I picked this up recently because having a three-in-one allowed me to get rid of some older single copies. It’s trade paperback size, but still easy to handle despite having three Spenser stories to read. The three are chronological within the series, so you get an arc, one story following the other. As entertainment, they’re all good reads, but from a critical standpoint from within the Spenser canon, they vary. Paper Doll is easily the best of the three, as it harkens back to the best of the series. Here is what you get with this Triple Shot of Spenser:


PASTIME

It had been a long spell since I’d read this entry in the Spenser canon, and while there are some great things about it, I found it less appealing this time around. The highlight, of course, is the expanding role of Vinnie in the Spenser world. Circumstances allow him to shift from being the dangerous right hand of Joe Broz, to the dangerous anti-hero when those circumstances force him to finally make the break from the gangster who has been almost like a father to him. It is the “almost” that comes into play here, and forces the split.

Yet there is far too little of that, and far too little of Linda Thomas, the woman across the way from Spenser in Valediction. She was in essence the turning point in this series, the exact moment where it became something different, and something less than it had been before. She was a breath of fresh air compared to the vain and pretentious Susan Silverman. With Susan Silverman finally out of the way, off fooling around with someone else, there was a moment in Valediction when many readers hoped that Spenser would drop Silverman like a bad habit. It would have moved both Spenser, and the series, away from Spenser’s smothering obsession with the insipid and undeserving Susan Silverman. But Parker extricated himself from that burgeoning relationship with Linda, and then came-a-runnin’ when the self-absorbed Silverman got herself in a terrible mess in A Catskill Eagle. They were back, more snobbish and devoted than ever, still too cool to get married, the depth and breadth of their love for Susan Silverman — “their” was no typo — more psychologically cloying than ever before.

I bring this up because in this book, Spenser does. Or rather Parker does. Because we learn much about Spenser’s past here, we also have a more wistful Spenser. In a return to the earlier books, he seems more aware of females other than Silverman in this one. And at least twice in Pastime, Spenser thinks briefly about Linda Thomas. As a reader, I almost felt that Parker was having some regrets about the literary decision which perhaps mirrored his own life. It would make sense, because Parker could not have been unaware of readers’ divided reactions about Silverman, and how he had hurt the series. In a later entry, Parker had Spenser himself finally own up to Susan Silverman’s terrible flaws, flaws which turn Spenser into something less than he might have been. He admits through Spenser’s ruminations that Spenser/Parker is not unaware of how vain and pretentious Susan Silverman is. Spenser just can’t do anything but accept it, however, because he loves her. He has too much invested in her. What Parker doesn’t say is that in a literary sense he’s let the good ones get away, and it’s too late to go back. The die was cast. It reads almost as an apology to the reader.

In this story, I could feel the change in the series this time around. The series still had echoes of what it had been, but they were wistful echoes. Parker was a terrific writer, and even the post Catskill Eagle books are good reads — almost all of them, at least. But I felt the change here more than in some of the others. You can feel it becoming about THEM, the plots taking a back seat to Silverman, the center of Spenser’s world and existence. Even though this one is more about Spenser’s surrogate son, Paul, from Early Autumn, and there are some tremendously written action sequences in the woods, and the great stuff with Vinnie and Joe Broz, and Broz’s kid, I felt the mold hardening here, and so did Parker. And it was too late to do anything about it.

Paul needs to find his mother, if for no other reason than he needs to resolve some issues before he marries. But it turns out she’s hooked up with another sleaze-ball in a long line of them. And her new beau has run off with a ton of Joe Broz’s money. Broz’s feelings for his own son mirror Spenser’s for Paul. But Gerry isn’t cut out for Joe’s line of work, and things get ugly before there’s any resolution. In fact, it leads to the split by Vinnie from Joe, when it becomes clear that though he is the son Joe never had, he’ll never be Joe’s son. There are three rites of passage in this book — Paul’s, Gerry’s, and Vinnie’s.

There’s far too much psychobabble in this one — another Susan Silverman side effect — and far too little of the scenes with Vinnie and Broz. A lengthy and violent confrontation in the woods is good stuff, but it doesn’t quite elevate this one enough. It’s good, but you can feel the entrenching of patterns here. Pearl the wonder dog is introduced in this one. She is, of course, Susan’s dog, given to her by an ex-husband (lucky sod, he got away). Dogs are wonderful, you can’t not love them. But you just know Spenser’s going to end up doing the dog-walking, the feeding, and especially the cleaning up. Sort of the same thing he does for Susan Silverman. So as I turned the final page on this one, I had mixed feelings about the direction this series took. Maybe Parker did, too.


DOUBLE DEUCE

Double Deuce is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity of the entire Parker series, in my opinion. Coming on the heels of Pastime, and though a good read overall, it suffers from the same malady as that book — too much Spenser and Susan Silverman, too much psychobabble. Pastime should have had more Vinnie, and Double Deuce should have had far more of Hawk and his connection to the ghetto from which he’d made his way out, at great cost. I’m aware that people point to this as Hawk’s book because of the overall story-line, but having read this several times over the years, and now re-reading it, my disappointment is palpable. By shifting the focus of the series to Spenser and Susan, which really began in Valediction with another missed opportunity, it’s as if Parker could not allow Hawk to have the depth and backstory he deserved, placing him on equal footing with Spenser and Susan. So Parker kept the story-line to a formula of dialog and psychobabble, and Susan. Lots of Susan.

While this entry seemed like a cool one when I first read it all those years ago, reading it now I can see what might have been — not just for Hawk, but the entire series. Spenser gives us a wonderful opening, as young Devona Jefferson clings to her baby in the projects and is brutally gunned down. By having this sort of prolog, Parker could easily have interspersed the story of gangs, and the similarity between Hawk and young Major, with chapters where Hawk is alone with his thoughts, remembering his own youth, before he became the Hawk we know. It would have given Hawk the depth he deserved. Instead we get the Spenser and Susan stuff, moving in together and then analyzing it all to death, when what it really came down to is that they didn’t belong together — mainly because of her vanity and pretension, not Spenser’s work.

The promise of the poignant opening — one of the best in the series — continues for a bit, as Hawk corrals Spenser into helping him clean up Double Deuce, and find out who killed Devona and her baby. The people he’s doing it for have suspect motives, one of them seeking the limelight as a platform. Hawk is also involved with a woman — the real reason he’s doing this — who works for a popular television journalist looking to exploit the situation for ratings. Then there’s a woman named Erin Macklin who is genuinely doing some good with the kids. Naturally, we get a healthy dose of Parker’s Boston-liberal viewpoint because he writes her — of course — as an EX-nun. She does whisky shots with Spenser at one point in the narrative. By writing her in this way, it gives Parker an opportunity to use Freud student, Theodor Reik’s quote — “The ways of the Lord are often dark, but never pleasant.” It was not the first time Parker had used this quote, as I recall. Un-huh.

Another issue lies with the plot — there isn’t one. Okay, maybe there is one, but it’s barely there. This is mostly just Spenser and Hawk sitting around waiting, in a chess game between Hawk and the young kid in whom he sees himself. It begs for Hawk’s real story, some flashbacks, or even some intimate scenes between Hawk and Jackie, but hey, then the series wouldn’t have been ALL about Spenser and Susan, ad nauseam. So Hawk gets shortchanged here, just as Vinnie got shortchanged in Pastime. Yes, it’s their moment to either shine (Hawk) or break out (Vinnie), but because of what Parker had done with Linda in Valediction, it could only be a spotlight, not a floodlight. We get some stuff with Tony Marcus before Double Deuce is over, but it all just falls into Spenser and Hawk’s lap. By this point in the series Parker had already made plot secondary to that elephant in the room which was Spenser and Susan. It’s a real shame. At one point, I just wished Vinnie would show up and pop everybody.

I’m still giving this three solid stars, because there are flashes of great stuff here. In it’s favor it is a quick, easy read which will entertain if you haven’t read it before. But for those who’ve read the series time and again over the years, it’s obvious that Double Deuce doesn’t go as deep as it could — or should have — into Hawk. I really think if Parker had written Double Deuce differently, he would never have allowed Hawk to become Tonto to Spenser’s Lone Ranger, which was already happening. The same could be said of Vinnie. Maybe that’s why Parker didn’t, because if he had, the series could no longer have been just about Spenser and the annoying Silverman. Perhaps that’s another reason why the next book in the series, Paper Doll, was so much better. He knew he’d blown this one…


PAPER DOLL

“Quirk flashed his badge, and put it away. It could have said Baker Street Irregulars on it, for all the clerk had a chance to read it.”


Falling where this does within the Spenser canon, two books down the road from Pastime — where you could sense an undercurrent of Parker’s regret at changing the focus of the series to Spenser’s relationship with the perpetually annoying and snobbish Susan Silverman, rather than the mystery and plotting — Paper Doll is shockingly good, and shocking in that here, we get a backhand acknowledgement that something has gone askew. What is more, is that Parker does something about it, as though openly — if alas, only briefly — revolting against himself.

It’s been quite some time since I’d tackled this one, and found it marvelous. Though Spenser’s cloying interactions with the vain Susan Silverman are scattered throughout the narrative, they are lower-key than usual, and feel less intrusive. In fact, she doesn’t even appear until around chapter ten, because Parker has remembered what the Spenser series once was, and decided to write an homage — to himself. How do we know it was deliberate, and that Parker was revolting? Within the narrative of looking into the death of Loudon Tripp’s wife, Spenser finds they had been leading separate lives, while still living together. It bothers Spenser that the Tripps had separate bedrooms, for example. He is telling Silverman how something about the couple’s relationship feels all wrong. And then we get this gem of unadulterated irony —


SPENSER: “They’re perfect. She was perfect. His love was all-encompassing. His devotion is unflagging.”

SUSAN: “And there’s a legal limit to the snow here.”

SPENSER: “Yeah.”


Wow. Freud, heal thyself. It’s as if Parker is telling readers — no, he’s screaming at his readers, “I know, already!” And at least briefly, it creates a watershed moment, and a return to the kind of plotting and mystery we hadn’t seen in a long time in this series, so devoted was it to the snow job Parker had laid on with a scoop shovel. Parker acknowledged it, then he did something about it, and gave us Paper Doll. While Paper Doll isn’t perfect, with elements of the case solving themselves, rather than being solved by good detective work, it’s still excellent compared to what the series had become. And while something is unresolved at the end of Paper Doll — another failing of later entries in the Spenser canon — this time it’s intentional, and as morally ambiguous as Spenser’s solution to April Kyle’s problem in Ceremony.

Loudon Tripp wants to know why his perfect wife was killed. With limited resources and high profile pressure because of who Tripp is, the seemingly random attack, is written off as just that. But Tripp doesn’t buy it, and Quirk sends him Spenser’s way, knowing no one can be more annoying than Spenser in his pursuit of the truth. And Spenser gets annoying real fast. Loudon’s teenage kids are brats, and everything Spenser discovers contradicts the glowing image of the important couple in Boston society. When he decides to go at it from the other end, looking into Olivia’s background, in case someone may have wanted to do her harm, things get suddenly ugly, and Spenser finds himself locked up and threatened.

Enter Martin Quirk, in what might be his finest moment of the entire series. Why Spenser and Hawk place Quirk in the same stratosphere of potential violence as themselves becomes all too clear. Though it’s only a flash, what had only been implied about Quirk within the series is shown here. Though the violence is left to Spenser, it’s clear that Quirk is just as formidable as Spenser, Hawk, and Vinnie, just as had been suggested time and again in earlier books. It’s Quirk’s moment to shine, and probably his most memorable appearance in the long-running series.

There is a lot going on here, plot-wise, from powerful political forces, to decades-old infidelities, and a husband in complete denial. And there turns out to be even more in this tough, violent and well-plotted entry more reminiscent of earlier books than post Valediction entries. Gay cop Lee Farrell is introduced in this one, Quirk having him liaison with Spenser. Again, in a return to earlier Spenser books, there is depth here, rather than preachy espousals. Farrell’s lover is dying of AIDS, and it affects his ability to focus. Parker handles it in a low-key way, even when Spenser and Susan attend the funeral, adding quiet poignancy to Farrell’s pain, rather than using flippant monologue to make it about how liberally cool Spenser and Susan are. Again, a return to the old Spenser books.

Rich and satisfying, with an almost out-of-the-blue revelation we should have seen coming due to someone’s odd behavior, and an ending as unresolved as we as readers guiltily hoped it might be, this is — almost — a return to greatness for this series. There are still some excellent ones to come in this series, though they were scattered among the weeds. But here, Parker seems to tackle the problems — both in the case, and with fans who were growing weary of the series — head-on. The result is a Spenser entry like we hadn’t gotten in a very long time. Sharp, crisp, moving and sometimes violent, this is a great read.


There’s a lot to like here in Triple Shot because these are all quick, easy reads. Your satisfaction might depend on how many others in the canon you’ve read, or how often you’ve read them, because the more familiar you are with this series, the more pronounced the flaws which eventually turned a great series that went beyond mere entertainment into a very good series as entertainment. All three in this compilation are worth reading, however, and great fun on a certain level. ( )