My dad taught me to read books for men. From about the age of ten, he was introducing me to his favourite authors. Dick Francis, Walter Tevis… Robert B Parker. At that age, I was a reading machine, and inhaled all of them.

Over the years, it was Robert B Parker’s Spenser who stuck with me. I went back to those books time and again – I still don’t have a complete set, something that irks me whenever I reread them. I’ve read other Parker books, but there was something about Spenser – a tough guy with a brain, a superhero with snark long before Buffy came along. I love the early books best, the ones that are so Seventies that it hurts, with the giant sunglasses and the hippie students and the casual sex. Though I also love the fact that unlike other 30-something heroes, he aged (almost) properly, adding extra scars and aches as the decades passed. I love the fact that Spenser found a woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with early in the series, but that they were both so damned irritating that they could never live together. I love his relationship with surrogate son Paul, and how he dealt with the kid’s silence and trauma by insisting they build a house together. I love that when it became clear that Paul’s interest was in dance, Spenser manned up and fucking well learned how to appreciate dance. I love that he is constantly showing off, whether it be his ability to cook (gasp, pasta dishes) or his infamous one armed push ups.

I love that half the time, Spenser is the most feminist person in the room, even when he’s being horribly rude to women. I love that whenever he enters a scene, he lists everything he can see. I never get tired of reading him. There’s a little piece of him in every male character I ever wrote, and whenever I feel that my blokes or my fight scenes are getting too girly, Spenser is the man I go to. Likewise, if my prose is getting too purple? Spenser is the antidote. Each book is a concise, intense bullet of a thing, plot and character in espresso form.

I was sorry today to hear of Parker’s death, at his desk, at the age of 77. He was, by all accounts, a very awesome person. Reading his obituaries, I learned for the first time that his PhD, which he got before his novels were published, was on “The Violent Hero,” and examined the works of Hammet, Chandler and McDonald. I’m not the least bit surprised. Spenser was a conscious creation of someone who knew how crime fiction worked – a second generation of noir heroes. And you know, he always was too smart for his own good. That’s why he got beat up so often.

There are books that stay with you your whole life, that you will never grow out of, because they grow with you, and there’s something new in them each time you read them. Robert B Parker’s Spenser novels were that for me, and continue to be so. I hope they always will.

Tags: crime, in memoriam, reading, robert b parker, spenser, tough guys