Sports Illustrated Training with Weights (With: John R. Marsh)
1974
Three Weeks in Spring (With: Joan H. Parker)
1978
A Year at the Races (With: Joan H. Parker)
1990
Spenser’s Boston (With: Kasho Kumagai)
1994
About Robert B. Parker
Robert B. Parker (1932 to 2010) was an American crime writer, the creator of the Boston private detective Spenser, who appeared in forty of his novels from “The Godwulf Manuscript” (1973) onwards. He also wrote the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall series and a set of Westerns about the lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch.
Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on 17 September 1932. He graduated from Colby College in Maine, served with the US Army infantry in Korea and took a master’s degree in English at Boston University in 1957, after which he worked in advertising and technical writing. In 1971 he completed a doctorate at Boston University with a dissertation on the private-eye heroes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. He wrote his first novel that year while teaching at Northeastern University and became a full-time writer in 1979.
The Spenser novels are set in and around Boston and feature a recurring cast that includes his associate Hawk and his partner, Susan Silverman. The fourth, “Promised Land”, won the Edgar Award for best novel in 1977. The books were the basis of the ABC television series “Spenser: For Hire”, which began in 1985 with Robert Urich in the lead, and of several later television films. Parker also completed Chandler’s unfinished Philip Marlowe novel “Poodle Springs” (1989) and wrote a sequel to “The Big Sleep”, “Perchance to Dream” (1991).
Jesse Stone, introduced in “Night Passage” (1997), is a former Los Angeles detective with a drink problem who becomes police chief of the small New England town of Paradise; Tom Selleck played him in a series of television films. Parker created the Boston investigator Sunny Randall at the request of the actress Helen Hunt. The first Cole and Hitch Western, “Appaloosa” (2005), was filmed in 2008 by Ed Harris, who starred with Viggo Mortensen. The Mystery Writers of America named Parker a Grand Master in 2002.
Parker died of a heart attack at his desk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 18 January 2010. His family and publisher chose to continue the series with other writers. Ace Atkins and then Mike Lupica have written Spenser; Michael Brandman, Reed Farrel Coleman, Lupica and Christopher Farnsworth have written Jesse Stone; Lupica and Alison Gaylin have written Sunny Randall; and Robert Knott has written Cole and Hitch. The Netflix film “Spenser Confidential” (2020) was based on Atkins’s “Wonderland”. The newest Spenser novel, Lupica’s “Framed”, is due on 24 November 2026.
