Crime Beat

In her first Thriller Talk column for 2010, Jassy Mackenzie – who is a finalist on the International Thriller Writers annual awards list in the Best Paperback category – pays tribute to the death of a master crime novelist, Robert B Parker.

Death of an Icon

Bestselling thriller writer Robert B Parker has died, aged 77. He was the creator of the legendary private eye Spenser, as well as the alcoholic small-town police chief Jesse Stone, and the sassy fashion-conscious detective Sunny Randall. Parker suffered a fatal heart attack on the morning of Monday 18 January, while at his writing desk.

Parker’s hard-boiled characters, his incisive humour, and his spare and elegant writing style inspired generations of thriller authors. Harlan Coben, in an interview with The Atlantic Monthly in 2007, said of Parker, “When it comes to detective novels, 90 percent of us admit he’s an influence, and the rest of us lie about it.”

It would be difficult to find a more prolific writer. Parker wrote his first book – a Spenser mystery – when he was almost forty years old. Since then he has had more than sixty novels published as well as four non-fiction books, and according to his agent, he has another Jesse Stone novel and another Western ready for release later this year, as well as a couple more books in the pipeline.

Parker would write five to ten pages a day, and preferred not to plan, often not knowing how the mystery would resolve itself until he was near the end. In a 2005 interview, Parker said, “I don’t rewrite, I don’t write a second draft.” Instead, he would pass the manuscript to his wife Joan to read, and would then submit it to his agent, Helen Brann. Oh, lucky, lucky Parker!

But how can one be jealous of a man who was, by all accounts, truly one of the good guys? When he wasn’t busy writing or raising money for charitable events, Parker could often be spotted dining out at restaurants with his wife Joan in their home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just as Parker based the “gentle knight” Spenser on himself, so he based Spenser’s sexy, perceptive love interest Susan Silverman on his beloved wife Joan.

When a writer dies, their characters die with them, or at least stop living. Spenser, Susan Silverman, Hawk, Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall are people I’ve become very fond of, and I have followed their lives, loves, conflicts and challenges with fascination over the years.

What would have happened in their next books? Sadly, that’s a mystery that nobody now will ever know.

Jassy Mackenzie is the author of My Brother’s Keeper and Random Harvest.