Sixkill by Robert B. Parker...

[fajrdrako]

I first discovered Robert B. Parker when I chanced on The Godwulf Manuscript in the Sunnyside Public Library soon after it was first published. The Anglo-Saxon allusion in the title caught my attention. I read the first page or two, was totally charmed by Spener's smart-assery and the send-up of pedantic officials. I was hooked.

And though some of the books are better than others - and some read a little like self-parody - I've read them with joy all these years.

Now Parker is dead, and there will be no more Spenser novels, so it was a bittersweet feeling to read and finish the last one he wrote, thinking, this is it. No more.

The Sixkill of the title is the name of one of Spenser's new friends, Zebulon Sixkill, who pretty much fills in for Hawk, who is inexplicably working in Europe. (The mind boggles.) "Zebulon Sixkill", known as Z, has to be one of the best character names ever created outside a comic book. Sixkill is a Cree, a former football player whom Spenser encounters in the course of a murder investigation - Sixkill was the bodyguard of the suspect. He was a good bodyguard until he had to fight Spenser, and Spenser utterly defeated him because, well, Spenser is the best there is at what he does.

So Sixkill is jobless, homeless, at loose ends, and maybe has a drinking problem. Spenser takes him under his wing (in a tough, macho way) and they take on the villains together. We get flashbacks to Sixkill's past, how he came to be where he was when Spenser met him, and we get Spenser and Susan Silverman analyzing him and Spenser's handling of him. Along the way we get a fairly typical Spenser story about a troubled and slutty young girl, her horrible parents, the mob, and references to just about every recurring character the series has had, from Chollo to Rita Fiore. Pearl makes only a brief appearance, thank goodness - the silliest, most spoiled dog in literature. There are the requisite tasteful ethnic jokes:

"Seem too immersed in being mad at each other," I said.
"Why the hell do they stay married," Z said.
"You Indians just don't understand white-man ways," I said.
"Hell," Z said, "I'm still trying to figure out why you killed our buffalo."

So I'd have loved it all as the end of a particular fictional-detective era, but, but, but... In this, the last Spenser novel, Parker did something that appalled me.

Parker has always had certain points to make about people and society. His viewpoint, mixed in with all the hard-boiled action and the clever wisecracks, is always pro-feminist, anti-racist, protective of abused or neglected children, pro-intellectual, and anti-homophobic. There have been strong ongoing sympathetic characters who are gay and Lesbian. Good stuff. It's one of the reasons I've always loved the books.

In this book, for the first time, he has a bisexual character, Jumbo Nelson. This character is the most awful pig you can imagine: ugly, fat, egotistical, hypocritical, cowardly, foul-mouthed, bullying and rude, a drunken lout with no brains. Spenser calls him a "repellent puke" to his face.

So it seems that while Parker has written in defense of the gay and the undertrodden, he is very, very biphobic.