Robert B. Parker: we like the way it sounds

Not long after Bob Parker's untimely death, Otto Penzler invited me to contribute to a Festschrift in his honor. (That's a German word, and it means a sort of tribute album in the form of critical essays.) It was not a request I felt I could deny, and I wrote a piece; the book, In Pursuit of Spenser, was recently published by Ben Bella Books, and boasts contributions by a distinguished array of crime writers, including one by Parker himself.

Here's what I wrote:

Interviewer: Why do you think your work is so popular?
Robert B. Parker: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.

That’s a wonderfully quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.

Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.

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Ruth Cavin was a great editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in the writer. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it, or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.

And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.

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We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.

“I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.

A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.

A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer is a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.

A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audition for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”

“Yes.”

“Caw caw caw. You hear him?”

“I do.”

“The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”

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