"Machismo got a bad name starting with the feminist movement, where it was used to label male behavior that women found offensive," the novelist Robert B. Parker once told Amanda Smith in a Publisher's Weekly interview. "But if you called it a commitment...

Hugger Mugger Robert B. Parker Read by Joe Mantegna Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio four cassettes, six hours and thirty minutes, unabridged Someone is taking potshots at the racehorses owned by Southern gentleman Walter Clive in Parker's latest Spenser mystery. Clive fears for...

ROBERT B. PARKER. Putnam, $23.95 (320p) ISBN 0-399-14587-7 Despite frequent appearances by Susan Silverman (longtime love of Boston PI Spenser) and the absence of Hawk (his enigmatic sidekick), the latest entry in Parker's estimable series is a worthy one. Missing is the...

One well-guarded secret in the press is that nobody necessarily agrees on the terms governing the guarding of secrets. "Deep background," "not for attribution," "off the record"--the specific interpretation varies from reporter to reporter and source to source. Now Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has made things...

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973, by Harry Mathews. Dalkey Archive Press, 203 pages, $13.95.A few weeks ago, the arts section of The New York Times turned its solemn eye on literary fiction. On Monday, the fine novelist and short-story writer Steve Stern...