The 1970s detective would not be an American pacifist ready to burn his draft card down on Main Street, nor would he be a Lieutenant Calley, murdering civilians and singing his own battle hymn. Detectives of this era attempted at once to recreate and to atone for a manliness of the past in order to situate themselves in the strange new present. [Robert B.] Parker’s introduction of Spenser became the main event in 1970s hard-boiled literature. Parker had a PhD in English and wrote his dissertation at Boston University on Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. He later took the hard-boiled step of denouncing his own academic endeavor, noting that he had written the dissertation in two weeks and that that was “about what it’s worth.” He did, however, say—in more than one interview—that he had started out wanting to recreate Philip Marlowe and took from Chandler the idea of an English Renaissance name. The name he chose for his own detective was that of a poet who chronicled the heroic acts of medieval knights, even if these were rather thin on the ground in the American 1970s.
Spenser was raised by his father and brothers after his mother died in childbirth. He is a former boxer, Massachusetts state trooper, and serviceman in the Korean War, making him at least forty years old in the first of Parker’s novels. His “former” identities borrow from previous American grandeur and nod to its fadedness. Spenser has a sardonic nostalgia, but rather than being a self-aggrandizing or bitter has-been, he thrives in the cultural weeds of the early 1970s. He is kind to others, ready to protect the weak, and is indestructible. Spenser is also clever and poetic, fond of quoting Wallace Stevens. He is even a gourmet cook, though he notes that if he were a woman, no one would call him a gourmet; they would just call him a housewife. One critic remarked that Parker had essentially created a hard-boiled superhero, noting Spenser’s bulletproof build and moral toughness. But despite some improbably impressive fighting skills, he also deals with the human concerns of how to be a responsible individual, a male adult, and an instrument of justice in a time of widespread disillusion.
The Godwulf Manuscript is set at a university, complete with left-wing students, drugs on campus, and a cast of pompous establishment characters. Rendering the generational chasm that had developed in the 1960s, it makes clear that the 1970s hard-boiled would operate in the middle of modern culture wars. But the social landscape of the 1970s was a challenge for the sort of individualism that Philip Marlowe demonstrated. For one thing, being moral in the 1970s meant being socially conscious. It meant being aware of the problems of others, not just of individuals but of groups. But being socially conscious sometimes meant spouting the well-worn lines of existing social justice movements, which diluted maverick individualism. How was the hard-boiled to have an ethics of his own that eschewed conventional wisdom and at the same time stand on the right side of history?
When asked in an interview about the crucial ingredients of a good crime novel, Parker said that “the most important ingredient in any novel is Character, Character and Character.” Raymond Chandler had described the ideal hero in 1945: “He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” Being a man of honor in the aftermath of the 1960s meant living by the principles of social justice movements of the period without seeming even to be aware that the movements existed. It also meant supporting other characters who operated in the same way. And it meant supporting—not as group members but as individuals—the people whose liberties the civil rights and women’s movements would make possible. Yet it also meant striding around with the same entitlements that white men had long enjoyed.
In Godwulf, a student member of the anticapitalist committee tells Spenser not to laugh at the group, saying that they are “perfectly serious and perfectly right.” Spenser answers that so is everyone else he knows. In a world that revolves around ideologies and declarations of righteousness, Spenser is glad to meet people who don’t take themselves too seriously. The cast of supporting characters is populated by friends of different genders and colors who operate on principle without saying so, who are more about the walk than the talk. This is part of the hard-boiled principle of understatement; other people’s pain is to be taken seriously, but one’s own is not. But it is also a signal that the hard-boiled is beginning to change his parameters.
One of the more sympathetic characters in Godwulf is Iris Milford, a worker at the school newspaper who, when Spenser asks her if she’s ever taken LSD, responds that she is “fat, black, widowed, pushing thirty, and got four kids,” adding that she “don’t need no additional problems.” But that is all she says about her own situation; the rest of her role in the novel is as detector and informant with strong observational skills. Spenser, too, spends time noticing people, particularly those who could be invisible to the rest of the world. For instance, when he sees a Puerto Rican kid mopping the floor of a coffee shop at 6:40 a.m., he remarks that the kid must have gotten up very early to come in and mop the floor, and wondered how late he would stay that night.
A good deal of what passes for hard-boiled authority is noticing what is missing. The detective sees that the world is not what it should be, or what it once was, but he is clear-eyed enough to doubt that the panacea ever existed. As it happened, the 1970s were a time of considerable nostalgia—for a more exalted American identity, for a simpler time, for more economic prosperity, for politicians who operate on some sense of principle. The 1950s are the decade most cherished in 1970s nostalgia, but so, too—ironically—are the 1930s. As William Stott put it, the 1930s were an era of “national bankruptcy but civic peace.” The problem was that a good deal of the “civic peace” that people mourned was what countless others had fought to escape. Just as the 2016 resurrection of Reagan’s 1980 “Make America Great Again” was a transparent call to reassert white male dominance, much wistfulness for the 1950s and 1930s was reactionary. Reruns of 1950s sitcoms were popular in the 1970s (as were sitcoms set in the 1950s), and although these recalled “more stable and simpler times,” they also showed most women as placid housewives and featured almost no characters who were not white. Spenser seems to get this. When he is tired of the chaos at the university, he muses that he wants to get in his car and drive north: “In my mind I could see the route . . . where there’s a kind of mellowness and a memory of another time and another America. Probably never was another America though.” Another time, he encounters “a miasma of profanity and smoke and sweatiness under heavy winter coats” and wonders, “Ah, where are the white bucks of yesteryear?”
He has no actual fondness for reactionary well-to-do college students, of course. This is a way to mock the unwashed hippies of the present day and the super-clean 1950s model students that populated sitcom reruns. In other words, it’s a way to distance himself from the present day and from nostalgia itself. The fact was that none of the past decades would come back. If you missed the days when white men owned the world’s rights and responsibilities, then you were fated to be a punchline in a Robert Parker novel, not to be a hard-boiled detective. If you missed being part of a community, you could create one and be of service to those around you. As national franchises eclipsed small businesses, Americans became nostalgic for local attachments. It might have been convenient to buy your aspirin at Walgreen’s, have your hair cut at Fantastic Sam’s, and get your jeans at the Gap no matter where in the country you were, but it was ultimately a generic experience. Having a private detective around made the world seem small again. And what is more, it made law enforcement seem homespun.
One important element of 1950s and 1930s life that was missing in the 1970s was a solid model of adulthood. In the earlier days of the hard-boiled, Chandler had echoed Roosevelt, who had famously stated that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” But the political and paternal model of the 1970s is Richard Nixon, who serves as a model less for heroic service than for rather spectacular weaseliness.
The early 1970s, it would seem, are full of pale white guys not sure how to be an adult. Lying on television is not the way to do it, but neither is paying lip service to social justice.
In Godwulf, the investigation ends up on the English professor Hayden, whom Iris describes as “one of those little pale guys with long, limp blond hair that looks like he hasn’t started to shave yet, but he’s like thirty-nine.” The early 1970s, it would seem, are full of pale white guys not sure how to be an adult. Lying on television is not the way to do it, but neither is paying lip service to social justice. As Professor Hayden is being questioned—and solemnly declaring that he will die without incriminating himself—Spenser muses that in a minute he’d start addressing Spenser as “my fellow Americans.” But Hayden is no JFK. The man who fancies that he holds the keys to the kingdom, who trades on social justice but pursues individual glory, is a particular 1970s brand of abomination. Cornered by Spenser at the end of the novel, Professor Hayden cowers in the bathtub, having wet himself.
The early 1970s were a heady time for civil rights and feminism. Spenser dives right in. Or rather, he dives in and stays in the boat at the same time. When it comes to women and people of color, he alternates between woke compassion and white self-satisfaction. In Promised Land (1976), he reprimands a character who calls Hawk a “nigger” and, at the end of the novel, warns Hawk that police are coming, preventing his arrest. But Spenser’s respect for Hawk ends up making Spenser, not Hawk, seem more complex and human. He anticipates numerous American stories that describe interracial friendships but still manage to be all about the white person. And Hawk remains comparatively unidimensional. When it comes to balancing civil rights with white entitlement, Spenser tends to have his cake and eat it too.
When it came to the relationship between blacks and whites, it was easy to see how paternalism was code for control and condescension. It would have been socially unacceptable—for a self-proclaimed honorable man in Boston in 1973—to lament the advances of the civil rights movement. The hard-boiled way to deal with civil rights was to act like it was a given, even when you simultaneously treated people of color as inscrutable accessories. But the women’s movement was another story.
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Robert Parker sent Spenser into the middle of some fraught conversations about feminism. Not only did plots center on bad mothers (God Save the Child [1974]), prostitutes made good (Mortal Stakes [1975]), and murderous feminists (Promised Land), but Spenser was in a long-term relationship with a divorced school psychologist, Susan Silverman, with whom he did a lot of communicating. Early on in Promised Land, a man hires Spenser to find his wife. Spenser comments that runaway wives have read two issues of Ms. magazine and seen Marlo Thomas on television and decided they can’t go on. Susan takes him to task for his contemptuous air and proposes she knows better than he does what the woman might be going through. She accuses Spenser of assuming the missing wife ran away for “a feminist reason,” and Spenser admits that he should not have made that assumption.
Betty Friedan’s 1964 The Feminine Mystique is often cited as the start of the women’s movement because it broke the silence surrounding women’s supposed contentment with their place in the world. Despite the existence of the National Organization for Women, however, women did not—and do not—band together as a “network” as other disadvantaged groups did. Many of women’s battles took place in private conversations—with a husband she needed to tell to do his share of the household chores or with a boss she needed to ask several times for a raise (if he would even consider it). Men had to learn that the rights and responsibilities of American women occupied the same air as theirs. Real women talked as much as men, thought as much as men, and wanted as much as men. For a man to decide unilaterally what women wanted and needed was as untenable as the “separate but equal” laws of the pre-civil rights era. Feminism could conceivably, however, create a challenge for a hard-boiled man, whose contact with women was usually about outsmarting a villain, saving a victim, or finding an admirer.
Robert Parker introduced Susan Silverman in the second Spenser novel, and a lot of her conversations with Spenser focused on each person’s need for freedom and desire for a reliable companion. Because Parker wrote dozens of Spenser novels, there were a lot of these conversations, and because Susan was a psychologist, these conversations tended to sound like those from 1970s encounter groups. Each person listened to the other, and each person’s emotions were validated in warm and witty repartee. Readers, though, as evidenced in letters to the author and in blog posts that continued long after Parker’s death, did not necessarily want to see these conversations. They flat out didn’t want to see Susan. Spenser could coexist with Hawk, a laconic soldier of fortune, but many Parker fans called Susan “insufferable” and “unbearable” and wished she would vanish so that Spenser could take care of business, get the upper hand, thwart conspiracies, and bust heads.
To a large extent, the history of the American hard-boiled detective is the history of obstacles, both subtle and not-so-subtle, to the American women’s movement.
The fact that Spenser is willing to have his conversations with Susan is a testament to the fact that the hard-boiled lives in the real world, complete with emotional attachments and changing social mores. Parker’s insistence on putting the relationship front and center may have been an echo of his own marriage. But the fact that Parker readers disapproved, sometimes vehemently, of Susan also suggests that the hard-boiled was a refuge for male traditionalism, a place where men could maintain their economic, political, and social dominance. It wasn’t easy for a hard-boiled detective to be a wholehearted friend of the women’s movement. To a large extent, the history of the American hard-boiled detective is the history of obstacles, both subtle and not-so-subtle, to the American women’s movement.
The fact that men lived in intimate relationships with women did not necessarily make them embrace the women’s movement. In every novel, Spenser mocks some incarnation of the liberated woman. Sometimes it is the free spirit who ignores her children and wants to cultivate her artistic temperament. Sometimes it is the woman who talks about herself, drinks too much, and flirts inappropriately at parties. Sometimes it is the women who are physically unattractive. But it is always something. In many ways, there was no arena for women to just be, no action or opinion or image that did not provoke a vigorous male reaction. Sometimes the reaction was admiring, sometimes contemptuous, but it was always there, and it was always loud. It took up more space than the female action that inspired it. Moreover, women’s claim to the same rights and responsibilities as men tended to get presented as aggressive rather than as instinctive or natural. A man advocating for the right to liberty, freedom, and equal opportunity seemed heroic and inspiring. But a woman in pursuit of the same principles came across as strident and self-absorbed. As Susan herself says when discussing the woman in Promised Land who had left her husband: “You assumed a feminist reason.” If you were a feminist, you were overly focused on your own experience. You were selfish, not an individualist—a complainer, an encounter group gone wrong. And that was something that the free-spirited male detective could criticize you for.
Second-wave feminism raised serious social justice issues, but popular culture images of women showed them insisting on looking good and having fun. Consider the iconic ad for 1973 Charlie perfume (“kinda young, kinda now, kinda free, kinda wow!”). Shelley Hack, clad in an elegant pantsuit, pulls up in an expensive car and heads into a restaurant to meet her date. (In that same year, in stark contrast, Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, draws a murderous picture of a young woman who doesn’t get what she wants.) Television and print advertisements presented women as practical but sublime, hardworking but ethereal. It was an incoherent and impossible compendium of qualities. By the mid-1970s, nearly half of America’s women were working outside the home, but “Wondra lotion [would take] the day’s work right out of your hands.” Commercials for White Owl cigars showed women draped on the shoulders of their husbands, smiling as the men blew smoke in their faces. An ad for Beautymist pantyhose showed Joe Namath wearing stockings, laughing, and saying that he didn’t wear pantyhose but that if Beautymist could make his legs look good, imagine what they could do for yours! He is rewarded with an adoring kiss from a female model, who presumably would continue wearing pantyhose even though they were undoubtedly just as uncomfortable for her as they were for Joe Namath, who would never think of putting them on again.
You had only to look at the ads and television shows of the period to know that the 1950s conventions were still alive and well—and relentless for women in America. And you could also see that the joke was on women—that women were expected to take care of their appearance rather than their own best interests and to laugh at the time spent doing so. Popular culture’s insistence on showcasing fun-loving women was no accident. From the start, humorlessness was held against the women’s movement in ways that it never had been against the civil rights movement.
When Spenser first meets the professor’s wife in Godwulf, he describes her as a “big, hatchet-faced woman” wearing “Gloria Steinem glasses.” Mrs. Hayden is clad in brown corduroy pants, leather sandals, and a gray sweatshirt, articles of clothing that no previous hard-boiled author would even have acknowledged as existing. This woman body-blocks a hitman and dies protecting her cheating husband, but what sticks with the reader is that she is “as lean and as hard as a canoe paddle, and nearly as sexy” (an echo of Raymond Chandler). A woman who isn’t good-looking is an easy mark, not just for men who mistreat them but for writers who saw women as ridiculous. Spenser introduces Susan Silverman by saying that she wasn’t beautiful but that “there was a tangibility about her, a physical reality, that made the secretary with the lime-green bosom seem insubstantial.” As the novels continue, he does admire her looks, as well as those of other women. Spenser’s entire conduct is a testament to male ambivalence about women. On the one hand, he could accept a woman as complete and three-dimensional as he was. On the other hand, he populated his hard-boiled landscape with countless women who were humorless, unattractive, or vacuous. These cardboard cutouts—and their ripeness for one-line ridicule—were as important to Spenser’s power as his muscles and his gun.
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