In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler Page A

championing a just cause, who won’t back down, even from impossible odds. Despite his self-awareness, he is that which he mocks, a noble PI, armed and humorous, fighting valiantly to uphold his code of honor.

PARKER AND SPENSER
A COLLABORATION
    | LOREN D. ESTLEMAN |
    ROBERT B. PARKER and Louis L’Amour have more in common than a guaranteed spot on the New York Times list of bestselling writers: From the late 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, they saved America’s place in world literature.
    At a time when America’s eastern intelligentsia was performing last rites for the Western, L’Amour’s frontier novels finished consistently among the top five most popular books in the world. When Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript , appeared in 1973, Ross Macdonald, the last surviving member of the trinity that included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, was nearing the end of his Lew Archer, private detective, series—drawing the curtain, somesaid, on a tradition that began in 1920. Within a handful of years, Spenser would sell in the millions and drag dozens of new private eye writers into print on the broad tails of his trenchcoat.
    When a juggernaut like the Western cedes much of its share of the market to competitors, the talking heads take notice and write its obituary. They overlook the fact that no other genre has ever commanded so much attention. It stood to reason, given the spread of technology, from primitive video games to Twitter, that the Western would surrender its dominance. What it has done—as opposed to the fat historical melodramas of the 1950s and nearly all of so-called mainstream fiction—is survive. In theaters, it has outlasted the comedy short, the travelogue, and the cartoon. In 100 years, not a twelvemonth has passed that has not included a major Western motion-picture release.
    The outlook was not so encouraging in bookstores, where the Western racks would have been crowded out the door long before by updated bodice-rippers, grunge-punk science fiction, and flashy techno-thrillers had not Louis L’Amour’s books stood fast against the pressure, dozens at a time. Similarly, the long, quixotic, bantering, pugilistic history of the American private eye saga might have gone to the scrapheap but for the unavoidable sight of every title in the Spenser series lined up in a box display at the front of the shop.
    Intellectuals—pale, dyspeptic creatures—wrung their hands at the public’s poor taste. They’d rather we slogged our way through James Joyce or snarled our brains in the ropy dependent clauses of William Faulkner. Even that vulgarian Ernest Hemingway was preferable to a lug like Parker. Mickey Spillane dealt this kind of snobbery a devastating blow when some sourpuss pundit challenged him to defend the fact that seven of the ten then-bestselling novels of all time featuredSpillane’s Mike Hammer: “You should be happy I didn’t write three more.”
    While our melting-pot society was distractedly searching for its place in the cultural firmament, that spot was already being filled. Just as jazz and rock-and-roll built a national art form from material dismissed as junk, the Western and then the hardboiled detective story assumed its critical place alongside Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy, and they did it by way of dime novels and pulp magazines that were cheap enough to read and throw away—but not to forget.
    How appropriate, then, that the publishing concern of Street & Smith gave us both Ned Buntline’s many Buffalo Bill adventures in the Wild West and Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, private detective, thrillers in the era of Prohibition and Depression, as the rip-roaring Cody who appeared in print and the two-gun-packing Williams are one and the same: American originals, acting while others sit and make plans. A society born in the Caesarean throes of rebellion places its faith in heroes who operate outside established