The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  Maybe this was indeed the case, but writers do have a lamentable tendency to reform their antisocial protagonists, and maybe readers want it that way; years ago I heard from a reader who informed me that he was quitting my Bernie Rhodenbarr series after the fourth book, The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, because by now Bernie should have seen the error of his ways and gone straight.

  More Earl Drake than Parker, Al had indeed seen the error of his ways, and was ready to reform, changing his occupation from bank robber to writer. He kept writing stories and Dan kept marketing them, and when Al became eligible for parole he went before the board with recommendations from editors who’d bought his stories as well as writers Dan had enlisted in his cause. He got out, and spent the rest of his life as a freelance writer, consorting not with fellow criminals but with writers and editors. I don’t suppose everyone would consider this a step up, but it worked for him.

  But wait, as the TV pitchmen say. There’s more.

  Dan Marlowe, who’s clearly one of the heroes of this story, suffered an absolutely appalling twist of fate. Probably as the result of a stroke, he fell victim in 1977 to a severe form of amnesia of the sort rarely encountered outside the world of soap opera. He forgot who he was, along with all the details of his life to date. It wasn’t an ongoing memory loss, in that he had no trouble recalling everything that took place after the stroke. But the past was erased, wiped off the board and forever unrecoverable.

  He could still write, lending credence to the folks who insist that what we do isn’t really mental in the first place. But he couldn’t remember having written, and had to read all his own work as if encountering it for the first time.

  Al, fresh out of prison, helped him relearn the world and his place in it. Dan had quit Michigan for California, and Al moved in with him and helped him adjust. Dan wrote a fair amount of soft-core porn, much of it under pen names that were anagrams of his own, and the two men did some work in collaboration. Dan never did write more about Earl Drake after his memory loss, and I can see how that would have been daunting; it’d be like taking over a series written by somebody else. Which happens often enough, but it’s never quite the same, is it?

  Dan resumed writing crime novels and published a bunch of them before his heart gave out in 1986. I haven’t read any of them, so I don’t know how they compare to his earlier work, though they’d have had to go a long way to match The Name of the Game is Death. I had met Dan a couple of times early on, liked him a lot, and was shaken when I heard about his amnesia. He was, no question, one of the good guys.

  While I never got to know Al well, I must have met him a dozen times over the years. He was active in MWA and a frequent participant in conventions and symposia, where he was always good company, ever cheerful and sociable. He dealt with his criminal past by being disarmingly open about it; his self-styled business card was a photocopy of his FBI Wanted poster.

  I recall one afternoon during Edgar Week when I sat next to him in the audience of some panel discussion, the topic of which I’ve long since forgotten. One of the panelists was John Ball, best known for In the Heat of the Night, who was skilled in aviation, aikido, and rubbing people the wrong way. Ball made a baldly homophobic remark, which brought a spirited rejoinder from Sandra Scoppettone and shifted the direction of the discussion. Al remarked to me that, all things considered, he’d rather spend time with a gay person than a morose one. I chuckled politely, and he was sufficiently encouraged to raise his hand and repeat his observation to the assembly.

  A couple of years later he came out, sort of. He was invited as a participant in some mystery colloquium—I wasn’t there, and can no longer recall whether it was held aboard a cruise ship or at a resort. Part of his deal was that he could bring someone to share his room, and Al brought Chris Steinbrenner, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection. Neither man seems to have been morose.

  If Al never achieved great success, he made enough of a living at his new trade that he was never constrained to resume his old one. He wrote a great many short stories for the crime fiction magazines, along with some episodic TV and young adult novels.

  He had a stroke toward the end of his life, walked with a cane after, and seemed frail the last time our paths crossed—at an Edgar dinner, if I remember correctly. I had the feeling that he didn’t remember who I was. The stroke may have had something to do with it, or perhaps he was simply unaccustomed to seeing me in a tie and jacket.

  He died in 1996, and his work didn’t outlive him by much. A short story will turn up now and then in an anthology, but otherwise his work is all out of print. And that’s probably to be expected. What’s important in this instance, it seems to me, is that the man himself be remembered. The work was secondary to the extraordinary life he led.

  * * *

  Al’s daughter, with whom I’ve had some correspondence, and whom I in fact met at NoirCon in Philadelphia, finds it impossible to believe that her father was homosexual. Well, okay. Perhaps she’s right. I’m happy to note her exception, but am not inclined to change what I wrote.

  Robert B. Parker

  * * *

  I met Bob Parker eight or ten times over the years. We shared a dais at a luncheon in Boston, appeared together in New York on a program hosted by Lewis Lapham, and ran into each other intermittently at conventions and promotional events.

  Just yesterday, as I write these lines, someone tweeted: “When I want to be lied to, I read Robert B. Parker. But when I need someone to tell it like it is, no one beats @Lawrence Block.”

  It should go without saying that I took that as a compliment. But I don’t know that RBP’s shade would feel slighted. Parker himself was very clear on his mission; he was writing not Realism but Romance, as noted in the following essay. And the bracing lies of Romance are no less a part of Capital-L Literature than the harsh truths of Realism.

  Parker died at his desk, working on a novel, in January of 2010. Some months later, I was invited to contribute an essay on an aspect of the man and his work to a memorial tribute volume, to be published as In Pursuit of Spenser. Here’s the result:

  “They Like the Way It Sounds”

  Interviewer: Why do you think your work is so popular?

  Robert B. Parker: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.

  That’s a wonderfully quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.

  Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.

  Ruth Cavin was a great editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in the writer. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it, or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.

  And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.

  We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.

  “I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.

  A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.

  A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer is a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.

  A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audit
ion for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.

  “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Caw caw caw. You hear him?”

  “I do.”

  “The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”

  But writing is silent, isn’t it? It’s an act performed in silence, and its creations are appreciated in a similar silence. (The medium of the audiobook is an exception, in that one reads it not with one’s eyes but with one’s ears, and there are accordingly two voices involved, those of the writer and the narrator.)

  “As silent as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean,” wrote Coleridge, in his own unmistakable voice. We do in fact hear the voice of the writer, all the silence notwithstanding. It falls upon the inner ear. We hear it.

  Voice. Isn’t it just another word for style?

  No.

  Different people will define style differently. But I’m writing this, so I get to use my definition. Which goes like this:

  Style is that façade a writer erects to conceal his voice.

  If Bob Parker wrote a phone book, people would read it.

  Well, perhaps I exaggerate. But his voice did have magical properties. On two separate occasions I picked a book of his off a library shelf, just intending to read a few pages and get an idea of what he was up to in this latest effort.

  Fat chance. A few pages? A couple of paragraphs and he had me, and both times I read the book all the way through to the end.

  (This would have been less likely had the books had more heft to them, but they were short. There wasn’t all that much in the way of incident, nor were all that many words used to tell the tale. In an effort to keep the novels from looking as short as they were, Parker’s publishers typically used larger type and wider margins. And they leaded out the text, so that there was often enough space between the lines of a Spenser novel to contain another whole book. The net effect of this typographic enhancement was to make the books even easier to read—as if that were necessary.)

  From the opening lines of The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser’s first-person voice was a delight to that inner ear. Spenser would become more his own man over time, and less a Back Bay Philip Marlowe, but that’s to be expected in a series of any length; the character undergoes a process of self-realization. But Spenser was Spenser from the jump, and his voice didn’t change all that much.

  And what makes us want to hear it? What makes us listen, even when that mellifluous voice is telling us things we aren’t all that eager to hear, even when the story’s too thin and the premise too frail and Spenser’s task insufficiently challenging?

  One ought to be able to take that auctorial voice apart and explain why it does what it does. And maybe someone can do this, but not I. All I can do is say that I think the man got it right:

  We like the way it sounds.

  I’ve had occasion to think about Bob Parker’s irresistible voice lately, upon the announcement that two writers have been approved by Parker’s estate to continue his two most popular series. Ace Atkins will write new books about Spenser, starting next month with Lullaby, while Michael Brandman’s Jesse Stone novel, Killing the Blues, came out last fall.

  I was surprised when I learned this, but decided on reflection that I had no reason to be. Writers have been taking up the lance of a fallen colleague for a century or more. In today’s publishing climate, beset by its own equivalent of global warming, death means never having to say you’re done writing. The market dominance of brand-name authors, the glut of books by living authors with acknowledged or unacknowledged “collaborators” or out-and-out ghostwriters, and the pastiche/‌homage of writers producing prequels and sequels to classic works, all combine to make a continuation of Parker’s work an appealing proposition to all concerned.

  Though perhaps not quite all. I’m not sure it’s such a great deal for the reader.

  First, though, there’s the question of what Parker himself would think of it. Is he likely to be spinning in his grave at the very idea?

  I didn’t know the man anywhere near well enough to venture a guess. Ego could tug a writer in either direction; he might be reluctant to see his characters follow him to the grave, or he might be loathe to see others putting words into their mouths.

  But any objection from this particular writer would seem to stand on shaky ground. Parker completed Poodle Springs, a Philip Marlowe novel that Raymond Chandler left unfinished at his death; later, he wrote a sequel to Chandler’s The Big Sleep, with the felicitous title Perchance to Dream. The man’s motives could not have been higher, as he admired Chandler hugely, wrote his doctoral dissertation about him, and quite clearly drew Spenser more from Marlowe than any other source.

  And I suppose the books are all right, although one is never in doubt for a moment that another hand than Chandler’s is at work here. (In Perchance, Parker includes flashback passages from The Big Sleep, set off typographically so you’ll know they’re Chandler’s. This was remarkably daring on his part, I always thought, and not necessarily the best idea he ever had.)

  Spinning in his grave? No, probably not.

  There are, we should note, some reasons to engage a new author to take over a series. And not just the most obvious one (“We can sell some books! We can make some money!”).

  I remember questioning the decision to bring out new Nero Wolfe titles after Rex Stout’s death. Some years previously, I’d written two mysteries in which the narrator, one Chip Harrison, plays Archie to a road company Nero Wolfe named Leo Haig. John McAleer, Rex Stout’s biographer, told me that Stout had indeed been aware of the books, and, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. If Stout bristled at pastiche, how would he feel about downright usurpation of his characters? I figured he could only hate the idea, and I wondered at his family’s acquiescence to the proposition.

  Then a publisher friend pointed out that it takes a supply of new books to keep the old titles in print. Sales of the Wolfe books had dwindled since their author’s death; without new works by a fresh hand, the publisher was inclined to let them go out of print. But if another writer in the person of Robert Goldsborough were to step in, the original books would not only remain in print but would be completely repackaged, with various outside writers commissioned to provide introductions.

  All of this sounds itself like a repackaging of We can sell some books! We can make some money! and there may well be a self-serving element here. But isn’t it safe to presume the author would prefer his own books to remain in print? Wouldn’t he want to increase their sales?

  Sometimes posthumous sequels work. Sometimes they don’t.

  And opinions differ. One online reviewer gives high marks to Parker’s Poodle Springs; a comment follows, decrying the book as a tragedy and saying the publisher should have issued Chandler’s four chapters and let it go at that.

  I must have read half a dozen of the Oz books when I was a boy, and would have read more if I’d had the chance. While I didn’t notice the difference, I remember my mother thought the later books by Ruth Plumly Thompson weren’t up to the standard set by L. Frank Baum. (Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and the series continues to this day; the most recent entry, licensed by the Baum family, is Trouble in Oz, by Sherwood Smith.)

  Series continue after the original author’s death for the same reason that they become popular in the first place; a reader, having had a pleasant experience, wants to repeat it, wants to renew his acquaintance with a character or characters whose company he’s enjoyed. If the author who provided that initial experience is on hand, so much the better. If not, well, too bad; as long as the characters are present, doing what they do, does it really matter who’s telling us about it?

  It doesn’t seem to have mattered much to the young readers who wanted to go back to Oz. Because that’s indeed what
they wanted, to re-enter that magical realm, and they didn’t much care—or notice—who it was that unlocked the door for them. Frank Baum may have created that world, but other writers seemed capable of accessing it, or some acceptable variant thereof. And that’s what the books were about, not Baum’s perceptions, not his voice.

  On the other hand, without departing from the world of juvenile fantasy fiction, try to imagine a later writer taking up the mantle of Lewis Carroll and turning out a third Alice book. It wouldn’t astonish me to learn that the attempt has been made, because there’s nothing that someone somewhere is not fool enough to try, but aren’t you happy you don’t have to read it?

  I was an impassioned fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books, and read them all more than once. I read the first of Robert Goldsborough’s sequels, and found it troubling. Stout’s auctorial voice, and the voice he gave to narrator Archie Goodwin, was more than distinctive; it was to my mind unique, and it had everything to do with the books’ success. One wanted to hear that voice, even as one wanted to spend more time in the rooms of that magical brownstone house, and in the presence of those perfectly realized characters.

  Goldsborough came to his task more as a fan than an author. He wrote the first book, Murder in E Minor, for the private pleasure of his mother, who longed to read more about her favorite characters; it was his own first novel, and wasn’t published until 1986, eight years after he’d written it. By 1994 he’d published six more, and that was that. A decade later he began writing books of his own.