‘Spenser’ to Return to Screen

You could still pass through this life and never read or view anything written by Robert B. Parker. But it’s now a lot harder.

“Hush Money,” Parker’s 25th novel about Spenser, Boston’s best-known private detective, will debut Sunday at No. 5 on the New York Times’ national bestseller list.

On July 11, more than a decade after actor Robert Urich popularized Spenser in the ABC series “Spenser: For Hire,” the A&E; cable channel will present Joe Mantegna as the smart-mouthed sleuth in “Small Vices,” which Parker scripted from his 1997 novel of the same name.

Marcia Gay Harden plays the lovely Susan, Spenser’s psychologist girlfriend, and Parker amused himself by taking on the eight-line part of Ives, a CIA agent whom the detective calls on.

“A towering performance,” the writer said of his star turn. “Think the young Olivier.”

In addition, “Small Vices” may be the first of five Spenser movies on A&E;, which also plans to make a series featuring another Parker creation--Jesse Stone, the alcoholic former L.A. homicide detective and now police chief of Paradise, Mass., introduced two years ago in “Night Passage.”

And there’s more--a kind of female Spenser that Parker has created for actress Helen Hunt. The character Sunny Randall, a Boston private detective whose ex-husband is a law-abiding member of a mob-connected family, will emerge in Parker’s next novel, “Family Honor.”

The book will be released by his longtime publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, in September, and plans call for Hunt to start filming the story--for a Sony Pictures theatrical release--in Boston next year, with an eye toward possibly turning Sunny into her franchise character.

“I like to make things,” Parker said the other day from his home in neighboring Cambridge, Mass. “And I’m kinda hot right now.”

He’s committed to writing two novels and two screenplays a year.

“It’s hard work,” Parker added, and hard work begets more work. But he doesn’t consider it brain surgery or art born of anguish.

“This is done largely with my hands and stomach, and my brain interferes very little,” he said. “I’m willing to admit: I don’t read these books. I do them in five-page segments, five days a week. So basically what you get is my first draft. Sure, I clean it up a little on my computer as I go along, and my editor will want a touch here and a touch there, but that’s it.”

He recalled taking a Spenser trivia quiz, sponsored by a Spenser fan club in Boston, and getting five answers wrong.

“I’m aware that I’ve created this thing,” he added, “but he’s probably realer to the reader than he is to me.”

Spenser is a rugged guy who likes a beer or two and can take and throw a punch. He does not suffer fools for long and has a sharp remark, often a wisecrack, for almost every occasion. When a melodramatic client swoons about the intensity of a now-ended affair, saying she and her lover could “barely breathe” around each other and “we couldn’t eat,” Spenser thinks to himself: “I knew the feeling, though love had never made me lose my appetite.”

At the same time, what goes down as easily as corn chips still touches on weightier matters along the way. In “Hush Money,” Spenser and his brawny sidekick Hawk also take on the case of a black professor who’s been denied tenure for an unknown reason, but maybe because he’s believed to have been romantically involved with a gay man whose death was apparently a suicide. The dead man had been identifying closeted gays--and outing them--in a militant publication.

As a result, Parker’s latest story looks at race relations, sexual politics and self-absorption on campus. University life is familiar to Parker, a former Northeastern University professor of English, who once said, “The academic community is composed largely of nitwits.”

Marilyn Stasio, the New York Times’ crime reviewer, this week said of “Hush Money”: “Despite its flaws, the story forces Spenser to take on the heroic task of examining his conscience for prejudicial attitudes about black people, gay people and female people who try to rape him. He’s a better man for the soul-searching.”

“Well, yeah, the book has to be about something other than plot,” Parker said of the contemporary twists. “That has to be as automatic as the wisecracks.”

Where is Spenser going after 25 books?

“I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t outline anymore. My advice to a beginning writer would be: Make an outline. But then drop the outline once you’re up and running.”

Parker, 66, said Spenser probably has modified some of his views as he ages, “just as I have.”

“He’s not me,” Parker said of Spenser, “but he’s not not me, either.”

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Icy Thrills for Summer: Caroline Alexander’s “The Endurance” (Knopf), her account of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to Antarctica, has been a national bestseller for months.

And what’s hot in commercial fiction?

Antarctica.

Avon Books is pushing to make James Rollins’ “Subterranean” a popular beach read, dressing up this paperback thriller set largely beneath the Antarctic ice in three different covers, and backing its late-spring release with radio advertising and other promotion. Meanwhile, Bantam will be out afterward with its paperback reissue of “Antarctica,” in which sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson casts the continent as a battleground between those who would take its treasures and those intent on thwarting the interlopers. Robinson’s earlier Mars trilogy was picked up for the screen by James Cameron, of “Titanic” fame.

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Barnicle Is Back Too: A newly revamped Sunday edition of the New York Daily News will debut this weekend under the watch of Sunday Editor Edward Kosner, former editor in chief of New York magazine and Esquire. Among the writers the News will feature is Mike Barnicle, a longtime columnist of the Boston Globe who resigned from the paper last year after facing persistent questions about the veracity of some stories.

What seems like a strange hire may also be a shrewd way to attract those curious enough to sample what Barnicle has to say.

“I think he’s paid his dues,” Kosner said last week.

Paul Colford’s e-mail address is [email protected].