"The End," He Said.

No more wisecracks, no more cooking tips, no more slow meditations on life, morality, love, evil and baseball. Author Robert B. Parker died at his desk Monday -- a setting he would probably have preferred for his death to any except maybe a ballgame or a boxing match.

Parker created Spenser, a private detective who headlined 37 of his 65 books. Later he added Jesse Stone, a kind of younger version of Spenser who was a police chief in a small Massachusetts town, and Sunny Randall, a female private investigator who also worked in Spenser's Boston and who sometimes dealt with some of the same people. In recent years, he had written both Westerns and young adult novels, some of the latter of which were of Spenser as a young boy and adolescent.

With the exception of those two new genres, a lot of Parker's output over the last 10 years or so had become repetitious, almost as though he had cut and pasted sections of earlier novels together on a word processor but changed some character names and incidents just enough to not be reprints of the earlier works. But the snappy patter and wry observations of his central characters usually carried enough energy to keep readers going to the end of the story and feel glad they'd done so (As always, when I write about Parker, I exclude Hundred-Dollar Baby from that statement -- it's an ugly story with an ugly ending that fails on so many counts that if it were the first Parker book I read I'd have used the other 64 for kindling without cracking them open).

But if the length of his career meant that Parker would continue to produce even into the twilight of his skill's erosion, it also made for a long, long high point. He wrote his first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript, while teaching literature at Northeastern University. Although it took him several years to write, he sold the manuscript to a publisher in a mere three weeks, and it wasn't because of his pretty face.

Hoist a beer or punch a thug in ol' RBP's name if you've a mind to, or maybe toss off a witty quip that's even faster than your fists (and might necessitate their use, if said in the wrong company). But be careful that you live now so as to merit good things in the life to come -- St. Peter's just acquired a new bouncer, and he's not easily intimidated or fooled.

P.S. -- The post headline comes from Parker's rigorous devotion to the word "said" as a speech tag in his dialogue. Longtime fans know that when a different speech tag appears, Something Interesting is going on.