Sat 4 Jul 2009
ROBERT B. PARKER – The Judas Goat. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1978. Reprinted many times, both in hardcover and soft.
Another book in the hard-boiled Spenser series is always more than welcome. Promised Land, the one just preceding this one, won a great deal of critical acclaim, including an Edgar award, but in spite of extraordinarily good writing, it was noticeably thin on plot, and in many ways it was largely an introspective character study of the tough Boston private eye named Spenser, and the world around him.
As if to compensate, this time the pace is fast and bloody, regenerating the series completely by means of extreme violence. A gang of terrorists wipes out most of a wealthy industrialist’s family, and Spenser is hired to track them down. After a cleansing process of this ferocity, digging out those responsible, we can only look forward to what’s in store for the future — and, no, Spenser’s proven that he’s not yet too old for this sort of thing.
Not a perfect book, but then again, so few are.
[UPDATE] 07-04-09. More often than not, I’ve been revising these old reviews slightly, not to change my opinion — not ever — but to correct small typos, to change some wording around and — every once in a while — to clarify points that I’ve thought I expressed poorly the first time.
This one I decided to leave exactly as it first appeared, except for the letter grade I assigned to each book back then, which I haven’t using at all in the reprint appearances of these reviews. I gave this one an “A,” so I obviously I enjoyed it, even though the plot as I described it, I have to admit, I don’t remember very much, if at all.
Over the past few years, Robert B. Parker and I have been drifting apart. It’s not his doing, and it’s not for a lack of appreciation of my part. I think he’s a terrific writer, and for a long time, he was one of a small grouping of authors, less than only five of them, whose books I bought in hardcover as soon as they came out.
I mention this because the flaws that many friends of mine keep pointing out to me in his work, I see them too. I guess they (the flaws) bother them (my friends) more than they do me.
So why haven’t I read any of his Spenser books recently? Why have I never read a Jesse Stone novel? Or one of the Sunny Randall books?
He just seems to be writing books faster than I can read them, that’s about the only excuse I can think of, and what’s really amazing is that he’s going to be 77 this year. Unbelievable.
It’s time, I think, to make time in the day to read another Spenser novel or two, and maybe even some of those with his other characters. I think that in the 1970s and 80s, Robert B. Parker almost single-handedly saved the PI novel from extinction. I really do.
July 4th, 2009 at 6:53 am
When the Spenser novels first came out I felt like you Steve. The first several were very impressive and I thought they were excellent. But somewhere after the sixth or seventh novel I found that I was losing my enthusiasm for the Spenser series. I found the girlfriend Susan to be very annoying and Hawk was simply unbelievable, too tough and also very annoying. In fact I started to hate these two characters and this forced me to stop reading Parker. I wish I didn’t feel this way because I had such high hopes at the beginning of the series. Now there is simply no way that I can consider Parker near the same level as such great PI writers like Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald.
July 4th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Walker
Neither Susan nor Hawk bother me as much as they do you, and in fact I enjoy reading about the two of them as much as Parker enjoys writing about them. What may be part of the problem is that they don’t change or grow all that much.
I just made a rough count of the Spenser books. If I’m right, Parker has written 37 of them. That’s more than Chandler, Hammett and Macdonald wrote, combined, and it doesn’t count any of Parker’s other books. That’s a lot of wordage, and it’s not surprising that a certain sense of “read it all before” has started to creep in. Familiarity breeds contempt, the old saying goes, but as far as the general public is concerned, it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
In terms of Parker’s impact on the field, I’m going to steal from Kevin Burton Smith’s webpage on Parker https://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/parker.html and quote the following:
“Disliking (someone’s) writing is one thing — ignoring history is another. I am not a huge Robert B. Parker fan, but he is important, and a lot of us in the 1980s and 90s were able to sell private eye novels because Bob Parker led the way.”
(Max Allan Collins, The January Magazine Interview)
“Last week I had the opportunity to spend a good deal of time listening to some of the best contemporary crime writers discuss their work at a conference in the Bahamas. Parker’s Spenser novels were mentioned repeatedly as a major influence on many of these writers (it was also frequently stated, to be fair, that the early books were far superior to the more recent ones.) My opinion is that the countless imitations of the Spenser books — and there are many — have tarnished our perception of the originals. We’re tired of Spenser’s sons so we’re tired of Spenser. Put it in another context: a young person looking at Bullitt or The French Connection today might yawn at “just another car chase,” but those car chases were groundbreaking and mind-blowing at the time of their release.”
(George Pelecanos, from a post to Rara-Avis, from 12/14/2000)
“I read Parker’s Spenser series in college. When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”
(Harlan Coben, August 2007, The Atlantic)
July 4th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Somewhere along the way Parker and Spenser lost me, though it took a bit longer than it did Walker. At some point I found I was buying them, but not reading them.
This isn’t to say anything against Parker as a major influence on the genre and on countless imitators. At his very best he was a breath of fresh air, the poetry of Chandler, the toughness of Hammett, and the violence of Spillane in one interesting package. Every couple of years I still pick up a Spenser, but can’t quite get the old feeling back. I guess Thomas Wolfe was right.
That said I’ve liked one or two of the other series Parker is doing, and his westerns, and I would never knock his considerable skills and import as a writer. Maybe I would have tired of Marlowe, Spade, and Archer if there had been 37 of them. You never know. But I suspect the sheer number of books show off his weaknesses instead of his considerable strengths.
And, sad to say, neither Susan nor Hawk have worn particularly well in my opinion. Perhaps because neither really exists save as a sounding board for Spenser.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[…] last year, and I’d forgotten I had. This one’s a review of The Judas Goat. Check it out here. […]