Robert B. Parker has always been a junior version of Raymond Chandler. He’s not alone in that, of course, but he’s been more successful at it than most. After chronicling the cases of his Boston P.I. Spenser, he took a break to introduce Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Mass., in 1997′s NIGHT PASSAGE.
Now we get the sixth Stone novel, HIGH PROFILE, in which a Libertarian radio/TV talk show host and newspaper columnist is found hanging from a tree. He’d been shot a few days before he was strung up. Nasty. The same day, the corpse’s new girlfriend is found dead in a dumpster behind Jesse’s favorite diner. She, too, had been left somewhere to ripen before being disposed of in this semi-public manner. Also nasty.
A handful of suspects are introduced, but only a couple of them are made to look suspicious so you know either that one of them will turn out to be the killer or Parker is trying to pull a fast one by introducing someone or something late in the story. He takes the easier course, which is what’s wrong with so much of his latest work.
The guy’s published more than 50 novels now and maybe 10 percent of them haven’t been mysteries. My guess is either he’s running out of gas or he just wishes his readers would let him do something else.
It contains serious stuff, like Stone’s relationship with his ex-wife, Jenn – they know they’re not good for each other, but they’re still sort of in love – and his maybe budding romance with P.I. Sunny Randall (another Parker franchise character) – who is still sort of in love with her ex – and Stone’s drinking problem. And maybe Jenn was raped, but maybe she’s exaggerating or making it all up just to get draw Jesse back into her net. Negative attention is better than no attention at all.
Okay, even I’ve been known to read real grown-up novels concerned with mature problems, but when stuff like that comes in the form of detective stories, I still expect the detecting to come first. Parker can’t seem to be bothered with the basic elements of this kind of tale anymore.
His strength is his dialogue. It’s clever, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but I wonder why it should be. Charndler’s Marlowe was always quick with a wisecrack, but usually when he needed to buy a second or two, or when he wanted it thought he needn’t be taken seriously.
Stone is funny just for the sake of being funny. So is everyone on the Paradise PD. Their senses of humor are identical. Without the “he said” and “she said,” it would be impossible to tell who was speaking. And each relates to the others in the same ways. I grew really tired of Spenser’s sociopathic pal Hawke, but at least he and Spenser could be differentiated from each other.
So HIGH PROFILE turns out to be pretty much like many mysteries that have morphed into “crime novels.” It’s an entertaining read because of its humor, but totally unmemorable as either a mystery or a novel. –Doug Bentin
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Parker’s been pretty much just going through the motions for more than 20 years, yet I still find most of his books quite readable. “High Profile” isn’t one of the better examples of even his recent stuff, but it’s not bad. And the first dozen or so Spenser novels (after “A Catskill Eagle they started going downhill badly) remain absolutely essential reading for anyone remotely interested in the contemporary private eye novel. Anyone who has read Parker’s later stuff but not those early classics is missing a real treat.
I agree with Mike.
After I discovered Parker’s Spenser series in the early ’80s, there was no bigger fan of the author or his work for a solid decade. I devoured everything he published.
But, right around the mid ’90s he just seemed to “lose it” abit. One Spenser novel became pretty much indistiquishable from the next & I just stopped reading them. Which was sad, because it was like growing apart & losing touch with a longtime friend or family member. But, I just couldn’t get into all the long, smarmy, repetetive passages about how long it took Spenser’s girlfriend Susan to eat something or how much they adored their dog …
Charecter insights that used to add to the series & make the books more enjoyable were now boring, eye rolling momentum killers that brought the novels to a screaching halt. Which finally led me to give up on the series altogether.
I was fairly excited when Parker decided to create a new protagonsit for a new series of novels in Jesse Stone, figuring that a fresh start would be good for the author & his story telling. And, the first two or three were marked improvements over the last couple-few Spenser novels that I’d read. But, then, unfortunately, Parker began to fall into the same traps with the Stone series that he had with the Spenser series & the series got really dull, really fast. With Stone’s relationship with his flighty ex becoming just as much of an irritating eye roller as Spenser’s domestic sitch with Susan Silverman & their dog …
I haven’t completely thrown in the towell on Jesse Stone yet, but then again, I’m not exactly waiting with baited breath for the latest installment in the series either.
Yeah, I really love the first raft of Spenser books–the transformation of the character was wonderful. I still pick up every new Spenser book, but they don’t have nearly the depth of the early stuff. I also have one Parker book, LOVE AND GLORY that stands tall on my bookshelf; it’s basically the story of a man falling as far as he possibly can into life’s depths, then pulling himself up through sheer force of will. I don’t even know if it’s available anymore.