Looking for Rachel Wallace

By Robert B. Parker, Delacorte Press, 1980, 219 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, June 1, 2020

An English professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey in 2002 told his class that Robert B. Parker was a fine example of a perfectly good writer who never wrote about anything. Had I been his student that semester, he would have either given me an A for my term paper proving him wrong or dismissed me from the class for calling him an ill-read imbecile.

If I were you, I’d wager on the latter. Term papers were never my strength; they took too long.

Parker strolled out of Boston College with a Ph.D. in English Literature. His dissertation was “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality,” which discussed the hard-boiled characters created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Two years later, Spenser appeared in bookstores in “The Godwulf Manuscript,” the first of the more than three dozen Spenser novels Parker would pen before his sudden death in 2010 at age 77.

If Parker’s Spenser is compared to those, he’s more modern, more liberal, and though he can throw a punch, he’s a slightly softer, more evolved private eye. Let’s say he’s boiled medium-hard. Recurring characters are black, gay, Hispanic, and (gasp) women not in need of a rescue.

My favorite of them, “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” was the sixth in the series. Like any good dick, Spenser doesn’t hesitate to throw a saddle on the white horse, don his armor and ride off to save the damsel. Unlike Parker’s contemporaries, though, the princess is not always helpless. And sometimes he even rescues a prince.

Rachel Wallace is lesbian feminist activist and author, a combination Hammett would never have imagined. She’s averse to the macho Spenser and fires him as her bodyguard. But when she’s kidnapped, Spenser sets off to find her without hope of a paycheck.

That’s one of Spenser’s traits that engenders such reader loyalty; he helps people who need it even if he doesn’t like them very much. No hero in the genre will violate the code, but Spenser’s personal take on that list of rules is kinder and more generous than his ultra-hard-boiled intra-genre peers.

He’s a bruiser with a heart.

He’s also a bruiser with a brain and watching him outwit and verbally out-parry the dullards he encounters — a group that includes most of the populations except Spenser’s close associates — provides much of the appeal. Consider this exchange between Rachel Wallace and Spenser in a scene before she fires him:

“You were a stupid thug. I will not have you acting on my behalf in a manner I deplore. If you strike another person except to save my life, I will fire you at that moment.”

“How about if I stick out my tongue at them and go bleaaah?”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“I’ll say.”

The wisecracks are sometimes self-deprecating, a device that allows the reader to see just how well Spenser knows himself. That includes an awareness of his weak spots, and that bit of less-macho humility not only makes him more likable, it gives him room to grow as the series progresses.

I handed him my license. He looked at it and looked at me. “Nice picture,” he said.

“Well, that’s my bad side,” I said.

“It’s full face,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Spenser remains the red-blooded prizefighter we expect, but Parker uses it as a mirror to remind us of our flaws. Consider this lecherous exchange from Chapter 13:

A girl not long out of the high-school corridors came past me wearing very expensive clothes, very snugly.

She had on blue harlequin glasses with small jewels on them, and she smelled like a French sunset.

She smiled at me and said, “Well, foxy, what are you looking at?”

“A size-nine body in a size-seven dress,” I said.

“You should see it without the dress,” she said.

“I certainly should,” I said.

Compare it to an exchange Spenser has with his love interest, psychologist Susan Silverman (Wait! Blacks, gays, Hispanics AND Jews are all good guys in this series? Why yes, they are!) late in the story when Parker holds up the looking glass:

“You make a good fire for a broad,” I said to Susan.

“It’s easy,” Susan said, “I rubbed two dry sexists together.”

Rachel Wallace — I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that Spenser successfully rescues her from the kidnappers — reappears in three subsequent Spenser novels, “A Catskill Eagle,” “Stardust,” and “Sudden Mischief,” in which she is a friend and colleague, though they never see eye-to-eye. As he does with recurring characters such as Hawk, Susan, and Tedy, Parker grabs the white-male tough-guy perspective by the lapels and gives it a forceful shake.

Parker is an ace at dialogue, but that Ph.D. in English Literature came with a lot of reading assignments and “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” like the rest of the series, is full of literary allusions that can make a mortal reader feel a bit daft. As a California-educated kid, I was unaware that the sentence, “The sun that brief December day rose cheerlessly and invisibly over one hell of a lot of snow in the city of Boston,” carried any more weight than a very nice bit of scene-setting, appropriately tying the poetic, cerebral sunrise description to the more direct, Spenseresque “one hell of a lot of snow in the city of Boston.” It took a child of Massachusetts to point out that every school kid there is forced to memorize all 759 lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll.” The first two of the 759 read, “The sun that brief December day/Rose cheerless over hills of gray.”

In “Looking for Rachel Wallace” alone we find allusions to Shakespeare, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, as well as Johnny Mercer lyrics, “The Trolley Song,” and others.

Like any good novel, it works on multiple levels. The story is fun in the spirit of Hammett and John D. MacDonald (note especially “Pale Gray for Guilt” and “The Lonely Silver Rain”) but there’s plenty there for a brainier experience once enough coffee has been ingested to make that possible.

Parker wrote 41 Spenser novels including the one he was working on when he died that was completed by his longtime literary agent. Eight more have been written by Ace Atkins, who was commissioned to continue the series after Parker’s death. I like Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series, and I like that he was a crime reporter at the Tampa Tribune until he switched to writing novels full time. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to read his Spenser stories; I’m sure they’re quite fine, but it feels disrespectful to let my old friend Spenser carry on with another writer at the helm.

Parker wrote a lot about relationships and loyalty. Through his characters, he maintained a running commentary on society that lets readers peek at how people who are not white and male experience the world around them and how much there is to gain by mutual acceptance. He wrote about race and sexual identity. He wrote about fear and fairness and picking the right shade of gray when the choices aren’t black and white. He wrote about friendship and marriage and self-doubt.

He wrote about plenty.