Pale Kings and Princes - Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series is the first detective series that really caught my imagination. The series began in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript, but I didn’t discover the books until 1983 when I spotted a paperback copy of Ceremony, the ninth Spenser novel, in a local bookstore. The good news, and probably the reason I got instantly stuck on the series, was that I had an eight-book Spenser backlist to explore, and I hurried to do just that. Then, over the next couple of decades, I had to wait for them to come trickling out one-by-one like everyone else.

By the time Parker died in 2010, he had written thirty-eight Spenser novels, but the series was still not complete. Two more completed Spenser novels were posthumously released, and the partially-completed Spenser book he was working on at the time of his death, Silent Night, was finished by his literary agent and published in 2013. In addition to these forty-one Spenser novels, Ace Atkins, author of the Quinn Colson series (a series I highly recommend), has added five more Spenser novels to the series. 1987’s Pale Kings and Princes is the fourteenth Spenser novel, about one-third of the way into the forty-one-book series.

Robert B. Parker

This time around, Spenser is hired by a newspaper to investigate the murder of one of its reporters who had been prying into the massive cocaine trade centered in Wheaton, Massachusetts, when he was killed. It doesn’t take Spenser long to get himself into the same predicament that got the reporter killed. Wheaton is under the thumb of a Columbian kingpin who will do anything to keep it that way and, with the help of the Wheaton cops, any threats to the Columbian, including people like Spenser, are usually quickly eliminated. Spenser, though, is as persistent as he his tough, and he doesn’t plan to go anywhere until he gets justice for the murdered reporter – even if he has to dispense that justice himself.  

According to Spenser, what he does best is annoy people enough to make them do things that lead him to more people to annoy. He puts it this way:

            “I don’t know what’s going on so I wander around and ask questions and annoy people and finally somebody says something or does something then I wander around and ask questions about that and annoy people and so on. Better than sitting up in a tree with a spyglass.”

However he does it, Spenser always gets answers. He’s really good at annoying people. And with a whole lot of help from Hawk, the huge black man who is also Spenser’s best friend, and Susan, the love of his life (at least to this point in the series), he will stay alive long enough to make the right people pay again this time. Spenser, Hawk, and Susan, different as they are from each other, make one hell of a team.

Bottom Line: Pale Kings and Princes cannot be said to be one of the stronger books in the Spenser series because the crime being investigated is a fairly standard one even for its day. But with the Spenser books, it’s not so much about the crime or mystery anyway. The real fun comes from watching Spenser, Hawk, and Susan work together as their relationships evolve over time. Susan is well represented in this one, Hawk not so much. And that’s a shame, because underusing Hawk is never a good thing. Just ask Spenser.