Parker’s Spenser novels amount to one of the finest literary achievements possible in that genre.

Parker and Dick Francis are markedly different stylists, of course, but they are working in the same genre and I think today that Mr. The next summer, I picked up a paperback Parker, I think at the suggestion of my sister (like him, a graduate of Colby College), and, hooked immediately, I began the collections, hers and mine, maintained and re-read with unflagging enthusiasm almost twenty years later. Parker, interviewed within, who at the time, although I had not read him, was an easy contender for the title with which I festooned Dick Francis, and surely now he has secured it. Doing so turned out to be ironic, for the cover of the issue in which that article appeared featured a photograph of Robert B. In 1985, having read all his books to date, I wrote a piece about Dick Francis for The Armchair Detective, celebrating the trademark Dick Francis protagonist as worthy for, essentially, never blaming others and never giving up-traits that I believe can be carried to a fault in life, but they make good literature and I praised Dick Francis as “the reigning Phoenix,” Shakespeare’s phrase for the artist who with his protagonist bursts forth from his own ashes into new life.

Editor’s Note: The title of this piece is derived from a work by Mark Twain about James Fenimore Cooper and, as all but the lamest reader will immediately perceive, it is meant as a facetious allusion: the present writer reveres the established author…but, in these litigious days, the writer being a doughy schoolmaster and the author being a literate thug, it is important to clarify such things at first.

Hush Money by Robert B. Parker