A Savage Place by Robert B. Parker (review)

88 Western American Literature A Savage Place. By Robert B. Parker. (New York: Delacorte, 1981. 184 pages, $14.95; rpt. Dell, 1983. $2.95, paperback.) When Spenser, hero of a series of detective novels, accepts a case which takes him from Boston to Hollywood, more is involved than protection for a TV newswoman who has uncovered a conspiracy. The case is also a fairly complex literary gesture. Parker calls attention to his debt to the tradition of the Southern California detective novel by bringing Spenser to the turf of his fictional ancestors; at the same time, even from the title and the quotation from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” which precedes the text, it is clear that Parker wants to explore Hollywood as a symbol, thus drawing on another Southern California literary tradition, the apocalyptic satire of Nathanael West and Evelyn Waugh. From his first appearance, Spenser has been compared, by readers, critics, and jacket blurbs, to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and to the late Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. He speaks a mixture of slang and wise­ crack which is pure Chandler. His complex code of honor, his charity and loyalty masked by cynical-seeming gruffness recall both predecessors. He is more of a physical caveman than even Marlowe, more of a pop psychologist than Archer. Like them, he lives in an uneasy relationship with the police, who consider him an interloper, but sometimes admire him for the purity of his code, while they must work within the constraints and expediencies of an imperfect system. Now, with his hero on the home streets of Marlowe and Archer, Parker occasionally seems to nudge us with sly references to the classic detective novels he admires — and on which he wrote his dissertation. Surely when a Sheriff’s Department investigator named “Bernie” appears briefly in one scene we are intended to recognize him as the Bernie Ohls we met in The Long Goodbye. As Spenser tries to protect his client, his rough-edged first-person narra­ tion develops a plot which adroitly combines the familiar elements: tangles with both sinister antagonists and the law, a romantic involvement with Candy, his client, which tests (not very hard) his granite values, several opportunities for him to demonstrate his skill with fist and gun, and at least one occasion when those skills are not enough. Local ambience — that quality at which Chandler excelled — is evoked well through Spenser’s observations. Spenser has been in LA before, so his reactions are not those of a rube; still, his frame of reference is Boston, and his values are nearly as traditional as the Brooks Brothers clothing he often wears. Southern California is alien, and he must seek for its historical and mythic significance. Thus he has much to say, like other literary tourists before him, about the strange emptiness of the streets, and possible effects of the weird blandness of the place on its resi­ dents. Nonetheless, Parker does not produce the jeremiad we might have expected, and his evaluation should strike even many Angelenos as basically balanced and fair — if excessively allusive. The hard-boiled detective novel is by now a form as tightly ordered as the Petrarchan love sonnet, and Parker plays his game skillfully. Spenser is Reviews 89 always interesting, dishing out violence and epigrams about life in the 80s at well-timed intervals. The book does its job, even if Spenser, for all his sword-and-sorcerery superman’s muscles, fails in his original charge to protect the woman. If the book disappoints at all, it is in the inventiveness of the plot. The revelation of organized crime’s involvement in the film industry does not shock, and the whole plot pales in comparison to the three-generation Oedipal tangles of Ross Macdonald, whose works still seem to me the triumph of the form. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University The Journey. By Anne Cameron. (New York: Avon, 1982. 307 pages, $5.95.) The Journey is a feminist Western. It can be enjoyed as a picaresque tale of two women fighting their way across the wild West, provided Cam­ eron’s hints at more serious intentions are not taken too seriously. Cameron...