THE PROFESSIONAL: A Spenser Novel
Robert B. Parker
Putnam Adult
Mystery
ISBN: 9780399155949
The 37th installment of Robert B. Parker’s series featuring the detective with no first name opens with Spenser in familiar surroundings. He’s alone in his Boston office when a woman shows up in need of his services. This may seem familiar to fans of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who introduced us to their famous fictional detectives, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, respectively, in a similar manner. But while the opening seems the same, Parker has taken the PI novel much further than his renowned predecessors ever did as he reinvigorates the somewhat stilted genre.
Longtime fans will find much to enjoy in THE PROFESSIONAL. The case appears straightforward: the woman who arrives in his office is a lawyer representing four rich married women who are all having affairs with the same man, Gary Eisenhower. Their husbands are older men in prominent positions. Eisenhower blackmails them with audio and video evidence of their trysts. Spenser starts investigating the case right away. He states, “But there was something wrong with the whole setup. Everything kept turning out not quite what it started out seeming to be.” Something is awry, a staple of detective fiction, but Parker brings everything to a new level with his latest Spenser story,
One of the things that throws a curveball into the case is that not only is Eisenhower not afraid of the cops, but none of the alleged victims of the crime are willing to press charges. And at least one woman sees no reason not to keep sleeping with Eisenhower! Since Spenser does not take money to rough up people or bump them off, the case is apparently at a dead end. He wishes the women good luck and leaves. But as fans know, Spenser just cannot let go as he tells the reader, “Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, nobody was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long running mess that I’d wandered into and hadn’t done a lot to improve.” And soon, dead bodies start popping up in true hard-boiled fashion, and Spenser’s choice to stay involved is cemented.
Due to Parker’s adept writing, the reader can’t turn away, either. Parker is called the dean of crime fiction, a title he richly deserves. He is a true master. Each Spenser book offers a clinic on how to write a fast-moving, entertaining novel. The chapters are short, the scenes are cinematic, the dialogue is crisp, and the writing is something both Hammett and Chandler would have tipped their hats to. Consider this:
“I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a red-haired woman with an angular face and skin you could strike a match on.”
It does not get much better than that. Parker possesses the great writer’s knack that he actually makes writing look simple when it’s really not. This series has taken the detective novel into a new millennium. His plots could have been ripped from the headlines: powerful people caught in webs of sexual intrigue. But his real contribution to the genre is that the Spenser novels in recent years have recognized that it is no longer just about good guys and bad guys. Today, we live in a world with all sorts of shades of gray and the real bad guys are often insulated in corporate and financial towers. Parker does not just give us paint-by-numbers genre books but novels in which he layers complications upon complications. And sometimes justice is imperfect, and our hero has to do the best he can and move on.
THE PROFESSIONAL is the perfect book with which to spend a cool fall weekend. May Robert B. Parker continue to give us our yearly visit from Spenser for many years to come. We could not ask for more.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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