As many of you know, I read plenty of detective novels. Today the news comes to me that Robert B. Parker has died.
He of course, wrote all the Spenser novels (which became the TV show with Robert Urich), the Jesse Stone novels (which became the TV movies starring Tom Selleck), the Sunny Randall novels, a bunch of excellent standalone books, and recently a few Westerns — Appaloosa was filmed with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen in a remarkably faithful adaptation now on DVD, and he sequeled it a bit ago with Resolution.
Parker was a spare writer. His later work is almost exclusively dialogue. When I would read a Spenser novel, I would usually end up forcing a passage on my wife as an example of “here’s how to do it.” His economy managed to get across enormous emotional content, and his last books were way beyond being pulp.
Luckily for me, I have a huge backlog of Parker books I have never read. I may go on a shopping spree, because I’m going to miss him.
