He’s already a smartass and a good cook, but he’s more conventionally hard-boiled: a loner, a heavy drinker, and not too principled to sleep not only with the young student he’s supposed to be protecting but with her mother as well (to be fair, the mother comes on to him pretty aggressively, but the later Spenser would, I think, have resisted, and not just because of Susan). (Of course, for some of us, there’s a little nostalgic potential in this evocation of a college campus in the early 1970s–if it’s possible to feel nostalgic for flared jeans.) Spenser also talks to (and about) himself more, and he doesn’t act quite like the Spenser we know later on. There’s really no need for us to know any of this, unless it’s to establish how observant Spenser is. A full-length black leather trench coat hung open. He had on a red sleeveless jumpsuit, black shirt with bell sleeves, high-heeled black patent leather boots with black laces. On her feet were blue suede hiking boots with thick corrugated soles and silver lacing studs.Ī black kid in a Borsalino hat came out of the library across the quadrangle. The girl had on bib overalls and a quilted ski parka. He was wearing black sneakers and brown socks, flared dungarees, a blue denim shirt and a fatigue jacket with staff sergeant’s stripes, a Seventh Division patch, and the name tag Gagliano. Under one of the saplings a boy and girl sat close together. There’s a lot more description of the setting and characters, with particular attention to what people are wearing: The Godwulf Manuscript is downright verbose by comparison. Over time Parker’s prose got more and more spare, especially his dialogue (I have joked that he seemed to be aiming for a book in which nobody actually has to talk at all, as they understand each other so well). Right away, I was conscious of differences, particularly in the writing style. It was very interesting, therefore, to go right back to the beginning of the series. The ones I own myself (and thus reread often) are all quite recent. Though I’m sure I’ve read it before, it wasn’t in my own Spenser collection–which is actually pretty small, since I originally read them from my family’s copies back in Vancouver. Parker’s first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf Manuscript.
It seemed appropriate to come back from Boston with a copy of Robert B.
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