Customer Reviews

Hush Money

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I had avoided reading Hush Money for many months because I feel that Parker has been coasting for many years. I have been getting tired of the basic plot of the invincible Spenser and his trusty sidekick Hawk bashing their way through mysteries.

Hush Money reminded me of how much I enjoy Parker's writing. His characters are fun to listen to, and his descriptions are very funny -- I laughed out loud many times.

Overall, I'd recommend the paperback version of this book. It's a quick, enjoyable read.

"Hush Money" is one of the best "Spenser" novels in years. Not THE best only because it probably could use a little more violence and gun play. SPOILER: Spenser and Hawk beat up only four people. And they don't even shoot anyone!

You think maybe they're getting old? Nah!

But seriously, "Hush Money" is Robert Parker at his finest. Spenser is at his wise-cracking, one-liner best and Hawk is; well, he is Hawk. Audacious, inscruptible, redoubtable Hawk. Plus, we get a glimpse into Hawk's early life, before he met Spenser.

And as another bonus, near the end, we get to see another side of Susan. I never liked her more. But don't skip to the final pages, it will spoil the fun.

If you are a "Spenser" fan, you'll enjoy this book. If, however, you are a politically-correct liberal (or from San Francisco, same thing), you'll probably hate it. As a personal side note, I am a fairly conservative African-American - no Buchanan-lover by any means (pun intended for those who've read the book) but defintely neither liberal nor politically correct - and I can testify to the self-righteous hypocrisy and racism of the liberal White academics to Robinson Nevins. It is almost as if Robert Parker was privy to some of the conversations I've had in academia.

"Hush Money" is an excellent book; on many levels.

HUSH MONEY Robert B. Parker Putnam $22.95 309 pp.

In this latest installment, Spenser hooks up with Hawk for the entire novel: he also hooks up with Susan Silverman enough times to turn foreplay into fiveplay, sixplay, even sevenplay. Spenser fans need read no further to know that a lot of fun is in store for them.

However, readers less familiar with this venerable series may need a few more facts. Spenser, the one-named private eye, has beaten up bad guys and bandied about bon mots on the bestseller lists for some twenty-odd years, in some twenty-odd novels. A poetry-spouting ex-pugilist with a gastronomic flair, he and his sidekick Hawk could waltz through the entire WWF stable without soiling their sartorial splendor. Hawk, imperturbable quick-tongued African American, was Spenser's "homey" before there was such a word. In HUSH MONEY, Hawk asks Spenser to help an African American professor at Harvard, denied tenure for spurious reasons; he supposedly spurned a young man who then committed suicide. As Spenser soon discovers, the professor was straight, and the boy was killed. Then, while Spenser carefully skirts the pitfalls of political correctness in the groves of academe, his main squeeze Susan entreats him to take on a stalking case for a friend of hers. Before long, Spenser finds himself treading lightly around the grounds of sexual harrassment, as the beautiful stalkee becomes his stalker. Spenser sets up the boy's murderer for he and Hawk to take out, while he sets up his stalker for Susan to take on.

The plot here is as thin as the "villain." However, the real pleasure, the power actually, lies in Parker's wordplay, a form of homage to Spenser's namesake, the great English poet. When Spenser's stalker demands to know what's so great about Susan, he replies without a beat, "The way she wears her hat,...the way she sips her tea." When his nemesis calls him an "unutterable" unnameable, Spenser admires the epithet rather than be insulted. At his best here, Parker spins a three-page tension-filled stake-out around the word "guileful." And, as always, he has a way with the vernacular: Spenser notes that what they have "...almost sounds like a plan; "'Do,' Hawk said, `don't it.'"

Good writing about people who are good company makes for a good time, and a great read.

While TV, in particular Star Trek, has Spock, the mystery genre has Hawk, perhaps the greatest literary creation of all time. In this outing of Boston's top PI, Spenser finds himself being asked to come to the aid of those closest to him. Hawk has a friend whose son is a professor at a big-time university, and it seems that the young man has been jobbed out of tenure. Meanwhile, Susan has a friend who is being stalked by an ex-something-or-another. So everyone's favorite poetry quoting tough guy finds himself on two cases with the hole in the donut as renumeration, and it isn't long before events get quite bizarre.

This is a different kind of Spenser romp. The body count is low, but the action is still quite high. I especially liked the fight in the campus office. We learn more about Hawk's difficult and disturbing past, and plus we get to see him in action pretty much throughout the whole story. We also get to see Spenser rampaging his way through a tenure committee, and we also are treated yet again to further glimpses of his devotion to Susan. Throughout, Parker calls up the old-school hard-boiled PI yarn, and the story adheres faithfully to the genre template laid out by the dean of hard-boiled noir, Raymond Chandler.

Many meaty themes and issues are tackled here with laser-like precision. Parker manages to juxtapose race, sexuality (mainly homosexuality) and politics in a volatile mix which keeps you turning the pages. In addition, several life lessons are dropped here and there, and the psychological motivations of the characters are always excellent. I actually found myself liking Susan's presence this time around. Though I have nothing against the character, she kind of gets in the way of the central premise of tough guys going after and beating up crooks. Then again, she does add another classy dimension and some refined intellectual texture to each story, and to Spenser.

This outing worked really well for me, and I have read it a dozen times at least so far. In fact, it may be the best of the lot. If I were going to write hard-boiled noir with sarcastic wit, this book along with Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye would be my templates.

Robert Parker has grown into a major writer. He began as a modern-day writer of hard-boiled detective novels -- one of the many heirs to the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Boston as the locale, Hawk as the sidekick, Susan as the confidante and lover -- these recur in title after title. But Parker has, on the whole, not succumbed to repetition: his characters have difficulties, grow, interact. Still, no one would claim that his grip on character is that of Chandler nor his insight into psychology is that of Ross MacDonald. Nor are his plots as intricate as many mysteries, but then hard-boiled detectives always -- Spenser is no exception -- subscribe to the dictum (Saul Bellow's line in another context, in HENDERSON THE RAIN KING) that "truth comes in blows."

But HUSH MONEY reinforces what has been a growing realization on the part of Parker's readers: that he has become a master of repartee, or dialogue that is direct, crisp, witty. The joy of a Parker novel has become, in the past eight or nine years, the joy of encountering language that zips and crackles, as crisp and astringent as biting into a stick of cold celery. He is not unlike -- and this will be a strange comparison -- a Jane Austen for our age: his characters speak the lines we ourselves would like to speak, if only we were quick-minded enough and had a deep fund of cool and humor. We can be happy encountering great dialogue, and today only Elmore Leonard writes dialogue that is as much fun as Parker's.

So like his other recent work, this novel is a joy to read. Yes, we get tired of the sentimentality of Spenser's perfect lover, Susan -- though re-encountering the interracial friendship between Spenser and Hawk, which never shirks from talking about race but remains intimate nonetheless, is a wonderfully refreshing phenomenon. It is both fun and enriching to see that, in contemporary America, it is possible for whites and blacks to be friends, friends who have no need to tip-toe around the shoals of American racial attitudes. Parker shows us what we as a nation can become -- what we as a nation, on the individual level, so often (and so unacknowledgedly) are.

This is not the first time Parker has taken on an academic environment; but in this case he has things exactly right. His is a satiric view of the small-mindedness that often characterizes the academic world, a view which sees the pretentiousness and categorizing that are the dark underside of academe. In this regard, the novel fits nicely with Richard Russo's academic masterpiece, STRAIGHT MAN.

So: for wonderful dialogue, a good look at the innards of academic life on a contemporary university campus, and one of the most sparkling friendships in modern fiction, try HUSH MONEY. You won't be disappointed.

Hush Money was my first Parker read. It won't be my last. His name has been familiar for years, but until recently his books hadn't floated atop my reading pile. Now I know why he's so highly regarded in the mystery field. Here's what I discovered:

Robert B. Parker is a master of dialogue. Virtually anyone who puts 80,000 words on paper is bound to come up with a clever phrase or two. Parker does it page after page. He has the uncanny ability to drop in the perfect comeback to every question and comment. Smiles and the occasional out-loud laugh are the result for readers. I haven't had so much fun reading a book in years.

The main characters, private investigator Spenser and his black sidekick Hawk, are very strong and well-done. One could argue that the characters are stereotypes--even cliche'. But they are examples as good as you'll find: witty, brave, irreverent, strong, unpretentious, open-minded, fair-minded, loyal, sexually magnetic, appropriately violent, and clever.

The shortcomings that prevent delivery of the fifth star are that Spenser's love interest, Susan, is too good to be true; Spenser's (and Hawk's) high vocabulary and reasoning are inconsistent with his blue-collar, average-guy image; and the plot is rather uninspiring. But that misses the point of this book. You read the book not for the gray matter challenge of the underlying mystery, but for the sparse and near-perfect utterings of Spenser, a classic, Chandleresque private detective.

Spenser hits his 25th anniversary with this one! Hawk gets him a case looking into a tenure denial, while Susan wants him to help with a stalking. As usual, nothing is simple. Spenser takes care of the stalker but the woman in question becomes addicted to his presence. Meanwhile, the tenure is wrapped up in race, gay pride, outings, and many other concepts.

It's amazing how well Parker does with "touchy subjects" - women stalking men, gays outing other gays, race-wise agendas being thwarted by those who should know better. I enjoy greatly reading about these kinds of situations and the moral dilemma that they pose.

That's not to say that the book really makes any sense. There are a number of huge plot holes. You don't really read Spenser for the mystery part - you read it for the lovely way Parker writes, for the Boston area mentions, and for the way issues are examined.

If you've not read Spenser before, you might want to start from the beginning - you get more out of the series when you understand where the characters are coming from. If you already enjoy Spenser, then you know what to expect - great writing, bizarrely flawed plots.

"Hush Money" begins with Hawk brining Spenser a client; Robinson Nevins, the son of Hawk's boyhood mentor, has been denied tenure at the University because of rumors that he was the lover of Prentice Lamont, a student and gay activist who committed suicide. Of course, as we have long come to expect with Robert B. Parker's novels in this series, no one will talk to our hero who eventually finds out the case is more and more complicated. There is also a secondary case involving a "friend" of Susan's, K. C. Roth, the victim of a stalker who finds our hero the proverbial white knight come to rescue her from any and all evils. This case gives Spenser something to do while the main case moves slowly along. The resolution of the main plot line is perhaps the most over the top resolution since the James Bondian climax of "A Catskill Eagle." I have spent the winter reading all of the Spenser novels in order and this has to be the most convoluted and complex case in the bunch and one of the few times Parker has really stretched credulity with me. Perhaps because I am defrocked college professor I have enjoyed Spenser's encounters over the years with various professors and administrators in their academic bastions (after all, this is where we started in "The Godwulf Manuscript"), but I have also appreciated the fact that such characters are drawn by Parker in lighter and darker shades of gray. "Hush Money" provides his best encounters which such intellectual denizens.

"Hush Money" is a slightly better than average Spenser story. The high points of this novel are when Hawk finally reveals some details about his life before meeting Spenser and when Susan decks someone (she also warns them they will "be sleeping with the fishes"). This underscore that the strength of Parker's novels has been the relationships of the key players, even with the cases have been less than compelling. I started reading these books because a friend said I would enjoy Spenser's caustic, literate wit, but ultimately I looked forward to each book because the story of Spenser and Susan Silverman is one of the better love stories you can find in contemporary fiction. I almost always find myself more interested in the discussions between these two lovers than in the particulars of the case. I can do without our hero cooking in every novel, he does not have to beat up on somebody or contemplate the moral implications fo his actions every time around, and if Hawk is off in Burma doing who know what I can live with that, but a Spenser novel without Susan is one missing its heart.

In Sudden Mischief, Parker started to erode his historical credibility. Susan's first husband, who a couple of books before had given her Pearl when he left for London, reappears. Unfortunately, now he hasn't seen Susan in 20 years, and his relationship with the dog has been forgotten. Also, Parker changes his mind on whether Giacomin's dad is still sending him money or not. This trend gets worse in Hush Money. Spenser should be about 65, and the same age as Hawk. However, we find out that Hawk is about 3 years older than a forty year old. This would be fine, if Parker decided to just go the Kinsey Mahone or Hercule Poirot route, which he would have to do soon anyway if he wanted Spenser to keep beating people up. But, the inconsistencies are worse; for example, his car blows up, and soon reappears. In addition, there are many awkward plot twists, and several times when credibility becomes an issue. Overall, this reads like a first draft. Parker fans will still want to read it- but at least avoid the hardback costs.

Typical Spenser. witty, hard nosed, careing, and plenty of other characters to play off of. Keeps you turning the pages