"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...

It may be the literary equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Novelist Raymond Chandler gets an idea. Robert B. Parker refines and completes it. Now playwright Tom Stoppard plans to turn Chandler's and Parker's "Poodle Springs" into a Hollywood screenplay. Meanwhile, Parker will be on...

We figure we've reached Robert B. Parker's house on the winding Cambridge, Mass., street when we spot a restored Victorian whose tiny driveway is crammed with a Jaguar, a Mercedes and a Ford Explorer--the sort of ho use and cars Spenser himself might...

"High Profile" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 290 pages, $24.95) _ Robert B. Parker: Jesse Stone, police chief in the mythical harbor town of Paradise, Mass., becomes the center of unwanted attention when a famous radio talk show host is found hanging from a tree in a...

Jesse Stone is police chief of a small New England coastal town where mostly nothing happens.Stuck in Paradise, Mass., Stone is just about bored to death, which gives him ample time to brood about the ex-wife he still loves. Otherwise, he subsists on Scotch whisky,...

It should come as no surprise to a reader of The Godwulf Manuscript (1974) to discover striking similarities between it and the novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, particularly when he remembers that Parker wrote his doctoral dissertation on the novels of those three writers. What is surprising, however, is the extent to which he has managed to stake out for himself an original claim to the territory already overrun by would-be successors to the three earlier masters of the har...

Robert B. Parker has created Spenser, a Marlowe-like private eye who drinks a lot and makes tasty omelets, salad dressings, and women. In The Godwulf Manuscript (1973) he is inexplicably rude (Marlowe never is): to a university president who has been only courteous, he sneers, "Is there something you'd like me to detect or are you just polishing up your elocution for next year's commencement?" The detective is less interesting, however, than his antagonist, a small, weak, lechero...

Last year in "Early Autumn," Spenser made a man of a 15-year-old boy vicitimized by his affectless parents. "Ceremony" seems an alternative version of that novel. This time the child with the destructive parents is a girl, a high-school dropout who volunteers for a life of prostitution, then finds herself a prisoner of it: finally, when freed by Spenser, she finds she has no other talent, no other aim in life. Spenser is faced with an interesting moral decision: what is best for ...