The Stuff Of Dreams – Stardust-A Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Stardust, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York,  1990 

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 of the year 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 seemingly never-ending Spenser series efforts, Stardust. Let me tell you first though how I came to read yet another Parker crime novel for crying out loud no matter how hot it is outside.

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 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 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. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character continuing through some forty books in the series to dwell on his eating habits, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, continually touting his 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.

That said while checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts 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.

If you think about it, as I well know, Boston unlike New York City or L.A. is rather provincial and a little sedate except for the students who run wild in the streets and on the campuses during the school year so perhaps the idea of running an interesting thirty or forty book series about a P.I. working that milieu was bound to run out of themes. Big themes anyway. And that is pretty much what has happened with Stardust, the trials and tribulations of a well-known but aging television star, Jill Joyce, who is beset by strange calls from a man, and haunted by memories from her low-rent upbringing.   

Of course as a well-known but aging television star Jill was nothing but a “pain in the ass” although she was on screen nothing but niceness and sexual allure (don’t believe me on that “pain in the ass” part believe her producer whose expression this was when asked about working with milady). Still she had those alleged calls that were disturbing her sleep (although not her drinking or dope intake). Spenser to the rescue. Except difficult Jill wouldn’t cooperate at least until her stuntwoman double was killed in what was assumed by all, even Spenser, to have been an attempt on her life. The murder shook some old time stuff loose as Spenser investigated deeper as she feed him a few crumbs of information, mentioned a few names. You know some guy, supposedly a goofball fan from Western Massachusetts, who had been harassing her who turned out to be a husband, a trip to the West where Spenser found her low-rent drunken mother and later her father.

Best of all the snippets of information he teased out in his investigations discovery of a daughter of fathered by a married man. A guy who turned out to be a serious gangster with some tough boys of his own. No wonder Jill clammed up for so long. As it turned out that father who left her mother had been not only a bastard who left them high and dry but had molested her as a child. He had to go down, and he did.   

Here’s the real problem though. It seems, and we are talking 1990, now the longer the series went the less time went into the plot and more time was spent discussing camaraderie with his black buddy Hawk, various acts of toughness against known and unknown adversaries, and the inevitable interplay with his companion Susan with whom he shared his gooey monogamous relationship despite the five hundred women who threw themselves at his feet. All those women throwing themselves at his feet for naught, including a drunken Jill here, who wind up getting half way through the verbal sexual foreplay before the real foreplay and wind up falling asleep on him thus allowing him to avoid temptation. Maybe though they were telling our big muscular hell of a guy something.