A brief Farewell.

When I was a lad of thirteen, I picked up a book on a whim; it was in the junior high school library, in the paperback section, and I have no idea why. It was called THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT and it was a reasonably short (handy for the teenager with limited time), and written in short chapters, and most of it was dialogue.

I thought Spenser was the coolest detective ever.

Of course, I knew detectives; my Father was a fan of Holmes, and Poirot, and somebody named Smith who went a-hunting Fu Manchu; but Spenser was cool; smart, good with his fists and his gun (but only when he needed to), and he had a simple moral code, which never wavered. It boiled down to a simple rule: the strong must protect the weak.

He had a girlfriend; a committed relationship without the need for a formal definition. Susan Silverman, the love of his life. And he had a wing man, a fellow known only as Hawk. And if it was possible to be cooler than Spenser, then THAT was Hawk. And, of course, there was Pearl, the Wonderdog. I think there was more than one Pearl, but it didn't matter, it was always Pearl.

One of my favorite traits was that Spenser and Hawk and Susan didn't age in real time. They were always in the present, but in the beginning, Spenser served in Korea; I always imagined this seventy something guy busting heads in Boston. But I don't think he ever got past fifty five.

I read about one Spenser book a year from that day to this day. And I read some other works of his, as well. There was a kind of comfort in the reading of it, like an old friend, or a comfortable sweater.

Robert B. Parker died (apparently, at his writing desk) yesterday morning, and my world got a little smaller and a little darker.

I'll miss them all.