[A] literary strain has been present more or less in all [Robert Parker's] novels, even in Mortal Stakes which has a baseball setting (Parker is an avid sportsman). Spenser has been well called "the thinking man's private eye": it is easy to detect the presence not far over his shoulder of an author fully conversant with the whole tradition of the novelist as seer or even as therapist. There is a concern with human beings that rises at times to compassion and perhaps falls at other times to that commonish complaint among American novelists "psychology showing through".

But the seriousness that this indicates is always well compensated for by Parker's dialogue. Spenser is a wisecracking guy in the firm tradition of the Chandler shamus, and above and beyond this all the conversations in the books are splendidly swift and sharp. Parker likes to refer to the minutiae of...