Robert B. Parker, Boston, and the Hard-Boiled World He Leaves Behind

Robert B. Parker died yesterday at age 77. His Spenser novels were the first adult fiction that hooked me--by the time I was a high school sophomore, I had read everything he'd written up to that point. I haven't read him in close to 20 years, as, like so many self-serious teenage would-be writers, I started to look askance at "genre fiction" like mysteries. The Spenser novels were old-fashioned, hard-boiled private eye stories narrated by the good-hearted, modern-age tough-guy Spenser--an ex...