Back Story (Spenser)
by Robert B. Parker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert B. ParkerEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-03-02
ISBN: 0425194795
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780425194799
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Back Story (Spenser)
Book Review: Sensually Satiric Flashbacks: Cool Electronic Clicks Fade to Steaming Sauna Jungles & Smoke Oozing Hippie Pads
Summary: 5 Stars
Flipping through pages in BACK STORY feels more like dancing than reading, feels like traveling in foot-tapping-syncopation through smooth-jazz dialogue. Like, COOL, man!
Through the first 100 pages, the detecting process flowed from one interview to the next, in each case going to the geography of the lead and doing the talking heads thing as only Parker can pull off with painless rivets attached. I liked the fact that the leads were given one-at-a-time, with the culmination of data applied to memory having been collected in a slow, natural rhythm:
-- Get name and address of someone who might know something about the crime.
-- Go there.
-- Talk to this guy/gal with observation antennae up to the zenith.
-- Follow the next lead, given by that person.
-- Or, go home first, get a hit and a refueling re-hash visit w/Susan. (Spenser's reverence of her provides a welcome, vulnerable warmth, for my reading tastes.)
-- Then go visit the next candidate for input.
Somehow that process worked perfectly, gradually seating me into the story through the natural flow of Parker's dialogue and economy of description of settings of each lead-following interview.
Not only that, this is how investigations are carried out. (Like, in real life?) So, the realism builds and the reader gets to saunter around in a legitimate detective's shoes, with the full ambiance of the gum. (Love the way Parker includes at least one scene of a detective folding a stick of gum onto his tongue.) In BACK STORY the guns come later, after the talking-heads detecting has set up the show.
What CONFIDENCE, when an author does the cerebral deal for a full 100 pages before even CONSIDERING, let alone attempting, a ball seizing, action surge. Please don't get me wrong, though, I'm not meaning to bash action-packed thriller tomes. They have their place, and required taste-bud-uptake-inhibitors, for those for whom cerebral extensions alone, or starting up-front-scene-one (and continuing on through two, three, four, and five) just don't ring the visceral alarm clock. For action-addicts, the Yawn rules until someone literally kicks ass. I understand, even warm to, this personality type and I certainly don't criticize it. I just don't live there. What with my pillow-plush, cushy easy chair taking up such a large part of my life.
Even the active danger and shoot-em-up scenes in BACK STORY are engagingly cerebral (in addition to being physically intense). What is strategy. Spenser.
This is my second read in Parker's Spenser series, and I not only love his style, I'm truly surprised by it. My stereotype of the hard-guy P.I. is blown. Spenser doesn't get his nose broken every third page; doesn't get his guts sliced out and returned at the end of every chapter, doesn't get a finger pounded to a tenderized crush or hacked off. So, is that stereotype filled by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, or what?
Maybe I've been too long recalling WALKING TALL, the movie which came out in the 70's. After about the first ten minutes of dry-swallowing and squirming, of head observing knees, then up one-eyed, then down re-checking knees, then more dry-swallowing and squirming; I walked out into the lobby of the cold, old, vintage theater in Northeast Portland, Oregon, and sat on a tautly-pillowed bench, leaning my upper back and head of long-brown-hair against a swirled concrete wall until the movie signed off and my husband the deputy sheriff and our friends walked out of the curved-cushy-chaired, dark arena facing the cinema screen, after the heavy-velvet curtain had descended on the torturous, blood-spewing, calculated violence. I wonder how drawn and white my face had appeared to the buttered-popcorn people behind the Coke & candy counter. I hadn't happily snapped coins onto the counter for a movie house treat, tiny-round-tokens which have now clipped in cash value to require a fat collection of paper money instead of a few coins with almost no precious metal left in them.
WALKING TALL was a very well done, realistic movie which exposed certain types of police "procedure" which was, in some cases, carried out religiously in small Southern towns seething in swampland miasma. And, yes, the sub-culturally-sanctioned, bacterial-behavior vividly exposed in WALKING TALL has thrived in the most teeming urban sprawls as well as in small communities.
No geographic X is immune to the essence of cruelty.
I was glad to be married to one of the good guys, who had every right to be walking tall, and who willingly put himself through the torture of watching a movie like that, to make sure he wouldn't ever slip even a Quantum Particle into that type of behavior. He didn't. After working 15 years as a deputy, unformed, and undercover for the DEA for a few years, he retired from the police force and became a commodities broker (he had majored in economics in college). He's still a good guy. I can say that with respect. Even though we're divorced, we've remained friends.
What a contrast to Spenser that WALKING TALL exposure of the dark side of police-force-mystique was.
Sometimes I wonder how our varieties of lifestyles can exist within the forces-of-gravity of the same planet, though I don't wonder how most of these have been collected between the covers of books, within the celluloid of film (whose messages are now sold through the cell structures of a wide variety of alternate mediums).
Thank you, Parker, for giving us 30 books of Spenser! I understand how your work has survived and thrived. Humanity has a good side and emotional health exists (having made its debut well before the birth of Prozac).
How did the human race live before pills?
I laughed out loud at least 5 times while reading BACK STORY, and was intrigued by Spenser's descriptive passages playing on contrasts between the 70's and now. The altered ambiance of the office space of various police agencies was crisply exposed by Parker's pen, having evolved in a circular path from the chaotic clang of gray metal edges buried in soft piles of mish-mashed paper ... to the pristine prime of Architectural Digest paradigms. The FBI structure and interior was particularly dramatic in decorative temperature changes.
Then, of course, there were Parker's cultural commentaries (spoken in singes through Spenser's observations) of the limp-noodle-hand-shake contrast between reefer madness and military diligence, dramatized through the face-slack, lackluster auras of Daryl's half-assed-dad-and-gang; Vs the bet-your-life-on-it backup of Spencer's Hawk-and-criminal-element-cohorts.
So, is Parker deifying or hero-ifying a white-collar, silk-T-shirt, orange-jumpsuit gang of Right Wing, literary red necks who spend their surveillance-time reading science tomes on evolution?
Is this fascinating author making a point about our species not having evolved much (basing from the 70's) beyond the Chimpanzee/Ape stage? The chimps would be swinging off Liberal limb-edges; the apes would be thundering hairy feet through Conservative mud jungles.
Yet, Spenser fits no stereotype. As soon as a slot slithers up to his ankles, he sidesteps the swamp without losing the shine on his shoe. He's a (somewhat) macho, ex-prize-fighter, renaissance man with platinum keys to literary echelon bidet abodes, who grows gourmet taste buds on his tongue and cooks for his psychiatrist significant other. And, he's funny to boot!
Parker entered the "Cultural Conversation" well before the term had been coined.
He did it with a sensual maverick slant which he has retained and continually refreshed with subtle, smooth syntax and an ambient attitude, through 3 decades.
In BACK STORY Parker successfully weaves the 70's flower-power, sauna climate into the present cool presence of electronic clicks.
Clicking off, looking forward to my next Parker detective drama, which in any Age is a steal on steel,
Linda G. Shelnutt
Summary of Back Story (Spenser)
In Robert B. Parker's most popular series, an unsolved thirty-year-old-murder draws the victim's daughter out of the shadows for overdue justice--and lures Spenser into his own past, old crimes, and dangerous lives.In this 30th entry in one of mystery fiction's longest-running and best-loved series, Spenser--the tough yet sensitive Boston private eye with no first name--takes on an unsolved murder nearly three decades old. The client, an actress, is a friend of Paul Giacomin, Spenser's surrogate son (who first appeared in 1981's Early Autumn). Her mother was slain by leftist radicals at a bank holdup in 1974, and now she wants to know who fired the shot. As Spenser digs into the past, he soon learns that powerful people on both sides of the law want the case left alone--badly enough to kill.
These death threats provide a fine excuse for Hawk, Spenser's extremely scary (yet sensitive) bad-guy pal, to tag along in nearly every scene as bodyguard. The interaction of the two friends is one of this series's familiar pleasures, as is the presence of Susan Silverman, Spenser's longtime love interest. Another pleasure is Parker's stripped-down prose, a marvel of craftsmanship as smooth as 18-year-old Scotch. (Plus we get the first meeting between Spenser and Jesse Stone, hero of another Parker series.) Alas, the whole enterprise feels a little tired. The plot never generates much sustained suspense, and the author's adoration for his central characters renders them at times almost cartoonesque. Still, Back Story is excellently prepared comfort food, even if it isn't five-star cuisine. --Nicholas H. Allison
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