The Professional
Robert B. Parker
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-0-399-15594-9
289 pages; $26.95

One of my favorite literary daydreams has for years been that my husband and I shared a lovely dinner with Robert B. Parker and his wife, Joan. I imagined us talking about literature while Joan took tiny sips of a martini and Bob – we’d be on first name terms, of course – took gulps of Scotch, or listening to Bob wax rhapsodic about the Boston Red Sox, or dissecting the character of Spenser, Bob’s series detective. Alas, it will never be: Parker died this past January of a sudden heart attack while sitting at his desk writing. An enviable death, I think, but one that came much too soon. Parker was only my father’s age, a young 77.

The Professional is not the last Spenser novel; Painted Ladies is due out this coming October. And it is impossible to read The Professional as any sort of elegy for Parker; it is, as are all the Spenser novels, “merely” a tale full of moral ambiguities, starring a bad guy who doesn’t really seem all that bad if taken on his own terms and some normal people who can’t really face up to what they’ve done and who they are. Parker seems to have been fascinated by the lies we tell ourselves, even the best of us. The only one who seemed to have a policy of strict refusal to ever fool himself about anything was Spenser – and even he occasionally fell victim to his own demons.

On its face, The Professional is about a gigolo who turns to blackmail and the women who refuse to flout him by confessing their unfaithfulness to their spouses. A closer reading, though, suggests that Parker is talking about the nature of marriage – or, more specifically, monogamy (as Spenser and his long-time lover, Susan Silverman, have never married or even lived together (aside from one disastrous experiment in cohabitation)). Throughout the book, Spenser and Susan question each other as to whether they’d prefer to open up their relationship, but the questions seem to be more or less the equivalent of me asking my husband if he still loves me: they know the answer, but they just want to hear it. It’s a sort of flirtation, a verbal hug. In the hands of a lesser author, it would be mighty annoying, but for the long-time reader of Parker’s novels, it is a comfortable reassurance that all is right with the world.

Parker’s style has long been to tell his stories mostly through dialogue. It reads very smoothly and swiftly, making it very natural to read this book in one sitting. It might fool a reader into thinking that this type of writing is easy. But advancing the action mostly through dialogue is a lot harder than it looks. It’s even harder to carry it off when your protagonist is a smart aleck who is constantly tossing out jokes and bon mots. Any aspiring writer would do well to study one of Parker’s novels for his technique.

I’ll say no more about the plot. No one who knows Parker’s work ever reads his books because they expect a lot of the plot, anyway (though Parker manages, as always, to give readers a few surprises in this one); they read him to revisit Spenser, Susan, Hawk and Parker’s other characters, who have become old friends over the years. Were I to talk about the plot, I’d give away too much and still say too little, because that’s not the real point of the book. Spenser is ultimately a philosopher, and that’s his real charm.

I wish I didn’t know there was only one more Spenser novel coming my way. I wish Parker were still at his computer, putting together the 2011 entry in the series right now. If there’s a heaven, though, and I get there someday, I expect there will be an entire shelf of new novels by Robert B. Parker for me to read. He’s probably tapping away at a celestial keyboard even now.