Robert B. Parker: Not a bad Western writer for a crime novelist

By Old Hoppy May 28, 2009 in Western Writers

As crime/private eye novelists go, Robert B. Parker of "Spenser" fame is not too bad of a Western writer, too.

If you are completely unfamiliar with the private-eye character Spenser of novel and television fame, you must be living in an alternate universe, or completely uninterested in detective fiction/crime novels. Tell me that isn't true. I'm a major Spenser fan myself, and I've read just about all of Robert B. Parker's novels, including the Sonny Randall crime novels, his first Phillip Marlow novel, and all but three of his "non-genre" novels. So, yes, I am a big fan.

What surprised me, however, was Parker's ability to do Western fiction. His "Gunman's Rhapsody" is a nearly operatic presentation of the Earps and those events we call "the shootout at the OK Corral" in Tombstone, Arizona. The other three Westerns he's done, one just released last month, focus on fictional gunfighters Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. I highly recommend those books in what he's called the Appaloosa Trilogy: "Appaloosa" (made into a movie released in 2008), "Resolution," and "Brimstone" (released last month). To use something of a cliche, his gunfighters, his cowboys, whores, saloons, cow towns, and all the rest ring with a true sense of "gritty" reality. And, they are well-paced and have flashes of humor.

If I have any criticism of Parker's western novels it's one which I have of all his non-Spenser novels: the dialog makes his characters sometime sound like Spenser and his sidekick Hawk placed in different settings or dressed in period clothing. That's not entirely a bad thing, because his terse dialog always snaps and crackles. And, that may simply be my perception because I have read and enjoyed all the Spenser novels for so long.

(Not Yet an eBay User? Register Now -- It's Easy and FREE!)