I blew through Blue Screen in less than two days, a credit to the readability of Robert B. Parker’s prose. This man is a very good writer. His plots are clean and compelling, his characters reasonably fully realized, his writing clear and inviting.

And, amazingly enough, this book is as much a love story (or perhaps the better phrase would be “story about love”) as it is a mystery.

I enjoyed Blue Screen a lot. Unfortunately, in order to do so, I had to force myself to turn off a couple of my built-in filters and just accept that it is what it is.

The novel offers two plots: the murder plot and the love story. In the murder plot, Sunny Randall is hired first to protect movie star Erin Flint, and then, when Erin’s personal assistant, Misty, is found dead of a broken neck, to investigate her murder. This latter investigation introduces Sunny to Jesse Stone, handsome Chief of the local police force (and sometime protagonist in another line of Parker novels), creating fertile ground for the love story to spring to life.

Parker spends approximately equal time on each plot, which might please some readers more than others. With little in the way of physical evidence, Sunny and Jesse follow the people trail to Hollywood, where they discover that Erin has a sordid secret past, that Misty has a closer relationship to Erin than was at first disclosed and that criminal figures in both Los Angeles and Boston all seem to have a hand in the situation.

Meanwhile, Sunny and Jesse discover they share an intense mutual attraction, far too many personal and emotional similarities and matching attitudes towards sex. By the end of it all, these two intensely defensive and careful individuals admit that they “might love” each other. They also discover who killed Misty but, as too often happens in mystery novels these days, decide not to push the matter and let the perpetrators go free.

It’s a decent story. It’s told with wit and humour and a fair dose of tension, both of the character-in-physical- and character-in-emotional-danger kinds. I smiled a lot at Parker’s clever turns of phrase and the snappy dialogue. I even laughed out loud on two occasions. And I finished the book in a very brief period of time.

All good.

But what about those nagging built-in filters? You remember, the ones I had to turn off?

To be frank, my problems almost all revolve around Parker’s portrayal of women. Most women in Parker’s books are cast in a negative light: they are either irrational man-haters, brainless eye-candy, helpless victims or ambitious graspers who don’t understand their place in the world and need to be reminded.

Erin Flint, this book's "client" is the perfect example. She is, in Blue Screen, all of the above. Early in the novel, she is branded a “feminist”, which in Parker’s world means “man-hater”. Stunningly beautiful and remarkably athletic, she even went to college, yet she is consistently portrayed as stupid and self-centred, unable to follow even the simplest concepts discussed by the other characters. Despite all of that, she is also completely dependent on the two major male characters in her life – a glorified pimp in LA, who turned her and Misty into prostitutes when they were just teenage orphans, and her megalomaniac boyfriend in Boston, who is using her to enhance his own power and prestige and also to indulge in his personal sexual perversions. If that’s not enough, Erin also plays the role of the over-ambitious grasper: encouraged by the Boston boyfriend, she actually believes she might be able to become the first woman to play baseball in the major leagues. A significant part of the plot recounts the effort by all parties (except the boyfriend) to show her that her baseball ambitions are ridiculous, that as a woman she is incapable of competing.

The women who are portrayed in a positive light – most especially Sunny, herself, and Susan, Sunny’s psychiatrist (borrowed from the Spenser series) – are merely what a man like Parker would consider to be the ideal woman. These are women who share common characteristics:
• While intelligent, they are still willing to recognize that the men in their lives have a natural leadership role;
• While physically capable, they still depend entirely on the men in their lives for their physical safety;
• Their attitudes toward sex and love are remarkably close to the masculine stereotype: sex is a physical activity to be enjoyed with anyone who is attractive, available and willing; sex is something that should be enjoyed without emotional or psychological implications; sex should always be in the forefront of your mind, even if it interferes with more serious commitments; all members of the opposite sex should first be assessed in sexual terms before anything else; love is something to be feared, to be hidden – it is a sign of weakness;
• Their social interactions with others are indistinguishable from those of Parker’s male characters;
• They love dogs.

Other than the fact that she defers to men in all things, that she never takes on a physical challenge herself and that she has breasts, Sunny Randall IS Jesse Stone (who is, of course, Spenser). If you took a page of dialogue between Sunny and Jesse and took out the tags, you would have no idea who said what. Their ideas, beliefs, attitudes, approaches, even their language and speaking style, are exactly the same.

I don’t know if Parker hates women or simply has no clue. I also don’t know what it says about me that I can actually turn off the filters and enjoy his books. Next up on my bedside table is High Profile, a Jesse Stone novel, so we’ll see if that provides any further clues.

Tags: Parker, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone, Mystery, Blue Screen