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News & ArtsTuesday, January 19, 2010
TV / Books Robert B. Parker
Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:18 AM
The prolific Boston-based mystery novelist (who is perhaps best known as the creator of the Spenser series, which became the TV series Spenser for Hire) is dead at 77.
1
SHIT! No more Appaloosa series? *weeps* (Okay, I see one will come out on May 4th, but no more after that.) Rest in peace, my good man.
2
That sucks! I have read the Spenser series countless times. I hate to think there will be no more of those. It is reported he has 2 other non-Spenser books in the pipeline now. RIP.
4
Aw, I remember Spenser for Hire being filmed around the city while I was in college. We watched a scene being filmed 20 stories below during class one afternoon. There used to be a great mystery bookshop named for Spenser in the Back Bay, wonder if it's still there...?
6
"...which became the TV series Spenser for Hire..."
Paul, the problem with this construction, which is very common, is that it considers the book-to-TV process as a linear one in which one thing is transformed into another. It suggests that the books died and were replaced by a TV series, that evolutionarily TV is a higher form of life than books.
It would be more accurate to say that it inspired the TV series. They are parallel works, not a caterpillar and a butterfly.
Paul, the problem with this construction, which is very common, is that it considers the book-to-TV process as a linear one in which one thing is transformed into another. It suggests that the books died and were replaced by a TV series, that evolutionarily TV is a higher form of life than books.
It would be more accurate to say that it inspired the TV series. They are parallel works, not a caterpillar and a butterfly.
7
@6- The problem with your post is that a porcupine seems to have crawled up your ass and started wiggling around.
8
The first few Spenser novels were good; the ones that are less than an inch thick, basically. They follow a pattern that's pretty common with detective series like this. They start off small and gritty and local, believable, and capture some of the flavor of decaying Boston in the early 70s.
But eventually he ran out of small-time crooks to run after, and started constructing increasingly more grandiose plots -- huge rings of wealthy and powerful child molesters that get together at people's houses to socialize and commit more rapes, white supremacist gangs with nukes in underground caverns in Idaho, increasingly vast and complicated weaponry, and so on, and they lose their charm.
I have a rule for books like this, of which I have been an avid consumer for thirty years: if the story in the book would have made the front page of the newspaper if it had happened in real life, it's no good. Spenser started out great but fairly quickly failed this test in ever-bigger ways. He got rich doing it, but he never created the body of work that John D. MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard (in Detroit), George V. Higgins, or even Michael Lewin (in Indianapolis) did.
But eventually he ran out of small-time crooks to run after, and started constructing increasingly more grandiose plots -- huge rings of wealthy and powerful child molesters that get together at people's houses to socialize and commit more rapes, white supremacist gangs with nukes in underground caverns in Idaho, increasingly vast and complicated weaponry, and so on, and they lose their charm.
I have a rule for books like this, of which I have been an avid consumer for thirty years: if the story in the book would have made the front page of the newspaper if it had happened in real life, it's no good. Spenser started out great but fairly quickly failed this test in ever-bigger ways. He got rich doing it, but he never created the body of work that John D. MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Elmore Leonard (in Detroit), George V. Higgins, or even Michael Lewin (in Indianapolis) did.
9
...And can the grammar nazis go fuck themselves? Really, we don't need to hear that shit. We really don't care. We do not read shit on the web because of its literary appeal.
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