Robert B. Parker rebounds with Stranger in Paradise, the best of the three novels I picked up for a buck at the library sale. After turning off my filters, I sat back and enjoyed a good read, a happy reminder of the kind of panache Parker used to produce in his heyday. Yes, it's still merely a novella and, yes, all of the objections I've recited in relation to earlier Parker novellas still apply, but this book has a sort of happy elan to it, a strong pace and a commitment to action that the other two distinctly lacked.

Published this year (2008), Stranger in Paradise features our friend, small-town police chief Jesse Stone, as the protagonist and, thankfully, there is absolutely no sign of Sunny Randall in the book, other than a single brief mention along the way. When an old friend, cold-blooded killer Wilson Cromartie ("Crow"), comes to town with a mysterious mission to perform, Stone and his force go on immediate alert. They tangled with Crow ten years ago, you see, and, before the self-described Apache warrior left town the last time, a lot of people died, including two of the town's boys in blue. Forced by circumstances and their own personality parallels, Stone and Crow soon find themselves working together toward a common goal: saving a rebellious 14-year-old girl from her gangster father and her gangbanger boyfriend while keeping as many other people alive as possible.

Woven into the fabric of this violent storyline are two interesting subplots: a wealthy white neighbourhood's desperate battle to stop a school for underprivileged Hispanic kids from opening in their midsts and Stone's own on-going effort to work out his relationship with his ex-wife Jenn, a beautiful TV investigative reporter who moves back in with him as part of the attempt to take care of the 14-year-old.

This is a violent book — Crow guns down a gangbanger early on in order to prove his own machismo, then picks off two gangster types in cold blood later in the novella while the gangbanger executes the 14-year-old's mother in a brutal development that Stone and his crew treat as a minor inconvenience — but Parker ultimately chickens out when push comes to shove. The climax, once again, is a disappointment, a well-plotted set up where Stone and his force sweep in to arrest all (and I mean ALL) of the perps and their comrades before anything too nasty happens. Even the enigmatic Crow, who loves nothing better than a gun battle, simply fades away into the background during that epic scene, uncharacteristically using the confusion of the developing fire fight between the gangbangers and the gangsters to disappear, rather than to indulge himself in some gratuitous killing.

It's as if Parker got to that point in the writing process and thought: well, I've almost reached my 40,000-word limit and I really don't think I can handle writing such a complicated scene so maybe I won't bother; I'll make it clean and easy, even if it doesn't suit the personalities of the characters I've so carefully created.

Again, I liked this book but with many reservations. I think the plot is stronger and more interesting than the last two Parker novellas I've read but it still plays out as a series of superior, independent men moving effortlessly through a world where no-one else matters. Crow, though interesting in some respects, ultimately fails as nothing more than a negative version of Stone himself. Parker indulges in numerous explications of how and why these two strong, self-contained men can know, understand and respect each other without ever having to spend any time together. They know each other because they are cut from the same cloth; they are each other. Violent, witty, uber-capable, utterly independent, sharing a strong moral code that says, while men are for killin', women are for protectin' and lovin'.

Every woman in the book swoons over Crow, in ways that they wish they could swoon over Stone. Even Molly Crane, the Catholic, mother-of-four, devoted wife who serves as Jesse's right hand on the police force, ends up sleeping with the cold-blooded assassin and convincing herself that this little indulgence of her primal female urges is acceptable since it apparently hurt no one and won't change her relationship with her family. It's a not-too-subtle way for Parker to consummate the erotically charged relationship between Molly and Jesse (Crow's positive alter-ego) without sullying Stone's moral standing.

As in the other Parker books, all characters speak with one voice, in one style, with a similar wit and morality. In fact, Parker appears so incapable of creating anything new in the way of character that the parallels between Stone and Spenser (the protagonist in Parker's earlier books) are blatantly and painfully obvious. Add in Crow, the ultra-capable, cold-blooded, member of a racialised community and Parker has recreated the Spenser/Hawk relationship to the point of idiocy. The one major difference — Spenser was a private eye and Stone is a police officer — actually represents one of the major weaknesses of this new series: whereas Spenser could credibly flout the law when his personal morality required it, Stone either cannot (since he is a cop) or must go to extreme lengths to get around it, leaving the reader shaking her head in disbelief.

Sex is, again, a game to be played and not to be confused with love or intimacy or commitment. Women are objects, littered around the city so that men can either protect them as fragile things of beauty, have sex with them in the on-going game or ignore them and their lives and deaths as unimportant.

it is ironic that, at the centre of this tale is the 14-year-old, Amber, who has already been molested by her father's posse, ignored by her obese, alcohol-abusing mother and forced to have sex with every member of her boyfriend's gang, which boyfriend is then ready and willing to sell her back to her father for $10,000. Stone goes through all this rigamarole to save her from that terrible life and escape into... into... what? A world where women are nothing more than the possessions and sexual playthings of powerful men.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Stranger In Paradise

I had an epiphany as I read High Profile, Robert B. Parker's 2007 Jesse Stone "novel".

The first inkling I had came when I got confused as to who was speaking in a long passage of dialogue between two characters. This shouldn't be so confusing, I thought to myself. It's just two characters. So I started trying to figure out why. I read the passage over again, then a third time. I got confused each time. And then it hit me. It's the paragraphing that is throwing me off. Parker starts a new paragraph every line. Here's what I mean (and I'm making up this passage since I can't be bothered to track down a real example).

Sunny smiled.

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know."

"You've got to have a reason."

Jesse looked over her shoulder at the lake.

"I don't have a reason."

"But you have to. People don't do things for no reason."

Sunny checked over her shoulder in case a bird was about to land on her.

"I guess I had a reason."

Jesse nodded.

"But I don't know what it is."

Did you see it? Parker puts the line of dialogue in a separate paragraph from the speaking character's physical action. Whereas most writers would, as my friend John would say, do an SPSP (same person, same paragraph), Parker separates action from dialogue. And it's confusing.

Why does he do it?

I didn't know. But then I registered how little text there is on each page. And how short his chapters are. And how little exposition there is as opposed to dialogue.

And it hit me. Parker's writing short stories —novellas at best —and passing them off to his unsuspecting readers as real life novels. I mean, the book is 290 pages long. That's fairly substantial, you would think.

So, my curiosity piqued, I decided to do a little test. First, I chose a similar book to which to compare Parker's tome: Dick Francis' Break In, a 272-page novel of which I have a hard-cover copy. The books seem to be about the same size. In fact, once I measured them (yes, I'm that anal), I realised that they are exactly the same size and that Francis' book has just 18 fewer pages than Parker's.

A good set to compare.

So then I opened High Profile at a random page — page 146, in fact — and counted the words on the page. Page 146 of the hard cover version of High Profile in my possession has 213 words on it. Then I counted the words on the next 9 pages in order to establish a reasonable sample from which to draw an average. 76, 66, 176, 185, 188, 182, 66, 94 and 166. The total over 10 pages was 1412, for an average per page of 141.2 words. Multiply that by 290 pages and the book contains 40,948 words in total. Yikes. I've been taught that a novel MUST be at least 60,000 words to be considered for publication and that 80,000 or more is a much safer bet. But Robert B. Parker's High Stakes is only 40,948 words long. No wonder I could read it so fast!

What about my comparison book, Break In? In order to be as fair as possible, I counted the words on the same ten pages —146 to 155 — to get my average and total. 307, 363, 394, 388, 372, 157, 254, 374, 356, and 370, for a total of 3335. That's an average of 333.5 words per page. Multiply by 272 pages and the Francis book includes 90,712 words in total.

Aha.

I can't help but feel that Parker and/or his publisher is/are playing fast and loose with his readers' money. They're charging us regular book prices for half a book and using every trick in the... ahem, book to fool us into thinking we're getting a full-length novel: breaking single paragraphs in two to create more lines, putting more space between lines of type, breaking the book into more chapters so that more pages are half empty, and such like.

And, of course, in counting Francis' words, I couldn't help but read them as well. And I realised that Parker couldn't hold a candle to "Dick Francis" (whether it's actually Dick who did the writing or his wife or somebody else) as a writer, no matter how much I seem to enjoy Parker's novellas. Francis' plots are more intricate and creative, his villains more complex and his action sequences much more breathtaking. I still have one more Parker on my Bed-Side Table but I swear, when that's done, I'm going to go back and enjoy Francis' entire run of novels again.

After all that, how was High Profile, you ask. Witty writing. All the characters are the same (as in other books and as each other) and the portrayal of women is just as bad as in the last book. The plot is paper thin and you can't even bank on Parker for riveting action sequences any more. In this book, there is no action. Sure, Stone attacks one man and beats him senseless. But it's not much of a fight. The man had just opened the door when Stone attacked him. And the climax of the book comes when Stone shoots the villain three times in the chest in what he rightly refers to as a "suicide by cop". All in the last 27 pages. The rest of the book is talk, talk, talk and half the time you have no idea who's doing the talking.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, High Profile

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

Now that I'm finally finished with Engel's book, I am launching myself into three by Robert B. Parker. The first, Blue Screen, hit the bookstore shelves in 2006 and features his female protagonist, Sunny Randall. This is the first of the Randall books that I've read — it is apparently the fifth Parker's written (by the way, have you seen how many books this guy's published? holy cow!) — and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It makes for a nice break from painting my office, my other weekend task.

As I think I've mentioned in an earlier blog, I am a big fan of Parker's original series, featuring Spenser and his buddy Hawk. At least, I'm a big fan of the early books in the series; I started to lose interest about five years ago when Parker felt his detective had to start tackling international issues and not just good ol' Boston crimes. So I wasn't sure I'd like Blue Screen, even though it introduces me to a new detective. What I had forgotten is how good a writer Parker is when he is on. And in this book, he is definitely on. No, it's not a classic of the detective genre; it's just a well-written story that clicks right along, sweeping you up into it.

I'm more than a third of the way through after only one real sitting and I'm looking forward to getting back to it soon. The writing is so smooth, so polished, you just can't resist it.

The depiction of women, on the other hand? Well, I'll have more on that issue when I post my review.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Blue Screen