In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler

feel anywhere near bad enough. Neither do you. You’re so goddamned empathetic you’ve jumped into her frame. ‘And you thought you felt you had to stand by them. Anyone would.’ Balls. Anyone wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.”
    In tracking down evidence in Mortal Stakes , Spenser encounters a pimp named Violet, who refers him to Patricia Utley, the madam of a high-priced call girl service, who ownsa four-story townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan. She talks of taking an eighteen-year-old hooker under her wing and teaching her how to talk to people, how to use makeup, how to dress.
    “You and Rex Harrison,” Spenser says. He doesn’t mention My Fair Lady , but later in the same context calls her “Pygmalion,” making his meaning clear. The literary allusions have an edge, ironically equating a sex-peddler with a professor of phonetics. And he doesn’t let up, even though the woman is cooperating and giving him the information he needs. He sticks it to her for exploiting the girl: “You keep telling yourself you’re a businesswoman and that’s the code you live by. So you don’t have to deal with the fact that you are also a pimp. Like Violet.”
    Spenser is so rude to the woman she has her goon throw him out. And yet he will turn to her years later, when faced with another moral dilemma: what to do with another teenage prostitute, April Kyle.
    Spenser is often faced with moral dilemmas. He does not let them thwart him. As much as he may moralize them intellectually, he deals with them pragmatically. In Ceremony , he introduces April to Patricia Utley, the madam he denounced so eloquently for employing a teenage prostitute in Mortal Stakes . We have Spenser the panderer, enabling a teenage hooker—in effect, pimping for her. Has he changed his moral position? Not in the least. The one girl had a chance at a better life. The other did not. April would be turning tricks regardless. In Spenser’s estimation, it would be better for her to be turning fewer tricks for a high-society madam, who would look after her health, than be a crack whore for some sleazeball who would beat her. Realizing this, Spenser doesn’t hesitate to endorse a life of prostitution for the girl that he has worked so hard to save. As Susan points out during Spenser’sstruggle with Jerry and Joe Broz, Spenser’s code is idealized; his view of the world is not.
    In Mortal Stakes , Spenser empathizes with the baseball pitcher who is hopelessly conflicted because gamblers are threatening to reveal secrets about his wife’s past unless he throws games. The man is torn between wanting to protect his family and not wanting to hurt his team.
    As Spenser tells Susan,
    “I know what’s killing him. It’s killing me too. The code didn’t work.”
    “The code,” Susan said.
    “Yeah. Jock ethic, honor, code, whatever. It didn’t cover this situation.”
    “Can’t it be adjusted?”
    “Then it’s not a code anymore.”
    Yet that code is not inflexible. Though he believes in the sanctity of life, Spenser admits to Paul in Early Autumn that he has sometimes killed people: “I had to. I don’t if I don’t have to. Nothing’s absolute.”
    “What do you mean?” Paul asks.
    Spenser answers, “I mean you make rules for yourself and you know that you’ll have to break them because they won’t always work.”
    This is Spenser, plain and simple, the pragmatist, the knight in shining armor, the man with principles and ethics and a code of behavior who would readily toss it all out the window if the situation required. Unapologetically, and without making excuses. As he tells Paul, “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, boy.”
    Spenser says it ironically, self-deprecatingly, mocking his bravado, and yet for him it is true. It is inherent in his codethat a man has to do what he believes is right, no matter how difficult that may be. At the same time he sees the humor in that code, sees himself as a parody of a heroic figure, a lone knight