I read Robert B. Parker's "Hundred Dollar Baby" this afternoon. I had long ago dropped the "Spencer" series off my reading list. I really liked the earlier ones, but by the mid to late `80s, it seemed as though he was phoning it in. They had become as formulaic as a Louis L'amour western. This one I picked up because it revisited a couple of characters from the early novels in the `70s.
But let's face this fact: Spencer is too old for this shit. The character fought in the Korean War, which at the most generous, assuming that he was 17 in 1953, would make him 71 years old. That seems a little too old to be running around Boston and getting into fights with goons forty or fifty years younger.
Sort of like the Mickey Spillane "Mike Hammer" books in the early-mid `90s. Mike Hammer had been a NYPD cop (I think maybe a sergeant) before WW2, which would mean he had to at least be in his mid to late 20s in 1941/2, when he joined the Army and maybe even older, as I imagine that promotion was slow in the Department back during the Depression (when you just about had to have a law degree to get on the force). That meant when the series restarted, ol' Mike was in his 70s, maybe even older. That's kind of long in the tooth to be swapping punches and hot lead with young punks, I think.
It's time for Spencer to head for Arizona.
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Sunday, October 7, 2007
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I hate to say it but I agree. I have everythinng he's written and I've re-read the first 15 books maybe 3 times. But nothing much since he started coming out in hardcover has really held, me. I can read the entire book in 3 hours, because the depth is gone.
ReplyDeleteI think when he branched out with the Stone and the Sunny R. series Spenser lost his stuffing/
The age thing would be OK, if he did as Sue Grafton did and had the books not keep up with real time. Kinsey's been around for 20 years and she's still in the 80's, but with 80's technology so it seems real.
My favoaurite was Catskill Eagle or Small Vices.
Also don't forget the updates to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe series he tried; they were pretty much clinkers. When you see the good stuff a writer can produce, the ones that were written solely to fulfill a book contract stand out.
ReplyDeleteCornwall's series also showed signs of "gotta get a book out-itis." There was one that the climax involved a surplus Russian nuc sub that was so bad that I threw the book against the wall. I haven't read her stuff since.
Sue Grafton's series has been excellent.
Funny, to me Grafton's latest seemed to be rather phoned in too. The difference is that she can't write badly even when phoning it in, while Robert Parker can't write well even when he wants to -- his earlier books were decent because of good plotting, not because he was ever any great shakes as a writer. So when someone who was never a very good writer phones it in, it gets really, really bad...
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