It isn't always heavy-duty lit with me, day in and day out, studying the social and historical questions, banging away at injustice, insulting right-wingers, offering practical jokes and lame humor.I'm about much more than that, folks.
Sometimes I stick my nose into a special kind of book and it stays there for hours, giving me enormous pleasure. When I do this I don't have to retrace a paragraph, consult footnotes, digress into arcane asides and associated minutiae.
All I have to do is enjoy the ride.
I may read the book through in one sitting, or forsake sleep to finish it. I'm hooked by the end of the first line, and I read the book cover to cover, the cleverness of the writing and the story reeling me in.
I'm helpless because the dialogue is riveting, often in the vernacular of the street, and the story unfolds with an organic seamlessness that cries perfection. That perfection resembles street poetry, real language captured by the recorder-like minds of a few genre specialists.
Newspaper types refer to this sort of indulgence as "summer reading," or "a guilty pleasure," or "pure escapism." They sell it short.
I call it reading Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain.
They are the big three in my mind, heirs to the Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald (pictured) school of hard-boiled righteousness.
Their anti-hero protagonists are detectives, private and public, realists, cynical, flawed and mystique-driven. They have a healthy respect for violence, unleashing it only if the situation commands it.
They get nicked-up, turn an ankle here and there, bleed, but they don't die. Their unfortunate clients aren't always as lucky, or smart.
Of the big three, Leonard is the only one still with us, and he's 85. McBain died in 2005. Parker died just a few months ago.
I'll miss Leonard when he finally departs. He may be the best of them all, and the funniest. But all of them enrich my days and nights.
Read the eulogy for Robert B. Parker by his son David Parker here.
TS
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