The History of Mystery

Promised Land, the 1977 Edgar winner, is one of the most baffling mysteries I have ever encountered. I don’t mean the events of the book itself, which almost entirely lacked mystery, suspense, or even interest. A man contacts a Boston detective who is so preoccupied with what he is going to eat and drink and what machines he is going to use on his next workout that he can barely pay attention to the case. When the detective follows up with the client at his house, he recognizes a heavy who was a boxer back when he, the detective, was a boxer, because, after all, Boston is a small town and everyone knows everyone. This tells the detective that the client has worse problems than a missing wife, but the client won’t say anything about that. So the detective looks through the wife’s phone bills, discovers she had called a number in New Bedford several times, goes there, and finds her immediately. Then the detective deals with the trouble that the client didn’t want to tell him about.

The baffling part is why this novel won an Edgar award, or even why it sold any copies. In fact, more than that, it helped make Spenser into one of the most beloved American detective characters, and as I noted in the previous post, because the basis of the pilot for the Spenser TV series with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks (which itself engendered at least one spinoff). If you go to the mystery section of the bookstore, you will see that Spenser for Hire is one of the rare series where, after the creator’s death, other writers feel compelled to continue his adventures (“Robert B Parker’s Spenser for Hire in Joe Johnston’s Deadly Chowder.”) Yet, I have now read two of the Spenser books and found them both to be disappointments.

As with the Joe Leaphorn series by Tony Hillerman, I had read one entry in the series already, disliked it, and would probably never tried it again if I wasn’t reading every Edgar winner. The first time this happened, it was a lucky second chance, because Dance Hall for the Dead was far better than The Thief of Time and I was happy to be led to a better entry in Tony Hillerman’s work. I disliked Mortal Stakes, the first Spenser book I read, but this time around the second one simply confirmed my dislike of the writing and detecting style.

Certainly, I want to like them. The late Robert B Parker seemed like a likeable author and I wished him well. He became a best-selling author while he was a literature professor, and knowing a lot of professors who would like to publish best-selling novels, I will always wish them well. I will admit that Spenser’s wisecracks are often funny, and he does sometimes make amusing observations about culture and drop off-kilter allusions to literary figures (Bartleby the Scrivener is amusingly name-checked in this one).

Yet, the mystery is nothing. As you can see from my synopsis, essentially no detection takes place. The surface mystery is solved by looking at phone bills and the secondary mystery is solved by coincidence. Technically, there really isn’t any mystery – it is more of a suspense situation where Spenser tries to help his client and the client’s wife, both of whom find themselves in terrible fixes. To really explain why this book leaves me cold, I will need to go into what I hate about the ending and that will have to await the spoiler-full entry.

But before going there, let me say a little about the annoying tics in Parker’s writing, where he feels compelled to tell us everything that Spenser eats, drinks, the roads he takes to his destinations, and how he works out. I wondered if my memory was playing tricks on me so I went back through the book and counted – there are genuinely at least 11 spots in the book where we are told what Spenser is eating and/or cooking. I’m not counting when he just mentions donuts; usually it is in great detail. At least at one point when the reader should be getting nervous about the characters, Parker goes 55 pages between describing what Spenser is cooking. Three different times, he mentions the roads Spenser takes to get to a destination. I forgot to count the number of times we are told what Spenser’s girlfriend is reading, but it’s a lot.

To mention one more irritating trope that doesn’t involve a spoiler – almost all of Spenser’s successes involve his skill at fighting. The enforcer that he sees with his client who used to box with him is the famous Hawk, the one who gets the spinoff TV show. Hawk could simply intimidate Spenser and Spenser admits that Hawk is the one person he knows who is tougher than him, but Hawk never does so because he knows from experience that Spenser is so tough that it would be pointless. Spenser does beat up a young punk half his age, one of Hawk’s under-goons, and a radical woman friend of the runaway wife who thought she could beat him because of her martial arts skills. As with the food and the books and the routes, the fights are described in loving detail. This is an annoying trope in the Travis McGee and Lew Archer novels, too, but the Spenser books seem to take it to another extreme, and in most of the Travis McGee and Lew Archer books the detective also runs into someone tougher. Travis McGee and Lew Archer always end up solving the case by doggedly pursuing a flimsy lead that was too desperate-looking for someone else to care about, and by making connections between obscure clues. These qualities make the recurring near-invincibility of fighting less annoying. In Promised Land, it is as though someone wanted the invincible tough guy material in its purest form, without any impurities introduced by suspense, actual detection, or time taken to reflect on any actual moral ambiguities.

And that is all what I can tell you without a spoiler, as to why I found Promised Land to be extremely overrated.