The Big Ebb Tide Of The 1960s- Back Story-A Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Back Story, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2003  

Funny what will turn up on your summer reading list and why. Sure I am like any other heated, roasted urban dweller and am looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Most days I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. But those kinds of books cannot survive the summer siege. Which brings us to the book under review, one of Robert B. Parker’s Police Chief Jesse Stone series, High Profile.  Or rather I will bring us to the book under review after I go through a little of how I came to read this book. How I came to read yet another a crime novel for crying out loud. That is not as condescending as it sounds since long ago I learned the very hard lesson that serious crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, Ross MacDonald and a few others, had earned their places in the American literary canon. Their hard-bitten sparse dialogues and plotlines were worthy of emulation, or if not that then a thoroughgoing serious read.

That is how in a roundabout way we get to this book. See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little Chandler or Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This year when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989. Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. While checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out what turned out to be Parker’s last Spenser effort, Sixkill. And because we still have several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

No question the 1960s with the rise of the black civil rights movement, the emerging and expanding anti-Vietnam War movement and the social movement or movements that carried it along, what we now call the counter-cultural movement created many strange and wondrous possibilities. Got plenty of people, mostly on the younger side who under more normal circumstances like today when there are not right now massive social upheavals would go about their workaday existences doin the best they can without making too many waves. People who would have normally become accountants or nurses took time off and donned the “outfit,” got cool with politics, dope, music, some sense of a new communal existence a-borning. Then the fall came, then that Garden of Eden as least in many of our minds faced a big ebb tide, a time when all those strange and wondrous possibilities turned in on themselves. Things like the lumpenization of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco when the deluge of refugees from the American suburbs descended on the place and the “rip-off” not the “pass the joint, brother or sister” ruled the day, when Altamont exploded some myths, the helter-skelter Manson stuff and a million other bummer. It was all there to see, good and bad.          

In Back Story Robert Parker has taken material from that ebb tide, the period in the early 1970s when things got squirrelly and fashioned a very good and interesting late Spenser series crime detection novel out of the mess, out of the misguided direction that some of those people who took time off from the rat race got into after the fall. All centered on a daughter, Daryl, of one such female denizen’s murder in a bank holdup in Boston in 1974 (seemingly based on a robbery that actually occurred with the union of idealistic college students and career bank robbers to give you a flavor of what weird intersections were being swirled around in the ebb tide). Of course a 28 year old murder, Emily’s murder, a “cold case” if there ever was one for the police is nothing but in a day’s work for Spenser and his amigo Hawk. Once the young woman decided she had to know the how and why of her mother’s death Spenser and company were on the case to the end, to the very end, bitter or otherwise.       

Here is how it played out in a nice twisty little plot line with enough bread crumb clues to keep you interested unlike a later book recently reviewed here, Parker’s last Sixkill, which seemed very much a formula piece with nothing left for us to figure out. The young woman’s mother who was killed in the bank that fateful 1974 day actually belonged to a radical action group of college students who were enamored of prisoners all of whom they apparently thought were really political prisoners rather than career felons. Those were the heady days when some college students seeing that you couldn’t do much as a college student as such were looking for some oppressed group to lead the way to the revolution, the commune or whatever they were thinking needed to happen. Yeah, ordinary college students caught in the social whirl and their own hubris. Otherwise the actions of the novel would not make sense. The twist on this one is who wants the exact details of that murder covered up, covered up big time to thwart Spenser in his errant knight tilting at windmills for a little dough (literally six doughnuts, okay).          

The cover up and why drives this one. Since no police, no zealous security guard shot at Emily on or off the record the only conclusion that Spenser could ultimately draw was that she was shot by someone in the group, the Dread Scott Brigade (brigade a common identification ending for action groups even when they fell far short of traditional brigade size), who robbed the bank presumably to gather funds for arms, the revolution, the commune or whatever there unstated goals were. Hence the cover-up since the driver in the escapade was a paid informant of the F.B.I. and of course that organization, then or now, could not have one of its stoolies compromised. So that file got buried, buried deep. So if it was an inside job then the question for Spenser and Hawk was who the participants were.

Guess what, after figuring out who the parties were it turned out that this interracial group of white college students and bad boy black criminals also had a Mafia princess in the crowd. Once our boys stumble into that hard fact, stumble into the hard fact that this aging daughter was also being hidden out up in Police Chief Jesse Stone’s bailiwick of Paradise up on the North Shore of Boston by a hard guy, Sonny, and he does not want his daughter to be bothered by the likes of Spenser all hell breaks loose. This hard guy boss of bosses sent a couple of waves of hit men at Spenser but he takes them all out without too much difficulty (always the magical realistic aspect of novels and films where hard guy hit men and such tumble under to a lone adversary making me wonder whether they were really hard guys or just playing when under ordinary circumstances it would take a brigade, literally, to waste them). When the deal went down though the princess walked, the hard guy walked. Why? Well along the way the hard guy had threatened Spenser’s sweetie Susan so he called the truce and every police agency bought into the compromise for their own sweet reasons. Smart guy.

Oh yeah, the reason that Emily, who was the scout in the bank operation, was gunned down, gunned down by the Mafia princess if you must know had to do with some personal animosities and nothing political like you might have thought. You can read about the why in the book but remember what I said about the ebb tide, about the whole thing turning in on itself if you really want to know why. Read this better Spenser crime novel.