ROBERT B. PARKER – The Judas Goat. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1978. Reprinted many times, both in hardcover and soft.

ROBERT B. PARKER The Judas Goat

   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.

– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 3, No. 3, May-June 1979.



[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.