From where he sits and writes in his Long Island home – in longhand, 10 pages a day – Mike Lupica can see a framed photograph of Robert B. Parker, the prolific author of the Spenser mystery novels. Parker wears a grin on his face and a Pittsburgh Pirates cap on his head. Also easily visible is a photo of the unoccupied desk where Parker wrote book after book, his output as steady as a metronome.
“I don’t know why it gives me inspiration, but it does,” said Lupica.
Parker died at his desk in 2010 at age 77, leaving behind an unfinished Spenser manuscript and 69 novels – five of which would be published posthumously. Spenser, a smart-mouthed private detective in the tradition of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, first appeared a half-century ago in The Godwulf Manuscript. The New York Times dismissed the book as “not notable for originality or ideas” but praised Parker’s writing and the character.
“I’m so old, I can tell you that I picked up The Godwulf Manuscript at an old Brentano’s on Boylston Street when I was in Boston College,” Lupica said, “and I’ve had this man’s voice in my head ever since. I go back and read my Peter Finley mysteries and I can see his influence.”
Parker wrote 40 Spenser novels. His agent completed his unfinished book. Then the Parker estate turned to Ace Atkins to continue the character, which he did for 10 novels. Now Lupica has picked up the pen. His first effort, Broken Trust, has a November publication date.
Lupica previously kept two of Parker’s other characters going – Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone – in their own series of books.
“I did four Sunnys and three Jesses and it was tough giving up Sunny and it was a little tougher giving up Jesse, but they’ll have to pry my pen out of my hand if they try to take Spenser away from me,” he said.
Fifty years on from his debut, Spenser lives. In addition to the novels, the character appeared in 66 episodes of the mid-1980s television series Spenser: For Hire, starring Robert Urich; three made-for-TV movies starring Joe Mantegna; and a poorly received Netflix movie starring Mark Wahlberg.
“That was just a mess,” said Atkins, whose Spenser novel Wonderland served as the basis for the Wahlberg movie. “It got a lot of views on Netflix and came out at the right time because it’s right during the pandemic and people were streaming the hell out of Netflix. What in there is Spenser, I don’t know.”
Critical missteps aside in that one adaptation, Spenser and his circle of supporting characters – longtime love Susan Silverman and close ally Hawk front and center — remain a reader favorite. Parker first appeared on The New York Times’ best-seller list in 1984 with his novel Valediction – the eleventh in the series — and his subsequent books have received the same distinction.
Otto Penzler, the editor, publisher and owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, as well as a longtime friend of Parker’s, includes his friend among the legendary writers of hardboiled private eyes. The list begins with Dashiell Hammet. “And then the baton was passed to Raymond Chandler, who then passed it to Ross Macdonald, who then passed it to Bob Parker Those are the four that I think will endure forever.”
Penzler, editor of In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero, said Parker wrote quickly. He could finish a novel in three months. “He had his character. All he had to do was come up with a story, and he never had any trouble coming up with stories. It was just second nature to him. His publisher didn’t want a Spenser novel every three or four months, so he branched out with other characters. He didn’t want to stop writing, and he couldn’t slow down.”
“Bob’s characters were so great,” said John Wilder, the multi-talented writer, director, and producer who created Spenser: For Hire. “I read all of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald. I was a huge fan of noir fiction, and Bob’s books were the best version of noir fiction that I’d seen in a long time.”
Wilder oversaw the production of the first year of the series, which was filmed in Boston where Parker set his Spenser novels.
“Spenser wasn’t an action series,” he said. “It was about a man’s code of honor and basically that’s what all the noir fiction is about – the guy who walks the streets alone and is true to himself and what he believes is virtuous. I think everybody relates to that. I hope they do.”
Parker’s widow, Joan, served as her husband’s first reader. During a talk at a Massachusetts library a few months before she died in 2013 at 80, she theorized readers of Spenser novels fall into three categories. There are those who care most about the characters. The second group want a good story. “And then others more like myself are looking for the voice. They don’t care about the plot that much. They want to hear the voice.”
Robert Parker’s unexpected death left his widow and two sons with a quandary: what to do with Spenser and his other characters. They asked themselves what Parker would have thought about another writer continuing his work, and decided he probably would not have cared. After all, Parker had himself completed an unfinished Chandler manuscript and then followed that up with a new Philip Marlowe novel. Besides, Parker’s publisher pointed out, the appearance of new books would drive interest in reading the previous novels.
“That really appeal to me to keep his name and the books that he wrote himself in circulation,” said David Parker, the oldest son. “But I think what really changed my mind and made me enthusiastic about it was the appearance of Ace Atkins, who was poised to take over the series and turned out to be a kind of an unofficial Robert B. Parker scholar. He knew and could quote extensively from the books and cite them properly. I’ve read all the books, but I couldn’t keep track of them like that.”
Atkins, a newspaper reporter turned novelist, had published eight novels before his publisher – who was also Parker’s – asked him to submit a 50-page sample of a Spenser story, in the hope of turning the character over to him. Parker’s longtime editor even offered to send him a box of the books so that Atkins could familiarize himself with the world of Spenser. He said not to bother.
“To say that I’m a fan of Bob’s work is an understatement,” said Atkins, a native of Alabama who covered crime for a Florida newspaper and who now lives in Mississippi. “I have been incredibly immersed in ‘Spenser world’ since I was a teenager. When I was chosen by the estate to continue writing it, it was not only a good gig to have, it was also a real honor.”
Atkins owns first editions of every Spenser novel Parker wrote.
“The only book that I didn’t have was The Godwulf Manuscript, because it’s very pricey to get that one,” he said. “A Parker superfan wrote me a very nice letter when I first started doing this. It was very complimentary. They saw what I was doing, how much I love the character and how much I wanted the books to have the same tone and the same feel, and he sent it to me.”
Atkins said he’s read the Spenser novels many times. When he was chosen to keep the character going, he went through and read them all in order again. “I didn’t want anyone to write me a cranky Facebook message and say, ‘This isn’t right’ or ‘Spenser would never carry this kind of gun.’ I wanted to make sure I had all those details right.”
Parker packed his novels with details of Boston. He was born about 80 miles away, in Springfield, and earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in English literature from Boston University. For a time, he taught at Northeastern University. Parker called Cambridge home. In other words, he knew the city well. Atkins did not have that advantage. He made up for that by taking regular trips to Boston to immerse himself in the city, to absorb the rhythms of the language, and to spend time with Parker’s inner circle including Joan and Mel Farman.
Farman, who was Parker’s best friend and once a partner with him in a small advertising agency, had a ritual of eating dinner with the author every Friday for more than two decades. Joan stepped in after her husband’s death, and then Atkins continued it when he was in Boston.
“Usually, I would come up on a Friday night and then I would meet Mel and we’d keep that tradition going,” Atkins said. Farman, who died in 2020 at 84, served as Atkins’ research assistant during visits to Boston and let the author know “Bob never spent this much time researching. You’re probably doing too much.” Atkins replied: “Yeah, but for me to really get it right, I want to do it.”
In first hearing Atkins was considered the likely candidate to write the new Spenser novels, Joan Parker was struck by one coincidence. Robert Parker’s nickname was Ace. Although he was born William Ellis Atkins, Atkins has always gone by Ace. Atkins said he took it as a complement when Joan and Farman said he and Parker had similar personalities.
“We liked the same kind of things. It wasn’t a stretch to get into character,” said Atkins. “I used to play football and I like working out and sports and that kind of thing. And I like beer. I like doughnuts and dogs, and I think we had a very similar worldview. Part of that is very complicated, because I think part of it is I spent my formative years as a teen reading Bob’s books. That kind of shaped my viewpoint into a so very Spenserian kind of viewpoint.”
Atkins, who played football for Auburn University, wrote his first two novels while reporting for the Tampa Tribune. His first four books featured Nick Travers, a former member of the New Orleans Saints turned amateur detective. He never met Parker but did ask him to write a blurb for his debut novel, Crossroad Blues.
“He said he would be glad to. I sent him a manuscript and he was nice enough to blurb it,” Atkins said. The back of that 1998 novel contains these words from Parker: “Crossroad Blues sings and proves that big guys can write, and that Ace Atkins can write better than most.” “The joke I found later, as I got to be friends with Bob’s inner circle, is Bob always said, ‘I will either read a book or I will blurb it, but I won’t do both.’”
Penzler said he was surprised a southerner was given the task of writing the Spenser novels, but pleased at the job Atkins did. “I read the first book to see if this was going to be okay, and it was more than okay. It was really a terrific, terrific job.”
Lupica likewise offered praise for Atkins. “He got it. He immersed himself in that world, that city, those characters. I thought Ace graded out really, really high. He doesn’t need me to tell him that, but as someone who was that kind of fan for as long as I was a fan, I was going to be a tough marker, but I thought Ace was great.”
Atkins said he would have liked to have made one change to Spenser, and that is to take the character back to the 1970s or ‘80s. The estate, however, wanted to keep Spenser contemporary. Parker had already stopped aging the character. “Spenser was almost 80 years old and he’s still bench-pressing 400 pounds and he’s still fighting with people, and so he decided to de-age Spenser,” Atkins said.
Like his character, Parker served in the U.S. Army Infantry in Korea.
“A tricky thing is how old Spenser is,” said David Parker. “If he has the same memories as Dad had, he would be 90. … We don’t know how old he is anymore.” The character appears now to be perpetually middle-aged.
Lupica has already made his mark on Spenser by moving the character’s apartment. Spenser’s apartment burned down in Atkins’ Slow Burn, and the subsequent novel Little White Lies relocated him to the Charlestown Navy Yard.
“Once I found out that I was going to do Spenser, he was going to move back to Back Bay,” Lupica said. “I made sure to take care of that in chapter one. I wanted him in the old neighborhood, back to being able to walk to work.”
Spenser takes great pride at the beginning of Broken Trust in letting everyone know he’s returned to the Back Bay.
Lupica, who was once famously name-checked on Seinfeld as George Costanza’s favorite writer, wrote his first mystery in 1986. Dead Air introduced Peter Finley, a television reporter in New York. Many, many books later, Lupica was driving from Connecticut to Vermont and listening to a book-on-tape of a novel featuring another Parker character, the Boston P.I. Sunny Randall. Beginning in 1999, Parker wrote six books about Randall. Lupica began wondering: Atkins had taken over the Spenser novels, and someone else was writing about Parker’s small-town police chief, Jesse Stone, but would anyone continue with Randall? He called his literary agent to ask. She responded with an invitation to write a sample chapter.
“I wasn’t looking for something more to do,” he said. “I’m busy enough.” Even so, he woke up the next morning and wrote what would become the first chapter of Blood Feud, which was published in 2018. “And just like that, I was in Robert B.’s world, and Sunny begat Jesse.”
Including a series of Westerns, Parker wrote four series at the same time. Lupica had enough to just keep Randall and Stone going. “Sometimes you felt like you were wrestling a bear to the ground, but the characters made it all worthwhile,” he said. “From the time I started writing Sunny, I just felt completely comfortable in his world, in his attitude. It’s why it’s been so much big fun for me.”
Lupica enjoyed a 25-year friendship with Parker. The humor that ran through the Spenser novels was evident in their conversations. “He was just so damn funny, and he was funny in person, and he was funny on the page. Not everybody does those two things well.” The two were once staying at the same hotel in Georgetown, where they were both on book tours, and planning to have dinner that night. Parker asked Lupica, whom he called Mikey, to make a reservation for 8:15.
“I said, ‘Well, Bob, how do you know you’re not still signing at that time?’ He said, ‘Mikey, let me explain something to you. When it gets to be eight o’clock, if I’m writing Robert B., before I even get to Parker I get up and go to dinner.’”
Lupica offered a theory why Spenser has lasted so long. The characters, the humor, the back-and-forth interplay between Spenser and Hawk are part of the reason. “I think it was Raymond Chandler who said when things slow down, you have somebody come to the door with a gun. We all know how to do that. But Bob’s dialogue and Bob’s sense of humor and on top of all that his literate approach to all of this is what has made it work for half a century.”
Parker’s legacy is rooted in the characters he created. He lived long enough to see his books on the best-seller lists. Unfortunately, his death meant he never had the chance to meet his grandson. His name? Spenser, of course.
