While there is an early mention of McGee not participating in the Cuban invasion, there is a later quote, “dressed me up in a green suit and sent me to fight in Asia” which would cover a lot of time.
I got tired of Spenser when Parker took his marital problems into his novels with a similar situation with Spenser and Susan. I believe he lost it at that point.
Died of a cocaine overdose.
Early Travis was in Korea, later Travis was unclear in which Asian war that might have been, leaving it to the reader to do the math and figure it out according to their own lights.
Thanks, Kropotkin.
Seriously?
No, I just don’t like the character.
I’m thinking of picking these up. I very much enjoyed the Amazon Prime Reacher TV series. (I avoided the Tom Cruise films, not necessarily on purpose, but at this point I don’t think I want to watch them.)
“Catskill Eagle” right?
Another book series with an odd take on time is Gregory McDonald’s Flynn series. Most of them take place in the late 1970s/early 1980s- but the last one takes place in the late 1990s, with none of the characters (including the children) having aged a bit.
It’s hard to like a professional enforcer, a leg breaker.
But Avery Brooks made the character sing*! He gave him such style. In the films, Sheik Mahmud-Bey was horrible. He didn’t “get” the character. Ernie Hudson was OK, but not really menacing enough. Brooks had the right balance between personal code of honor and professional violence. You could imagine he only broke the legs of those that truly deserved it. 
*not literally!
Brooks was great in Deep Space Nine, but I couldn’t go for his Hawk role. Perhaps I dislike the character too much.
Odd. Hawk’s my favorite character in the Spenser books. I’d read an entire volume devoted to him alone. In fact if you could leave Susan out of it entirely, and Spenser sidelined, I’d run out to buy a copy.
Leaving Susan out is an excellent idea.
Spenser served in Korea. That establishs his birth to at least 1937. Maybe 1936.
I rationalized that Spenser had several big cases every year. 15 books may have only represented 7 years.
That means we weren’t in present day. The stories were in the past.
Spenser did age in the books. There are references to him slowing down. Fights with younger men were more difficult.
Remember the book where Spenser gets shot multiple times by a contract killer? There’s a long rehab with Hawk helping him. Spenser never seemed quite the same in the later books. He wasn’t as strong or such a bad ass.
It never seemed to me to be such a problem because Parker could have always written them as “cases from Spenser’s past,” and just made them into period pieces, but he chose not to take that solution.
I would have rather than he had the elderly Spenser getting the shit kicked out of him, eventually by old ladies, and killed off various characters, particularly Susan, with Spenser helpless to avenge their deaths, eventually adjusting to his lack of physical wherewithal.
I read the books to escape reality, not be reminded of it!