"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 to honorable behavior, it wouldn't sound half so bad. . . . To act courageously and to refuse to be dishonored isn't a bad code." Parker's stand-up fictional protagonist, Spenser--he goes tersely by his last name in the books--is machismo with a Parker twist. He's a gumshoe, a PI, the inheritor of a long line of tradition from fellow traveler's in the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, all the way from Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe to Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Like those earlier doyens of the genre, Spenser is flip and fast-talking, as quick with his fists as he is with his mouth.
