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The Hybrid Private Eye
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14861 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1988 |
2,674 Words |
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
CRIMSON JOY
Robert B. Parker
New York: Delacorte Press, 1988
224 pp., $16.95
In Crimson Joy, Robert B. Parker's Spenser makes makes his fifteenth novelistic appearance as he tries to help his friend Lt. Martin Quirk catch a killer responsible for a series of grisly and politically charged murders that threaten the lives of black women, and the fragile racial peace of Boston. As they stalk the killer through methodical investigation and the elimination of suspects, the murderer, with a twisted logic of his own, closes in on them. The book moves swiftly and directly to its violent and shocking end.
But the Spenser series has continued so successfully for so long (on television as well as in books) not simply by virtue of its suspenseful, fast-moving plots and brief but deft descriptions; these, after all,a re fairly common in the genre. Like its literary brothers such as Lew Archer and Travis McGee, Parker's private investigator possesses a distinctive sensibility, a particular way of seeing and feeling about the world. He too is something of a loner and an incorruptible man in a deeply corrupt world- a modern knight in a fallen, usually urban, landscape.
Spenser's distinctiveness resides in a sensibility that enables him to move comfortably in the dark underside of the city--the world of whores, snitches, hit men, and cops--as well as in the daylight of the suburbs and gentrified city areas, where college professors, social service workers, psychotherapists, and countless other upper middle-class professionals live and work. The cop's ethos and that of, say, the mental health professional are liable to be worlds apart. Spenser offers a vision of their antagonism melting into a working harmony, ending the bitter opposition between value systems in which each claims exclusive rightness. In these thrillers we have intimations of a world where the vice cop and the therapist, lion and lamb, lie down together, closing the fierce political and moral conflicts that emerged so sharply in America twenty years ago when, for instance, the Chicago police defied upper middle-class opinion and beat, on television, the children of their suburban betters.
Worlds apart
The Spenser novels work by playing upon the tension between the two worlds and the hope of bringing about a reconciliation between them. At the most
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