Boston Op
By * Martha Duffy
GOD SAVE THE CHILD
by ROBERT B. PARKER 185 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.
It seems that this thriller writer is not trying to put anything over on anybody. Two years ago, he announced on the jacket of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, that he had written his doctoral dissertation on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Both of Robert Parker's novels, about a private eye known simply as Spenser, are filled with echoes of the masters. But Parker is really not a pirate. Instead, he resembles film makers like Jean-Luc Godard, who pay homage to great directors of the past with little vignettes so blatantly similar in style that no aficionado could miss or fail to savor them.
Pure Chandler. Take, for example, Spenser's reply to a smug and windy college president who wants to emphasize the "delicacy" of his predicament: "Look, I went to college once, I don't wear my hat indoors. And if a clue comes along and bites me on the ankle I grab it. I am not however an Oxford don. I am a private detective. Is there something you'd like me to detect or are you just polishing up your elocution for next year's commencement?" Pure Chandler. So is the president's riposte: "The district attorney told us you were somewhat overfond of your own wit."
There are other bouquets. At one point Spenser even calls himself Nick Charles to relieve the tedium of an inquiry. His Boston office, a block or so away from the infamous bar in George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, could be Philip Marlowe's in Los Angeles: "Second floor front, one room with a desk file cabinet and two chairs in case Mrs. Onassis came in with her husband, mail slot and pile of mail." L.A. has long been the culture capital of suspense fiction. Boston may now be moving up. In Parker's God Save the Child, kidnapers instruct that the ransom be put in a green book bag -- a touch as evocative of Boston as the swan boats in the Public Garden.
Parker, however, lacks George Higgins' obsession with the city and uses his local details more sparingly. He works a more middle-class milieu; the reader gets to know suburbs like Lynnfield and Marblehead too. He is also careful to keep his echoes just that. Spenser is not Marlowe or the Continental Op. He is a naturally optimistic and even-tempered fellow. In so far as he can afford it, he loves the good life. A bachelor at 37, he has a fine, selective eye for women. He is also an excellent cook, and Parker does not hesitate to halt the narrative to describe in detail Spenser's culinary procedures. If the se ries goes on long enough, Houghton Mifflin will doubtless publish Spenser's Clues to Cooking.
Split-Level Goals. On the evidence of The Godwulf Manuscript and God Save the Child, this could well be a long-running series. Parker's writing is clear, his plots believable and uncluttered. In Spenser he has a malleable and there fore durable hero. But despite his dust-jacket confession, Parker is holding something back; he would be no mys tery writer if he did not. His real debt is not to Chandler or Hammett but to Ross Macdonald. Both Parker's plots deal with lost, unhappy young people estranged from their parents' split-level goals, but with no values of their own to turn to. Their searchings invariably bring them into the underworld of drugs and extortion that is right below their classroom windows. This, of course, has become Macdonald's sole theme.
Yet Parker is a cooler, less driven writer. Although his new book is flawed by a repetitious section devoted to a truly odious middle-aged couple, it shows a better plot and a looser, more interesting Spenser. With his knowedge of the drug trade, Parker must surely know that he is a pusher too -- to mystery addicts -- and take his long-term responsibilities seriously.
* Martha Duffy
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