“Robert B Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me,” by Ace Atkins G P Putnam’s Sons, copyright 2020 306 pp

Robert B Parker was the leader of American mystery/detective fiction writing for a generation or more. Born in 1932, he began to publish in the 1970’s and he died in January, 2010. There were competitors, but none of them really came close as far as I know. He was widely regarded as the most legitimate heir of the great Raymond Chandler, author of the Philip Marlowe novels of the ’30s to the ’50’s and indeed he finished “Poodle Springs,” after the death of the founder of the genre.

Chandler’s genre, which Parker changed a bit and expanded some, but never betrayed was that of the hard boiled detective. He told the story first person and the reader presumably got to follow his thoughts and feelings as he worked his way through a case. He was ambivalent about relations with women, liking the women but hating the strings attached that went along with the relationship. He had a few friends, but not many and then often they served a professional purpose. And he had his own way of talking, often using clipped, quickly worded and not extravagant metaphors to get across his meaning.

The hard-boiled detective did not look for trouble but when he encountered it he know what to do. He was tough and resilient and could handle the baddies with his fists or, occasionally, with a pistol. He was introspective and considered the world pretty much of a mess. This was his world, however, and he did not consider it a raw deal necessarily for him or for most. It was just the way things were.

This description mostly is about Marlow and his innumerable imitated versions, most of them not too good, but at least one, Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade, reaching for the same height. Phillip and Sam were both from California which may or may not be important.

Parker’s very great contribution did change some things quite a lot, yet it kept most of the rules the earlier books had largely established. He wrote an immense number of books, pushing one hundred, I think, but is best known for the stories about Spenser, a Boston Private Eye. Spenser is a traditional tough guy PI with some changes,. Like Marlowe he is courageous and physically tough. He was once, briefly, a professional boxer and he was also a cop before the frustrations of cop rules drove him into private detecting.

Spenser has a large number of firearms in his collection and he is expert at using them all. But he is big and tough enough he can often handle bad guys with his fists. In many ways he is like Marlow and the influence of the earlier writer upon the later one is both obvious and admirable. But Spenser has some additional tidbits about him.

Unlike Marlow, who pretty much went from one woman to another,(but not a lot of them)Spenser is in a committed relationship with Dr Susan Silverman, a practicing psychologist and a Harvard Ph.D. Susan is sexy, brilliant, witty, insightful and independent. She met Spenser early in his career and they have shared their lives for several decades. But they keep separate apartments so don’t “live together” though they are obviously close to it. In many ways they function as a married couple, but not quite.

Both Susan and Spenser love dogs, both are gourmet cooks and based on Parker’s descriptions and I think meeting them at party or about anywhere would be quite intimidating. You would be meeting beauty, charm, brilliance, physical power, quick wit and towering intellect all rolled into one–well, OK, two. Spenser is surely the most intellectual of all the fictional private eyes. He likes to point out that his name is spelled like the English poet, though he never explained why he, an Irish American, had that English name, just as he never. for some reason told us what his first name was. He knows poetry, literature, art and some music and history.

He once confused a bad guy who asked what he was doing there. He said, “We’re studying the earlier works of Increase Mather.” Huh? Sam Spade never would have said that–or understood it. So Spenser is a great intellect as well as being physically strong, courageous, tender, at least with Susan and dogs, and and all round good man to have on your side.

When established mystery guy Ace Atkins took over the books(as requested by Parker’s family) not much changed. He caught Parker’s addictive, what-happens-next pacing almost perfectly and he didn’t miss by much on Spenser himself, or the minor characters, such as Quirk, a cop and former colleague and sort of friend. The only two people close to Spenser are Susan and Hawk, and if there’s anyplace Atkins doesn’t quite measure up to the master, it’s with them, though he does pretty well there too. Susan, I have already described. It does seem to me that Spenser’s relationship with this lovely, accomplished and strong woman is not quite as compelling as told by Atkins. This is particularly true in “Someone,” I think, but part of this is that she’s in the story less often than usual. Still, she comes through pretty loud and clear.

Hawk is one of the great creations of American pop lit. He is a black man a little young than I think Spenser is, but about the same age(be patient a minute here and I’ll comment a bit further on age) . He is a tough guy who also knows how to use his fists and weapons. He is at least as deadly as Spenser is and less inclined than Spenser to be restrained by moral compunctions.

What he did in the past is left somewhat vague, but for years he has been a professional tough man, who works out at the gym several times a week, keeps himself in shape for fighting or loving, and enthralls(usually only briefly) attractive and adventurous women. He works with Spenser when needed and is loyal and dependable. What he does for money other than be sometime partner to our hero is not entirely clear, but he obviously does well. Like Spenser he is a closet intellectual, though one hidden very deep in the closet. He does come up with startlingly intelligent remarks now and then.

The relationship of the two men in this book is also not quite like in the old Parker days, but seems closer than the one with Susan. Neither of them is developed here quite as fully as in Parker’s case, but it’s not really a serious flaw, just a slight decline from near perfection

Regarding age, by the way, for the first decade and a half or so, Spenser clearly identified himself as a Korean War veteran. That would have made him at least pushing 60 by sometime in the 1980’s and somewhere along the line Spenser’s past just dropped out of the stories. For a long time mystery writer there’s really no way other way to handle this. Note that Hercule Poirot was a retired detective in “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,(1920)This would have made him around 115 by the end of the series, but Agatha just kept him going along without comment and for her and the readers I’d say that was the right thing to do.. Eventually such characters exist in an admittedly imaginary but someone very real and poignant world understood by writer and reader if no one else.

I have read perhaps half of the Atkins’s Spencer novels and this is one of the later ones. Atkins has now returned to his own characters and stories. I think this book is actually better than a couple of the others, He keeps the story moving in the usual way and this is partly done by introducing a new character. This is Mattie Sullivan, who as a teenager a few years ago was helped and supported by Spenser through a very difficult time. She is now grown up and determined to be a PI herself. She works as a sort of combination gopher and investigative assistant to Spenser and is at least as dedicated(but less funny)than he is.

The story, which is turning out to be the lesser part of this article, is of another teenage girl. This one tells Mattie she was assaulted in a private club by a revoltingly decadent man and describes him and his practices in details that would possibly shock a Trump rally. The girl, Chloe, fled the situation but left her laptop and backpack behind and now needs them back to protect her privacy and to prevent possible personal disasters.

So this leads to Mattie and Spenser taking on the case, with Susan providing comfort and her usual psychoanalytic insights and Hawk bringing along the weapons and muscle. The other characters include a number of girls who have had similar experiences with the same man or his disgusting friends, “creepy old men,” as I remember one charter describing them.

This leads our friends from place to place and situation to situation around Boston. But the icky man at the top, Peter Steiner, is elusive. He is protected by a huge fortune and a lot of powerful friends, deeply connected in business, politics and law. It is difficult to touch him.

Steiner, however, owns his own island in the Bahamas and the chase to nail him, stop his depredations and bring him to justice leads Spenser and Hawk there eventually. After a careful and complicated approach they get on the island and into a position to free a lot of innocent girls and get their oppressor out of circulation. How this happens with what results I will not, of course reveal, but these are the basic facts you’ll be working with if you read this book. I recommend that you read it. It’ll keep your mind off elections and things of that sort. Anyway, it’s worth the time.

I should not stop here, not without adding that while the Spenser stories are what Parker is best know for he wrote a lot of other books. The best know of these would likely be the Jesse Stone novels. I tried one once and didn’t finish it, not because it wasn’t a good book but, hey, it just wasn’t right for the author(or the reader, I guess). He also began, late in his career, a series of novels about Sunny Randall, a female Boston PI. She lives in the same real and literary world as Spenser. She occasionally deals with one of the old colleagues of Spenser with the police and her psychoanalyst is Susan Silverman. These are basically stories asking you to imagine a female Spenser. The idea works.

Ace Atkins has been replaced by another top American mystery writer, Mike Lupica, who is apparently going to do both Sunny and Spenser books. I read a Lupica Sunny Randall novel recently and enjoyed it. If you have never read any of these people, I commend both Atkins and Lupica to your attention. But nobody beats Spenser–or Parker.