Sat 5 Aug 2017
A PI Mystery Review by Barry Gardner: ROBERT B. PARKER – Walking Shadow.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
ROBERT B. PARKER – Walking Shadow. Spenser #21. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, 1994. Berkley, paperback, 1995.
What in the world is left for me or anyone to say about Parker, Spenser. Hawk, Susan and the whole menagerie? At his best Parker writes some of the smoothest prose the field has seen, and at his worst is so pretentious he’s embarrassing and devises plots you wouldn’t wish on Mack Bolan. I guess the suspense is in seeing which one you get this time out.
Spenser is drawn into the world of theater when Susan, on the theater’s board, drags him to a small Massachusetts town to see an avant-garde play. It develops that the producer is being followed by a person unknown, feels threatened, and wants Spenser to find out why. For Susan’s sake he agrees, but before he can find out anything, a cast member is murdered.
The town has a large Chinese population, and Spenser is visited by one of them and two Vietnamese gang members who encourage him to stay away. This is a signal to bring in Hawk and get serious about things.
This could be sub-titled “Three Against the Tong,” and that should tell you all you need to know about what kind of story it is. Parker has created a fantasy-land here, his own little Oz, with a manly hero who knows T. S. Eliot and has not only stone killers (two of them this time) but every sort of cop at this beck and call when he needs aid, and an oh-so-understanding lady with a precious dog to boot.
He’s only going through the motions now, though granted, they’re smooth motions. He writes effortless prose still, but it’s all moves and no punch. It’s slick, it’s superficial, it’s kind of silly, really, and it’s the literary equivalent of week-old stew. If this were a paperback original from a new author, I might be a little more tolerant — but it isn’t. I’m afraid Parker’s just about played out his string.
August 5th, 2017 at 12:20 pm
I see this is number 21 in the Spenser series. I had lost interest in the series a lot earlier. When I first read the early novels I was quite impressed but somewhere around the 5th or 6th I started to develop a dislike for Susan and Hawk. They became so annoying that I stopped reading.
August 5th, 2017 at 1:15 pm
As a PostScript to the numbering, WALKING SHADOW was #21 of 39 written by Robert Parker. Add to that six more that Ace Atkins has done since Parker’s death.
Since I enjoyed one of the Atkins books he wrote under his own name, I read the first of the Spenser’s he did. It was OK, but there certainly wasn’t anything new that came out of it. I also asked myself, since I haven’t read all of Parker’s book yet, why read another of these pseudo imitations? And that was the end of that.
August 5th, 2017 at 4:16 pm
I guess I’m not so critical in my tastes, as I have enjoyed every Spenser no matter who wrote it. To me, just good reads, nothing profound. I like the characters.
The Parker books in hardcover are a little amusing due to their thicker paper, larger font, fewer lines per page, all an effort by the publisher, I think, to make them look more substantial than they are. Not needed!
I pretty much like everything Ace Atkins has done.
August 5th, 2017 at 4:34 pm
You certainly aren’t alone in liking Spenser et al., Howard. Ace Atkins wouldn’t be busy writing more of their adventures if people weren’t still buying and reading them.
August 5th, 2017 at 4:59 pm
It was the publishers re-releasing the Spenser catalog that stopped me reading Spenser. I always enjoyed the books and even liked Susan and all of Parker’s characters.
The problem was the plots were so forgettable I would buy books I all ready read that had been republished with new covers. As the book buyer for my Tower store I got to order them for our paperback racks and read them that way. They sell occasionally. But I have no interest in reading Atkins versions.
As I mentioned I liked Spenser, Hawk, Susan and Parker’s characters in the books. But boy did I dislike the TV versions, especially Hawk and Susan.
August 5th, 2017 at 7:57 pm
The Quinn Colson series Ace Atkins writes is really well done. I feel he does a nice job of following Parker’s style and voice in the Spenser books he has written.
August 7th, 2017 at 1:04 am
Of the Parker imitations I liked the Fiddler series, but the hero was a lot more laid back than Spenser and not half so well connected. By this point Parker was just turning out television episodes and not novels about Spenser and Susan and Hawk.
Once in a while he would hit one out of the park I’m told, and I did read and enjoy some of his other series and his two Westerns as well as the two Marlowe books, because the man could write, but well before book 21 Spenser and I had parted company, largely because the Susan and Hawk things had reached a point of nauseating precociousness for me.
August 7th, 2017 at 11:00 am
I never got around to reading the Fiddler books, and I’m sorry about that. They were quite popular at the time. From Wikipedia:
“Fiddler is the fictional protagonist in an eight book mystery series by A.E. Maxwell (husband and wife writing team Evan and Ann Maxwell, who also writes as Elizabeth Lowell.) The books in the series are Just Another Day in Paradise (1985), The Frog and the Scorpion (1986), Gatsby’s Vineyard (1987), Just Enough Light to Kill (1988), The Art of Survival (1989), Money Burns (1991), The King of Nothing (1992), and Murder Hurts (1993). Fiddler is an independently wealthy Southern California resident with a past who occasionally solves crimes with the assistance of his ex-wife and on-again, off-again lover Fiora Flynn, a successful investment banker. Themes included action and adventure with villains ranging from KGB officers and Colombian drug smugglers to high society artists and corporate executives.”