[Deathwatch] Robert B. Parker, author, 77

[Notification of departing celebrities]

  Master crime novelist Robert B Parker dies

The creator of the wisecracking Boston private eye Spenser died on 
Monday, aged 77

Wednesday 20 January 2010

Bestselling American crime novelist Robert B Parker, creator of the 
wisecracking Boston private eye Spenser, died on Monday, aged 77.

Author of more than 60 books, Parker passed away at his home in 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, his American publisher Penguin confirmed. "He 
will be deeply missed by us all," Penguin said.

Parker began writing his Spenser novels in 1971, going on to pen 37 
books starring his street smart, tough investigator who would inspire 
the 1980s television series Spenser: For Hire. In 2002, he was named 
Grand Master at the Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America, and 
has sold more than four million copies of his books around the world.

Parker, who would publish up to three books a year, said he would write 
10 pages a day, often not knowing "who did it" until near the end of the 
book. "I don't rewrite, I don't write a second draft," he said in a 2005 
interview. "When I am finished, I don't reread it. Joan [his wife] reads 
it to make sure I haven't committed a public disgrace, and, if I 
haven't, I send it in. Then I begin the next book."

After writing about Raymond Chandler 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/raymondchandler> in part of his 
doctoral thesis about the evolution of the American hero, Parker went on 
to write Poodle Springs, a novel completed from an unfinished manuscript 
begun by the late Chandler, as well as a sequel to Chandler's The Big 
Sleep, called Perchance To Dream.

"I first got into him when I was a student and me and my friends heard 
about this writer who had these really cool books about a detective in 
Boston. You really had to seek them out at first," author and fellow 
Bostonian Dennis Lehane told the Associated Press 
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100119/ap_on_en_ot/us_obit_robert_parker>. 
"He taught me how to be funny on the page. He taught me how to be 
succinct. He taught me how to give voice to that wonderfully jaded 
Boston sarcasm that came out in his books. I remember telling Bob that 
the first chapter of my first book (A Drink Before the War) was so faux 
Parker he should have been suing me."

Novelist Robert Crais told AP that Parker "opened the doors for everyone 
who came after". "For a long time, the American detective genre was 
defined by the big three: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross 
Macdonald. I would say Robert Parker is the fourth," he told the newswire.

"I read Parker's Spenser series in college," crime writer Harlan Coben 
said in 2007 in an interview with the Atlantic Monthly 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/harlan-coben/3>. "When it comes 
to detective novels, 90% of us admit he's an influence, and the rest of 
us lie about it."

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