Review of Night Passage by Robert Parker (Jove, 1997)

Having lost his wife and job as a homicide detective in the LAPD, and despite being drunk in the interview, Jesse Stone has landed the role of chief of police in Paradise, Massachusetts, near to Boston.  In fact, Stone only has the job because he’s an alcoholic and thus perceived to be easily controllable.  Paradise is run by Hasty Hathaway owner of the local bank, commander of the small town’s militia, and a believer in the rights of individuals over government.  To fund the arming of his militia so they can assert their rights, Hathaway has been laundering money for the mafia.  When the previous police chief wouldn’t do as he was told he was eased out of the way.  While Stone has a drink problem, he’s also no push over, and when a set of murders start to occur shortly after he arrives rather than turn a blind eye he’s determined to bring some law and order to Paradise.

Night Passage is the first novel in the Jesse Stone series.  Stone is a typical flawed but dedicated cop, an alcoholic who’s trying to straighten his life out after his wife cheated and then left him.  Hired as the new chief of police he finds himself in a small town that has its share of colourful characters and troubling events.  Parker has an engaging voice and the pace and plot keeps the pages turning.  However, while the story is entertaining it’s also rather fanciful as the delusions of a local kingpin and his bodybuilder enforcer are used to create a series of plot devices.  Moreover, Jesse’s relationship with his ex-wife seemed somewhat forced and the denouement is a little flat.  The result is a tale that rattles along and is enjoyable, but also felt a bit overly contrived.

Review of The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert Parker (1974, Houghton Mifflin)

Boston in the early 1970s.  A wise-cracking private investigator, Spenser has been hired by a university to recover the Godwulf manuscript, a rare medieval illuminated text.  His initial focus is a student radical group who oppose the forces of capitalism.  When one of their members calls him in the early hours he arrives at her apartment to find her heavily drugged holding a gun and her boyfriend shot dead.  She swears that he was killed by two men and the gun forced on her, but to the police it looks like an open and shut case.  Spenser, however, believes she might be telling the truth and her rich parents hire him to discover the truth.  Others though are not so keen for him to be meddling in their affairs.

First published in 1973, The Godwulf Manuscript is the first in the Spenser series that had reached book #40 by the time of Parker’s death in 2010 and also spawned a hit TV show and some TV movies.  Spenser, as introduced in the book, continues the hardboiled, American PI tradition of the wise-cracking, womanising, tough guy investigator, which is perhaps no surprise given Parker’s own interests in the private-eyes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, on which he wrote his PhD dissertation.  While the theft of a medieval manuscript sounds like a relatively sedate case for a tough guy PI the tale soon shifts focus as Spenser tries to free a student framed for murder and tangles with both cops and the mob.  Never short of a wise-crack, Spenser manages to rub up the wrong way just about everyone he meets and progresses from one scrape to the next in the pursuit of justice.  A good example of oeuvre, tightly written and rattling along at a fair clip, the book is an entertaining read that will appeal to fans of hardboiled PI tales.