He gave a talk about what he’d been up to lately, how clueless hollywood people are, etc. Then threw it open for questions.
I asked for an explaination of two seemingly incongruous bits of Spenser’s history. He tells Susan that he was raised in an all male household, never knew his mother. I think he was born by emergency cesarian after his mother died, because he quotes the bit about Julius Ceasar “Not of Woman born”. However, much earlier in the series, in ‘God Save the Child’ while staking out the bodybuilder’s house, Spenser muses about eating his Mother’s american Chop Suey and how it made him feel. Either Spenser was eating some ancient leftovers, or he was lying to Susan about his past.
That’s when Mr. Parker asked for me to be removed from the Bookstore.
It turns out he just forgot. ‘Hey, nobody’s perfect’ sez Grandmaster Bob
Later I asked, prefaced with a ‘Gotta Try’, What is Spenser’s first name?
“I Don’t Know. I mean, he has one, he’s not like Charo, or Cher. If I had to come up with one I would, but I haven’t”
So, Spenser has a first name, but not Even Robert B Parker knows what it is.
[nitpick] It was Macduff who was “untimely ripped from his mother’s womb” and thus able to defeat Macbeth despite the prophecy about “no man of woman born” being able to harm that title character. [nitpick]
Hey, don’t feel bad about the error. As Parker told you, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Y’know, we’ve been needing a Spenser thread in here. I assume Hawk doesn’t have a first {or even second} name either? I’ve only mostly read the later ones, where Hawk is his buddy, though I’m trying to catch up.
Oh yeah, and not a Spenser book, but Double Play should have won every damn literary award going that year, and I don’t even know anything about baseball.
Ten or fifteen years ago, on Larry King’s show, Parker, in response to King’s question, spouted off a first name for Spenser. Had King, and the rest of us, going for ten or so seconds, before he grinned and said it wasn’t so.
Can’t even remember, at this late date, the name Parker pulled out of thin air.
If I may, Sonoran Lizard King, you mentioned Parker making reference to Hollywood being clueless. Did he make any mention of the Spenser series.
When the program was on, he was always kind to it, usually saying something like: “It is not my Spenser, but I enjoy it very much.” He also always had kind words to say of Robert Urich and Avery Brooks.
I’ve always been a Spenser fan, and just this week re-read Playmates and Sudden Mischief because I’m low on new reading material. I would have asked him the EXACT same two questions you did, Lizard King.
Hawk is by far my favorite character, and I confess that when I’m reading him, I’m imagining him as Avery Brooks. I remember that wonderful delivery he had: “SpenssAH…” I looked for the series on DVD last year, but haven’t found it.
Did anyone see the two Joe Mantegna movies? One of them (Walking Shadow) had Eric Roberts as DeSpain and was pretty durn good. I like Manetgna, but NOT as Spenser - Mantegna’s Chicago accent is so not Boston it was driving me nuts.
i also enjoy the spenser books. avery brooks did a fantastic job bringing hawk to life.
i’m sure they named spenser after his mother. some times guys can get away with being named lynn, gale, or marion…susanna can really get you hurt on a playground.
I might have asked how old Healy is. Again going back to God Save the Child, Healy tells Spenser that he’s been a cop for thirty years.
That was thirty years ago, and I just finished I.O.U., in which Healy is STILL a state cop.
That’s going to be one hell of a retirement check.
In Promised Land, Hawk is working for King Powers, and while he and Spenser are friendly, they are not friends. In Back Story, Spenser and Hawk talk about their first meeting when they were both fighting on an undercard, and suggest that they’ve been friendly since. In I.O.U., Spenser says he’s known Hawk since he, Spenser, was seventeen - pretty young to be fighting, but I guess possible.
What I would ask Robert Parker is how come Spenser never seems to get paid for anything he does? Where does his money come from? And why is Hawk always helping Spenser without expecting any kind of compensation? Oh, and do you, Robert Parker, really think anybody gives a shit about that goddamned dog?
Oh, and what were you smoking when you wrote* Perchance to Dream*? You want to show a guy is evil, so you have him pick up a kitten by its head and chuck it out a porthole? What did you think you were writing, an episode of The Tick? Philip Marlowe is a fucking cartoon in your head?
Case Sensitive wrote:
I saw one such film. I liked his portrayal, but it seemed like they had cut the story down to the point that they had to noticably slow the pacing to a grind, resulting in snappy dialogue sequences being delivered at a tedious pace that sapped all the energy from them.
He did mention the ‘Spenser: For Hire’ and says the much the same. He didn’t write the scripts, in fact one of the Clueless Hollywood stories he tells is them wanting him to come work with the scriptwriters and ‘put some jokes in’. He had to tell them that’s not what he does. His one scriptwriting credit he says he got mostly by accident, by helping Tom Selleck with a western script he was working with, and did enough changes the Writers Guild awarded him a screenwriting credit.
I pointed out a continuity error between earlier and later books concerning a character’s mother.
I was going to elaborate, and say “yeah, I couldn’t figure if Spenser had eated some years old leftovers, or If he was lying to Susan about his mother, or if he meant he had used his mothers recipe, or what.” But, conscious of the 60 or so people behind me in the signing line after the talk, I just told him I enjoyed the talk, and got out of there. He grunted thanks, well aware of the 43 people he’d already signed for, some with stacks of books.
