FREE THE PROFESSIONAL (A SPENSER MYSTERY) PDF Robert B. Parker | 304 pages | 02 Jul 2010 | Quercus Publishing | 9781849162234 | English | London, United Kingdom Spenser - Book Series In Order I turned 47 in February, so it was high time for a mid-life crisis. Rather than searching for an inappropriately young girlfriend or impulse buying a European sports car, I read all the books by Robert B. Parker starring Spenser, the tough but fair Boston private eye who saves lost souls and kills bad guys with the help with his girlfriend, refined therapist Susan Silverman, and his partner, the fashionable and street-wise Hawk. InRobert B. Both Marlowe and Spenser were Elizabethan poets. The Godwulf Manuscript was a hit, and Parker would go on to write 38 more Spenser books credited with helping revive and define the genre. The novels of Agatha Christie The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) Rex Stout are still around, dated as they may be, while someone like Erle Stanley Gardner would be almost entirely forgotten if it were not for the television productions starring Perry Mason. From my vantage point it seems like the posthumous reputation of Donald E. Westlake keeps holding some ground, while the work of his peer Ed McBain is receding into history. Will Robert B. Parker stand the test of time? What was edgy or advanced in the s or s is trite or even embarrassing today, and presumably that condition will only worsen as society keeps evolving. If the books do stay in circulation, it is going to be for witty dialogue between opponents, the rise and fall of tension in a fight scene, the technical details of how to take on armed posse when the opponents already know to expect trouble. Nobody could The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) a tough guy action sequence like Robert B. You want to call it toxic masculinity? During a mid-life crisis, you might need some goddamn toxic masculinity, and as soon as I put down one Spenser, I was eager to pick up another. An early success is The Judas Goat The waiting itself is a funny and dramatic sequence, and it is a relief when the guns finally start firing. If I had to chose one Spenser title as the best, I might go for Playmates Parker occasionally enacts joyful revenge against the culture of high education, a culture he left behind after becoming a successful novelist. As if you could make falsehood true by richly said restatement. Parker and The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) Creation of an American Hero is valuable. This just fine, for the Western is a perfect format for a tough guy action series with an unwavering moral center. Potshot literally puts Spenser in charge of cleaning up a Western town, with a climatic shootout that pits seven against forty, just like an old John Ford movie. I first read Taming A Sea-Horse as a teenager, more or less when the book was new. During my recent reading, I was wondering when that chapter would turn up. To set it up: Spenser is trying to help an occasional recurring character, April Kyle. During the process, Spenser befriends hooker Ginger Buckey and learns of her a terrible father, the toughest man in Lindell, Maine. Spenser reports into his client:. She smiled more. You are in your own idealistic way as cynical as I am. Chapter 13 is all Western, and all great. I recopied it out, hoping to learn a few literary lessons along the way. Maine is much bigger than any of the other New England states and large stretches of it are, to put it kindly, rural. Lindell is more rural than most of Maine. If three people left, it would be more rural than the moon. The center of town appeared around a curve in a road that ran through scrub forest. There was a cinder block store with a green translucent plastic portico in front and two gas pumps. Across the street was a bowling The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) with a sign in the window that said Coors in red neon script. Beyond the three buildings the road continued its curve back into the scrub forest. Some years back there had been a timbering industry, but when the forest got depleted, the timber companies moved on while Lindell sat around and waited for the new trees to grow. I parked in front of the Lindell sign and went into the building. Half of it was post office, one window and a bank of post office boxes along the wall. The other half of the building was the site of town government in Lindell. Town government appeared to be a fat woman in a shapeless dress sitting at a yellow pine table with two file cabinets behind her. I smiled at her. She nodded. There was a gap in her upper front teeth about four teeth wide. I smiled at her again. Was I losing it? Of course not. She was just obdurate. But this might be important to Vern. I was smiling and talking. I drove seven hours to talk with him and I want to know where he is. The woman laughed a wheezy laugh. She fumbled around in the litter on the table and found a tired- looking pack of Camels and got one out and lit it with a kitchen match that she scratched on the underside of the table. She inhaled some smoke and blew it out with a kind of snort. She smoked some more of The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) Camel. She was squinting through the smoke from the cigarette, which she left in the corner of her mouth while she talked. She laughed again, wheezing, and choked a little on the smoke The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) her cigarette and laughed and choked and wheezed at the same time. She stopped laughing and wheezed a little longer and got her breath back and squinted at me some more. I was gaining ground, so I shut up and smiled and listened. Susan said it was a technique I might consider polishing. The fat woman pointed with her chin. She inhaled, coughed, The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) chuckled in her wheezy way. I was wearing jeans and running shoes and a gray sleeveless T-shirt and a gray silk tweed summer jacket and a gun. I took off the jacket, and unclipped the gun from my belt and folded the jacket on top of the gun and put them on the front seat of my car. Then I walked across the street and into the bowling alley. The bowling alley was one of those round-topped corrugated buildings that look like a big Quonset hut or a small airplane hangar. There were only three lanes inside, and a snack bar that sold beer and sandwiches. No one was bowling. A short dark-haired man with The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) bald spot and tattooed arms was behind the bar. He had on a sleeveless undershirt with a spot of ketchup on it. Sitting on a barstool drinking Budweiser beer from a longnecked bottle was a guy with a round red face and a big hard belly. He was entirely bald and his head seemed to swell out of his thick shoulders without The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) of neck. He had small piggy eyes under scant eyebrows that were blond or The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) and barely visible and his thick flared short nose looked like a The Professional (A Spenser Mystery). The eyes and nose gave his face a swinish cast. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and baggy blue overalls and work boots. He was staring straight ahead and drinking the beer. When I came in he shifted his stare at me and in its meanness it was nearly tangible. The hand wrapped around the beer bottle was thick and hammy with big knuckles. There was no air-conditioning in the place but a big floor fan hummed near the bar, pushing the hot air around the dim room. He unhooked his bootheels from the lower rung of The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) barstool and let his feet drop to the floor and stood up. He was The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) least six feet four, which The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) him three inches The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) me, and he must have weighed eighty pounds more than my two hundred. A lot of it was stomach but what he lacked in conditioning he probably made up in meanness. Buckey put the beer bottle down on the counter and stepped toward me. The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) shrugged. In the parking lot. No point messing up this slick amusement complex. I turned and went out the door. In the parking lot cars and pickup trucks and two motorcycles had arrived. People sat in the cars and trucks and on the bikes in a kind of expectant semicircle. I gave her a short thumbs-up gesture. She poked an elbow into the man The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) to her and pointed at me with her chin. I could hear her wheeze. Buckey came out of the bowling alley The Professional (A Spenser Mystery) with his little pig eyes in the glare of the summer. He looked around at the circle of onlookers and hunched his shoulders as if to get a kink out and came straight at me. Said everyone in this part of the state was afraid of you. The Professional (Spenser, #37) by Robert B.