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 ...

Robert B. Parker has written five books starring Spenser, the tough Boston operator, a one-man army. In his new book, "Wilderness" …, a different hero is introduced—a man named Aaron Newman, a writer, jogger, big and strong but saddled with doubts of self and wife. Jogging along peacefully one morning, Newman sees a murder and can identify the killer, who turns out to be a psychopathic gangster. He tells the police what he knows, but when the gangster threatens his wife, Newman r...

[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 oth...

In "Early Autumn," by Robert B. Parker, the private eye has come a long way from the dissolute days when he was a hell-raising, hard-drinking womanizer with a license to carry a gun. Spenser, Mr. Parker's detective, is a baby-sitter in the seventh novel of this popular series. He salvages Paul, a 15-year-old boy whose divorced parents each want him only to spite the other. Paul is "thin, nasty, apathetic and withdrawn." In a surge of supererogation, Spenser takes him to Ma...

The Judas Goat is not [Robert Parker's] best book, but it is very good. Parker is one of those authors who … are always being compared with Chandler and Ross Macdonald …, and while the comparison is apt as a label for quality and tone, it no longer is very helpful, since Parker has established a voice of his own. The Judas Goat is tough, cynical, sexy in a realistic way, and just a mite sentimental, and it sends Parker's series detective, Spenser, off to London, Copenhagen, and A...

Parker must have learned a good deal from "Godwulf"; his new book is more deft, smoother and sharper in characterization. Where "Godwulf" read like a compilation of every private eye from Chandler on, "God Save the Child" has a great deal more personality and character. Robert B(rown) Parker 1932– Photograph by Kathleen Krueger; courtesy of Delacorte Press

In the tradition of Hammett, Chandler and the other private-eye creators of the 1930's comes "The Godwulf Manuscript" by Robert B. Parker…. Parker's locale is Boston, and his private-eye—a tough, wise-cracking, unafraid, lonely, unexpectedly literate type—is in many respects the very exemplar of the species. He is called in to investigate the theft of a 14th-century illuminated manuscript from a college library. Along the way he runs into student activists, t...

Robert Parker is perhaps the best of [the writers attempting to replace Chandler]…. [Promised Land] shows him gaining mastery over his material all of the time. The dialogue is good, without that cutesy-tough overtone one finds in so many imitators of Chandler, and while Spenser remains a bit self-romanticized, he is no more so than Marlowe and Archer. Anyone who complains about the lack of Chandlers ought to try [either Mortal Stakes or Promised Land]…. Robin Winks, in a review o...