Neither Last Nor Least

Painted Ladies may not be the very last Spenser book from the late Robert B. Parker, who died in January. A Facebook page set up by his family and Amazon.com list a May 2011 date for Sixkill, another Spenser mystery, and commenters on the Facebook page suggest yet one more Jesse Stone book. Because Parker hit the word processor with a pretty solid work ethic (and because, like it or not, for the last decade or so he's been coasting so much that most of his recent work could have been done in his sleep), there may very well be other stories in his files at various stages of completion. How the family will process those for publication, or whether they may even do as some other author estates have done and hire a ghostwriter to continue the series, is still an open question.

In the meantime, there is Painted Ladies, which doesn't really come very close to the Spenser franchise's glory days of the 1970s and 1980s but which does a better job of echoing them than just about anything Parker had published since the Clinton administration. Thieves have stolen a painting and want a certain professor to deliver the ransom money. He hires Spenser as a bodyguard during the transaction, but things don't go well. Nobody holds Spenser responsible for the problems except for Spenser himself, so he goes digging for answers. Those answers will involve Nazi art thefts and cast a jaundiced eye on the silliness that pervades so much of university life, described with Parker's usual arid wit.

Along the way, we get some classic Spenser touches that Parker seemed to have forgotten or overlooked in recent novels. The events of the case give him several chances for self-reflection on who he is and why he does what he does, both in soliloquy and with his longtime paramour Susan Silverman.  Even though this failure wasn't his fault, Spenser's belief it was means he takes the consequences of it seriously, something Parker had more or less glossed over recently, like in the awful Hundred-Dollar Baby or the limp Rough Weather. Although nothing like the four-volume arc of change and growth that Spenser's failure put him and Susan on starting in A Savage Place, Ladies offers a refreshing return of a Spenser who didn't just glide through all the wrongs he had to confront without being affected by them.

A fan of the way Spenser used to describe in recipe-level detail a dish he cooks for himself and Susan? It's in there. Like the punch-by-punch recap of a top-quality scuffle, the kind of touch that used to marry Parker's literary gift and obvious intellect to a violent and sometimes scary world that's just as real? It's in there. Like the way that Spenser the tactician used his own mind and resources to outwit as well as outfight his opponents? It's in there too.

At 78, Parker would have known that his last Spenser couldn't be very many years off, even if he had no idea when it would be or that it would come so soon. Perhaps he started to write with that in mind; that each book might be his last. Perhaps he thought about how he wanted Spenser and company to step off the stage, and those thoughts brought effort and life into his writing that he'd mostly been missing for many a year. It's hard to say, and I guess Sixkill and other "final" books will show us if that's true or not. I really hope it is, because despite its own fuzzy edges and definite déjà vu shading, Painted Ladies makes a fine capstone to a couple of top-level careers: the knight-errancy of Spenser and the writing of Robert B. Parker. It'd be a shame if Sixkill and whatever else is left don't measure up to it.