died.
The completed book became a best seller in 1989 and later was turned into a movie by HBO. Parker also took on a second Chandler project, a sequel to "The Big Sleep" called "Perchance to Dream," but declined offers from the Estate to do other Chandler projects.
"I'd done enough of that," said Parker. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life writing some other guy's books."
Parker's literary career clearly was inspired by Chandler, a writer that Parker believes changed the whole direction of detective fiction by making character, atmosphere and style the important thing rather than plot. Chandler's Marlowe became so much the quintessential L.A. private eye that Parker admits he even looked him up in the L.A. phone book the first time he ever visited Los Angeles.
"I knew he wouldn't be there," said Parker, "but it was my sort of homage to Chandler."
However, Parker is quick to point out his own Spenser has developed on a quite different track than Marlowe, who stopped being Spenser's model "as soon as I figured out I could do this and people would pay me for it." Spenser's outlook on race, women and sexuality are much more palatable to modern readers than Marlowe's. Spenser today is wittier than Marlowe ever was -- and knows a hell of a lot more about food, wines and poetry.
Many critics like to reflect that Spenser is very much a man of his time -- especially sensitive to the needs of women, even though he's a tough guy who used to be a prizefighter. He also has always had a liberated attitude toward race, religion and homosexuality. Though Spenser is presumably of Irish-Catholic ancestry, his woman is Jewish. His best friend, Hawk, is black. And he has had sympathetic gay characters from the early days of Spenser. In "Looking for Rachel Wallace" (1980), Spenser helped a feminist lesbian writer, rather advanced behavior for a private eye character at that time. Parker explains that he's a man of his time, so it shouldn't be any surprise that Spenser has such modern attitudes.
As for the positive gay characters, Parker observes, "I have two gay sons, which gives me some insight into the gay community." (One of his sons, actor Dan Parker, played the gay police detective Lee Farrell in the first A&E Spenser movie, "Small Vices.") He says it's his intention for us to see contemporary issues through Spenser's eyes, "but it's also my intention not to lecture."
When I first met Parker in 1985, he had come to Hollywood to do interviews in conjunction with the premiere of ABC's weekly series "Spenser: For Hire," starring Robert Urich as Spenser, Avery Brooks as Hawk and Barbara Stock as Susan Silverman. Even at that time, Parker had a liberated attitude about screen versions of his books. He didn't think his fans should be concerned about trivial things that didn't match up between the books and the TV shows, even when some of his actual books were being directly adapted for the series. (His "Promised Land" was adapted for the ABC pilot.) Critics mostly loved the TV show, but it never earned big ratings.
After ABC canceled "Spenser: For Hire," Parker and his wife became actively involved in plans that finally revived it as a series of two-hour movies for the Lifetime cable network. The movies were based on the books and Parker wrote the screenplays, again with Urich in the lead. When those films ran their course, there was a gap of several years when there were no Spenser movies on TV. Then A&E stepped into the picture.
As Parker explains it, producer Michael Brandman was a fan of the books and had a meeting with Parker in the early 1990s about possibly doing some new Spenser feature films. They made an agreement that resulted in Parker writing two screenplays based on "Small Vices" and "Thin Air" on spec. Brandman shopped them around the studios, but had no worthwhile offers. Meanwhile, A&E wanted to adapt Parker's 1997 novel "Night Passage," featuring small town police chief Jesse Stone, as the first in a possible new series of movies for its "Mysteries to Die For" franchise. During their meetings, Brandman happened to mention he had two original Parker screenplays for Spenser movies. A&E asked to see those -- and greenlighted a new series of Spenser films.
When it came time to cast the role of Spenser for "Small Vices," veteran actor Joe Mantegna was the choice. (Urich had been battling a rare form of cancer and also was under contract for a new "Love Boat" series at UPN.) It was a controversial choice among fans of the original series, who didn't want to see anybody but Urich play the part. Parker saw that complaint coming.
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Joe Mantegna plays Spenser in 'Thin Air,' which A&E shows four times back to back, starting at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 12.
"I run into people on airplanes all the time who recognize me and say, 'Every time I think of you, I think of Bob Urich,'" Parker said.
Though Parker has been reluctant to say anything negative about Urich, he clearly prefers Mantegna, claiming, "The Joe Mantegna Spenser is as close as we've ever gotten to the book Spensers." He also liked the fact that Mantegna called him first, before accepting the role, and made sure Parker had no objection.
"The complaints about Mantegna boil down to the fact he's Italian and doesn't weigh 200 pounds," said Parker. "The answer to the first complaint is I don't care and the answer to the second is: Neither was Bogart."
In Parker's mind, Humphrey Bogart was nothing like either Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe in Chandler's "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Big Sleep," but those performances defined the characters for most people who saw Bogart in the two movies.
"Joe's a good actor," said Parker. "If you're not stupid, one of the first things you learn if you're trying to translate books into television is that you don't run around looking for a guy who looks like Spenser. You look for the good actor -- and pretty soon he will look like Spenser -- or a reasonable replica."
Now 67, Parker is busier than he ever has been. He has a schedule for writing two novels a year. One will always be a Spenser novel. He now is finishing up "Perish Twice," the second novel featuring his new female detective Sunny Randall. (He created the character at the request of Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, who will star in the movie version of "Family Honor," the first Sunny Randall novel.) Efforts to adapt "Night Passage," the first Jesse Stone book, haven't worked, so a writer is now trying to adapt "Trouble in Paradise," the second Stone book, for the screen. Parker plans to alternate new Randall and Stone books with his annual Spenser novels.
Though Parker is aware that Colin Dexter finally revealed the first name of his long-running Inspector Morse detective character and, in this year's "The Remorseful Day," wrote an ending for Morse's career, he doesn't intend to do either one of those things for Spenser.
"I don't know what Spenser's first name is," said Parker. "I've never made one up."
As for writing a final chapter for Spenser and putting it in a safe deposit box for publication after his death -- as Agatha Christie did with Hercule Poirot in "Curtain" -- Parker says he won't do that because "I think that's kind of cheap. If I write one, I'll publish it, so I can get the money."
But what about the other pressing question of Spenser's life: Is he ever going to marry Susan Silverman? Parker says, "I would guess not, but I don't know. They tried living together once, but that sure didn't work."
Parker also is aware that he actually gave Spenser an age in the first novel: 37. Though we can't be sure how many years have passed in the fictional life of the hardy private eye since then, there are some strong clues. For instance, Spenser served in the Korean War, as Parker did. He also boxed with Jersey Joe Walcott, who retired in the early 1950s. That would make him pretty doggone long in the tooth, considering the physical stuff he often gets into while solving mysteries.
"He has to be about my age," Parker confided, but he doesn't want us thinking about that too much.
As we make our way into the 21st century, Parker accepts the idea that the detective is now the most popular of all heroic characters in mass culture worldwide. He's comfortable with the concept that readers today expect detectives like Spenser to solve problems for them and get involved with serious social issues.
"They're not angst-ridden adolescents coming of age in a chaotic world," he said. "These are people who actually may accomplish something. They may solve the problem. I don't know if they do this in real life, but they sure do in fiction."
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The photo of Robert B. Parker is © by John Earle. The "Thin Air" book cover is from the Berkley Books paperback edition. The photo of Joe Mantegna is by Christian Lantry and is from the A&E cable network. The photo of Robert Urich and Wendy Crewson is from Lifetime's "Spenser: A Savage Place" and is © 1994 by ABC-Ultra/Broadway Entertainment.
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