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Robert B. Parker Interview

This interview with Robert B. Parker was first published in 1998 in The Country and Abroad. Here's an excerpt:

Kelly: What was the genesis of Spencer?

Parker: I read Raymond Chandler and copied him.

Kelly: There must have been more to it than that.

Parker: I always wanted to do this [write crime novels] and I had read all of the Chandler, Hammett, and Ross Macdonald stuff. I had also read hundreds of pulp magazines, The Dime Detective and Black Mask. I finally got the opportunity to start writing when I got a job that gave me hours of free time, which was as a college professor. And I sat down to write The Godwulf Manuscript.

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I asked Bob about the writing he'd done for television.

Kelly: Did you just jump right in?

Parker: Yeah, I just jumped right in. The first thing I did was a screenplay of my novel Wilderness. A studio bought it in 1979. I don't remember reading a screenplay before I wrote one, but there are certain things you have to do. Speakers have to be identified. It's like a play for the screen. You have to describe what people are going to see up there. When most people say they don't know how to write a screenplay, what they mean is that they don't know how to format it, whether you indent the dialogue.

Kelly: I guess I was thinking more about exposition. How do you get the story across?

Parker: The same way you do in a book. Through dialogue and through action. What is character but the determinant of plot, and what is plot but the definer of characters, as Henry James said. He was also a dramatist. His novels are almost screenplays, though he was a lousy dramatist. If he wrote a movie, it would vacate the theater. There are things experienced screenwriters know that I don't, about the dramatic structure and when the climax ought to come. Particularly in television, when you may have to write seven acts interrupted by commercial breaks. At one point I started a screenplay for a television movie and they told me it needed seventeen acts.

Kelly: What was this? The Ring Cycle?

Parker: No, it was "Freeze, dirtbag, or die. And now we pause for station identification".

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I asked Bob about his novel All Our Yesterdays, a non-Spenser novel that he characterized to me as "very successful in critical terms and a total bomb in sales".

Kelly: Why was that? Do you think your name is just too associated with Spenser? Do you think it's like a product-labeling problem?

Parker: I think I've stretched my product label too far, yeah. Somewhere we lost the market--the market for a long generational novel about an Irish-American family doesn't read books by guys who write detective stories. And people who read books by guys who write detective stories don't read long generational sagas. I don't know what happened with All Our Yesterdays. It wasn't the publisher's fault. Dell did as good a job as one can reasonably expect promoting it. They thought it was going to be a big book. They overpaid for it; they promoted the hell out of it; and it fell with a resounding thud.

Kelly: But the reviews were good.

Parker: The reviews were excellent. Best I've ever gotten. I think it's a wonderful book.

Kelly: I read that there was going to be a mini-series of All Our Yesterdays.

Parker: There was, and now there isn't.

Kelly: No chance?

Parker: Well, there's always a chance, but it won't be CBS who does the mini-series. I was not heartened when the young woman in charge of the mini-series division at CBS said, "What are all these Irish guys doing in here?" This is not a good sign.

Kelly: What did she think the book was about?

Parker: Well, she never read the book.

Kelly: Someone from Hollywood once told me that Hollywood people are incapable of reading anything that takes longer to read than the amount of time one spends on the toilet.

Parker: That's probably true. The toilet is an apt place for them to be reading.

Kelly: You and Joan [Joan Hall Parker] produced some of the Spenser books for cable, didn't you?

Parker: We were involved in it. We wrote 'em, and Joan was one of the coordinating producers. But by the time we did our first production meeting up there in Toronto, where the movies were shot, it was so horrifically bad that Joan uttered the Parker family motto, which is "Fuck this".

Kelly: Yes, I saw it on your coat-of-arms in the den.



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