But not as good as one written by Robert B. Parker. He had a unique voice that is hard to imitate. I think Ace Atkins does a pretty good job but he is just too crude. He doesn't have the subtlety with invective that Parker had.
I know that Parker took a lot of inspiration from a great Boston Crime novelist called George V. Higgins. You can taste the echo's of Higgins style in the early Spenser books. Higgens best book was his first "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" that was made into a movie starring Robert Mitchum. There is a lot of that character in Spenser. But he branched out from there.
The problem for Parker was that Spenser has become sort of a superman. He wins every fight and every shoot out. Consider the fact that he mentions he was a Korean War vet in an early story it would make him about seventy years old right now. So some of the exploits he gets into are sort of ridiculous. Atkins tries to blend in some younger characters but the bulk of the story is still Spenser. I don't know how much longer they can pull this off.
Still it is a lot better than most run of the mill hard boiled detective novels.
3 comments:
The Friends of Eddie Coyle" was a hell of a book. I got a book on tape version and listened to it about 10 years ago. The movie is good too.
Higgins is a master at dialogue. I take him as a role model.
Well, Parker eventually stopped mentioning Spenser's Korean War service, probably because of how badly it started dating him. I figure that if Spenser lied about his age and entered the war at the very end in 1953 when he was 15, that still would have made him 72 years old by the time Parker died.
Which would have made the books kind of silly at some point.
Haven't read any of the non-Parker Spensers, though. I just don't have the heart for it.
Might pick up the Eddie Coyle book, though, after reading this post.
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