Robert B. Parker's other tough guy detective, Jesse Stone, is tailing a suspect through downtown Boston, and I'm following right along in my head because I know exactly where they are.
Jesse began to walk up his side of the street in the same direction Garner was walking on the other side. In fifteen minutes they were at the south corner of Boston Common where Boylston crosses Tremont, near the old cemetery...
I've been there, right there, a thousand times. I was there again just this past May. I know that spot, know that crossing, I've been in that cemetery. The painter John Singleton Copley's buried there.
A couple paragraphs later, Stone has followed his suspect to:
...the corner of Tremont and Park, where the entrance to the Park Street subway station spread out into a kind of plaza...There was a newspaper vendor on the plaza and somebody selling souvenirs from a pushcart, and somebody else selling popcorn. Kids with lavender hair and nose rings lingered on the corner. Jesse lingered on the far side of Tremont, waiting to see which way Garner would go. I f he turned in to the subway entrance, Jesse could sprint if he needed to, without Garner seeing him. Garner went and sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the plaza, across from the Park Street Church. Jesse walked a block past Park Street, up Tremont, and crossed and went back down and stopped in front of the church to read the historical plaque out front...
This spot I know even better. I used to cross it every day on my way to the bookstore where I worked back in college. The bells on the Park Street Church were always chiming nine as I walked past. I was supposed to be to work at nine. I was always five minutes late.
This is one of the things I enjoy about Parker's detective novels, his Spenser novels foremost, but also the Stone novels, and his Sunny Randall series. He takes me home. It's not just the place names that do it. He describes these old familiar places in ways that match how they look in my memories.
Driving into Boston from the north, there was a choice between the tunnel under the harbor and the bridge over the Mystic River. The tunnel was a little shorter...but on the Boston end you came up out of the tunnel into the boiling confusion of the largest urban renewel project in the country. Jesse took the bridge.
As they arched down toward the Charlestown end they could look down at the merge of the river and the gray sprawl of the harbor on their left. Below them was the old Charlestown Navy Yard, now mostly condominiums. Straight ahed the individuated buildings coalesced into the skyline.
Again, I was just there. I drove over that bridge on our way to see the Bunker Hill Monument and the USS Constitution and that is exactly what I saw as I did.
Of course, it's been so long since I lived in Boston and I've read so many of Parker's books since then that it may be that I don't remember the city I lived in; I "remember" the city as he's described it to me. Going over the Tobin Bridge it could have been that I was looking out through Parker's eyes.
But this post isn't a meditation on place in fiction or the effect of fiction on memory, athough I'd enjoy reading such a post if somebody else wants to write it.
Between Copley's grave and the Park Street Church, the guy Stone's tailing makes a pit stop at a McDonald's to buy a soda. Stone doesn't follow him in. Make a note of that. Stone doesn't follow him in.
They walked up Tremont Street across from the Common where a lot of people carrying backpacks, wearing shorts and sunglasses, were looking at maps One of them was taking a picture of a fat woman standing so that the McDonald's across the street would serve as a background. Garner went into the McDonald's and came out in a moment carrying a large diet Coke in a big paper cup with a clear plastic lid. There was a straw stuck through the little hole in the lid, and Garner took a thougtful pull on the diet Coke as he walked.
Again. Been there. Done that. That's the first two-story McDonald's I was ever in. But that's besides the point.
Bought a soda at McDonald's lately? Any size, any kind? Look at the cup?
How does Stone know Garner's drinking a Diet Coke?
All the soda cups at McDonald's are the same. White with the golden arches on them. Unless they're printed with some promotional stuff and have as Nathan Arizona says of the baby's jammies in Raising Arizona, "Yodas and shit" on them. The only way Stone could tell by looking that Garner ordered a Diet Coke is if he was standing close enough to see the dimple in the plastic lid, assuming that Garner was served by the one conscientious employee who bothered with punching the dimple.
Garner's a vain and prissy character, overly conscious of his looks, so it's a good bet that he did indeed order a diet Coke. But that's not what it says. It doesn't say that Jesse guessed it was a diet Coke. It's a statement of fact, a fact Stone couldn't know.
Parker's the one who knows. That's Parker telling us what's in the cup. But the narrative has been and continues to be throughout the novel limited third person, that is, everything we're told is supposed to be coming from Jesse's point of view.
A little mistake, that's all, right? Happens to the best of writers. A lapse of attention.
The trouble is Death in Paradise is full of lapses. So are the other two books in the series I've read, Night Passage and Trouble in Paradise. Maybe the Spenser novels are too, I just don't notice them. I'm a big fan of Spenser. Parker's Stone novels and his Sunny Randall novels leave me a bit cold. (Stone Cold. Get it? Get it?) Familiarity's some of it. Spenser himself is a lot of it. ("A fresh bastard" a character in one of George V. Higgins' novels calls him, in one of my favorite literary in-jokes.) Hawk and Quirke and even Susan Silverman are part of it too. Parker hasn't been able to come up with good supporting casts for Stone and Randall, although the gay caricature of himself he's made Sunny's occasional sidekick and muscle is pretty amusing.
But I think what I really don't like about the Stone novels is that in them Parker has given himself license to indulge all the tough guy detective cliches he either avoids or undercuts with humor in the Spenser novels, including the license to write sloppily.
Spenser is walled off from the excesses of the tough guy detective novel by his being a fresh bastard---that is, Parker has made him healthy, well-adjusted, fairly happy, and funny; he has a sense of humor---and by his love for Susan Silverman. Spenser is devoted to Susan and he's loyal to her and temperamentally monogomous, so unlike all the other tough guy detectives Spenser isn't spending half his novels having hot steamy sex with femme fatales and a good chunk of the rest of them failing to save the girl from doom and ending the novels pitying himself for his failure to save the dame he loved but knows he shouldn't have. (Travis McGee does a lot of this, but John D. MacDonald had his own ways of saving McGee from being just another tough guy detective novel hero.) Spenser does a little too much meditating on his own code of honor and how well he's living up to it, and way too much time rhapsodizing on the virtues of Susan Silverman, clothed and unclothed, at work and in bed, but for the most part his thoughts are on whatever case he's working on. His books are about the crime and its solution and the characters caught up in the mystery.
With too much of tough guy detective fiction the books are about the tough guy detective, who is way too often a pill.
And a self-pitying pill at that.
Jesse Stone's had a hard time of it. He's a former star athlete who tore up his shoulder just before he was about to move on to the pros. He's a drunk. He's been fired from his job as a homicide detective in Los Angeles and is barely hanging on as chief of the small police force in the Cape Ann town of Paradise. (Countess, are you there? Anne Laurie? Have you read any of the Stone novels? Is Paradise Manchester-by-the-Sea or Marblehead or Nahant or a little of all three or someplace I don't know about?) And he's divorced from his Susan Silverman but still madly in love with her, as she is with him, but they're kept apart by their addictions, his to booze, hers to men, idealized men who she hopes are sober and more marriageable Jesses. It's so sad. Boo hoo.
Stone spends an awful lot of his time thinking about his predicament and his reaction to it is fairly human. He feels bad for himself. But self-pity is not my favorite emotional background for a novel.
The relation between self-pity, sloppy writing, and the reason mystery novels don't often rise above their genre to the level of literature would make another interesting post I hope I have time to write this afternoon. Right now I have to run.
But first I'm going to go put the most recent Spenser on reserve at the library. The newest one, School Days, doesn't come out until September. I can't wait.
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