The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Potshot, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2001 

Of late I have been on something of a Spenser crime detection novel run, you know those sagas of the Boston-based P.I. with the big burly  physique and the no nonsense grit and determination to see a case through to the end, the bitter end if necessary, written by the late Robert B. Parker. I started out several reviews of those books by explaining that most of the year when I review books I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. I also said that come summer time you never know will turn up on your summer reading list and why. So blame this run on the summer heat if you must.  I confessed that like any other heated, roasted urban dweller I was looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Then I went into genesis about how I wound up running the rack, or part of the rack, after all there were some forty Spenser books in the series before Parker passed away in 2010.  I will get to the review of his 2001 effort Potshot in a minute after I explain how I came to read yet another Parker crime novel for crying out loud.

See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some of the other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell 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 summer 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. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character with his chalk board scratching to my mind repetition of his eating habits, his culinary likes and dislikes, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, his continually touting Spenser’s physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his so-called monogamous and almost teenage-like love affair with Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.

Checking up on what Parker had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed and grabbed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts reviewed in this space previously  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 Spenser again. 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.

Of course even Boston-based P.I.s have to spread their wings and Spenser and his coterie in Potshot find themselves out in the high desert in the West, finding themselves trying to figure out how a long-time Potshot resident, Steve Buckman, wound up dead, very dead, after his wife Mary Ann hired Spenser to see that rough justice was done in this wicked old world. Her speculation centered on a group of outlaws who lived on the outskirts of town, a place called the Dell, robbing and running rough shot over the town’s people. Got enough of them to move out to have housing prices come crashing down.

Spenser bought, or maybe half-bought, her theory until he started checking things out. He still was focused on the killing but as things went along and he, as seemingly is always inevitable in this series, Spenser was warned off the case. Warned off by the local sheriff, and more ominously by an L.A. mobster who controlled the illegal activities east of L.A. Naturally Spenser ignored that advise and rose to the occasion, especially after he suspected that what was at issue, what was, and is, always at issue in the desert-water, or as here, a possible new source of water which could make the town expand. So scare off the townies and buy up the land cheap expecting to hit pay-dirt when the next migration tired of the cities comes trekking through became the central theory. Nice, right.             

So Spenser now had two tasks-find the murderer that of client’s husband and stop the hooligans out in the Dell led by a tough hombre named the Preacher from reducing the town to a ghost town. And that is where the headline for this review comes in. Spenser recruited six other hard-boiled hard boys, including his old pal Hawk, to root out the forty or so hell-raisers in the Dell. Naturally those lop-sided odds seemed right for the task at hand when Spenser was on the case. The second half of the crime novel dealt with the how and why the magnificent band of seven brothers tried to do their best to rid Potshot of its scourge. This is where Spenser’s stick-to-ness comes into play. The Preacher said he and his mob had nothing to do with the murder that started the whole potential gang war. Spenser believed him, or half believed him on that one, although to protect turf Preacher still took a run at the Seven. Wound up losing, of course, against Spenser’s tougher hombres.     

But that still begged the question of who killed Steve Buckman. Now when murder is in the air, when murder and water are in the air out in the desert, every serious investigator, public or private, has to naturally look close to home, has to look to a wife or companion to see what crawls out. So Spenser pressed the issue. Guess what. Yeah, a thin, very thin story line so you can see why I weened myself off of Spenser back in the early days. What the heck though do I do for the rest of the long hot summer, tell me that. Maybe I better reach again for Chandler and Hammett, maybe Nelson Algren.