Having just reread A Catskill Eagle (my introduction to Robert B. Parker, by the way), the slight oddity of the Hawk-Susan friendship struck me. Thus this thread. So I ask you, ladies and gentls: could you be friends with Hawk?
On the plus side, he’s handsome, articulate, funny, reasonably well-off, has good taste in wine and cheese, and is unfailingly loyal. Breaking up with his best friend won’t matter; once you and he are friends, you’re friends forever, and if you’re being held sort-of-captive by some trust fund baby with a private army, he’ll kill the entire state of California if that’s what it takes to set you free.
On the minus side…well, he’s willing to kill the entire state of California if that’s what it takes to get what he wants. Okay, that was probably hyperbole on his part, but the fact is he’s a stone killer. Admittedly almost everybody he kills in the books deserves killing, but that’s not quite the point, is it?
Well, I am friends with several people, who may not have killed the equivalent of the population of California, but still ran up an impressive number of kills. Not really seeing any problem with also befriending this Hawk person.
Oh, I agree that Susan & Hawk’s friendship (which is not only independent of Spenser by the later books, but probaby stronger in some ways than the Spenser-Hawk friendship) is believable. Susan likes dangerous men, of course; she’s said so explicitly. The fact that Spenser is capable of cold-blooded murder is part of the reason she’s with him, though she’d have difficulity admitting that. If she’d met Hawk first, she might have ended up with him. (She’s also said, jokingly but sincerely, that Hawk is better looking than the gumshoe in question.)
Oak, I’m assuming your friends who’ve killed people are from the service. Yes? Because there’s a difference between being a sniper, say, and being a hitman. Admittedly Hawk never seems to take on “civilians.”
They due allude to him doing jobs for different gangsters in some of the books. The killings you read about are usually justified but they are also usually pro bono. Man’s got to make a living. I voted yes but I guess it would be like being friend with a Mob family.
Series-Hawk is similar but not identical to book-Hawk. He and Spenser aren’t as good friends, for one thing; there’s a third-season episode in which the two get into a huge fight over how to handle a case. That’s inconcievable for the book characters from, say, Early Autumn on; the one thing that could bring them to blows would be if one of them assaulted Susan, which is even more inconceivable. And while book-Spenser says jokingly that he’s as tough as Hawk, series-Spenser is under no such illusion; when Hawk wordlessly calls him out in that episode, Urich played it as Spenser being at least dismayed, if not terrified.
I thought it might. But I don’t think you’re rich enough for her taste. Then again she clearly wants to do do Spenser, who is middle-class but hardly rolling in it. I guess it would depend on how studly you are.
In A Catskill Eagle especially, Hawk & Spenser both kill people in ways that are hard to justify. The pimp and his bodyguard, for instance. And in Early Autumn, Hawk kills a man for being a potential threat to Susan, which even Spenser won’t do.
In later books the pimp killing is repeatedly referenced as an outlier for Spencer. The one time he had to break his own rules, and it was for Susan.
I’m under the impression that away from the books, the pimp killing would be all in a day’s work for Hawk. Hawk is a freelance gang enforcer. His work is more similar to Junior and Ty-Bop than Spencer.
In fact they killed the pimp and his bodyguard for the two prostitutes he and Hawk had forced to help in the robbery, not for Susan. And those [del]killings[/del] murders were not in violation of Spenser’s rules, but required by them. The prostitutes were (relatively) innocent, and Spenser & Hawk had created a situation that endangered them. By his standards, they could not proceed without working protect them. I also think thoughts of April Kyle might have been going through his head, though she isn’t mentioned.
Anyway, the pimp murders don’t seem substantially different from the killings in Mortal Stakes, though those were perhaps even more cold-blooded.
Though they were in the larger situation for love of Susan, these specific murders were not in defense of her or even in furtherance of her freedom.
It was kidnapping, robbery and double murder, against people that had nothing to do with Spencer, Hawk or Susan. I don’t have access to my books right now but I know it was referenced at least once more during some Susan psychobabble about Spencer possible holding against her.
Nah. Anything in the novels is on-topic, I deem. The poll is just a hook.
I’d not call it psychobabble, but yes, I think there was some buried anger there. Oddly, she seems not to hold Spenser’s infidelity with Candy Sloan against him at all. I can never decide if that’s just Parker’s bias or if she does not, in fact, really give a damn about monogamy, but I lean towards the latter. She wants to be his primary emotional involvement (she was jealous of Paul at the beginning), but when it comes to sex I suspect she’s actually polyamorous.
But friends with? Nah. I don’t match up with Hawk’s idea of how to be. I draw my rules from the written word.
Spenser himself told Candy that Susan would not hold it against him – at least the one-night fling. But he also told Candy that an on-going “house privileges” arrangement WOULD be a betrayal.
Later, after Catskill, Spenser says to Susan that he betrayed her with Candy, to which she replied, “You had the right.”
Which is why I say Susan does not in fact care about exclusivity, only priority. Other stories in the series make it clear that she feels a compulsion to be conventional which she fights against, which is why she doesn’t expressly say that she’s perfectly fine with Spenser having one-nighters.
In a later book, a crazy client tries leaves a message on one of their answering machines claiming that Spenser slept with her and is not the only one. Susan laughs it off, saying that nothing the woman said bothered her because she trusts Spenser too much to worry about such an accusation, but in in fact I think she cares as little about that sort of fidelity as Hawk does about not punching people.