Pale Kings and Princes

“Everybody knew me. Nobody liked me. Nobody talked to me. Everybody avoided me. I’d been unpopular before in my life, but never with this kind of heady pervasiveness. People who’d never met me disliked me.” — Spenser

I’ve always felt that this is a very solid entry in the series. It’s a relatively early one, but still post-Valediction/Catskill Eagle, as the series slowly shifted toward sterling entertainment in the crime/detective genre, and only occasionally strived for greater resonance.

But that’s not to say there are no resonating moments here in Pale Kings and Princes, because it certainly has a few. Surprisingly, for the millions like myself who have a palpable dislike for Spenser’s shallow, pretentious, snooty show more love interest, one of the resonating moments comes when they are together. It occurs when actions taken by Spenser while attempting to get to the bottom of a reporter’s murder outside Boston leads to two deaths, and tragically impacts a nice woman working at the town library. Feeling morally and mortally responsible, a quiet and somber Spenser seeks comfort. Susan reminds Spenser of a quote he has used in speaking with her about his work, that death is the mother of beauty:

‘“I didn’t think you were listening,’ I said, and took my hands from hers and slid them up her back and held her against me in the cold night under the bright artificial light on the empty street.”

Spenser has been hired by a rather successful newspaper to look into the murder of a reporter sent to Wheaton to get a story about the cocaine trade. Wheaton is apparently a known hub for drug traffic that rivals South Florida in volume. So far however, no one has been able to prove it, or do anything about it. Spenser arrives and no one wants to talk to him; not even the cops, who may have reasons beyond simply writing the castrated reporter’s murder off as the result of his fooling around with someone’s wife.

The town has an unusually large population of Columbians, and while the growing is actually done in Peru and Bolivia, Spenser knows the presence of such a large group so centrally located to one of the biggest flows of cocaine in the country has to be more than a coincidence. It starts out with no one willing to talk, then escalates to actively attempting to drive Spenser out of town; this of course doesn’t work well for them.

Spenser makes an enemy of the Chief of Police, then meets a Columbian woman who may have an ax to grind called jealousy, which calls into question her information. He also meets a very nice woman at the library who just happens to be the wife of the Chief of Police. The hostility of the town escalates when Spenser angers the man who runs it, and possibly the drug trade, by questioning his stunning yet dangerous wife about her possible carnal involvement with the dead reporter.

This really is a good one, with Hawk finally entering the picture when Spenser appropriates a truck trailer full of cocaine.

“It’s best for society if Hawk is kept busy.”

Along with the always sharp dialog and witty banter, there exists a sprinkling of observation and insight worthy of the early Spenser efforts:

“There was no particular sign of pain. Grief makes less of a mark on people’s appearance than is thought. People torn with sorrow often look just like people who aren’t.”

Sexy Rita Fiore, who as the series went on would become a bright and welcome contrast to the nauseating Susan Silverman, also makes an early series appearance in Pale Kings and Princes. We also meet young State Trooper Lundquist, who proves invaluable to Spenser and Hawk late in the narrative.

It’s winter in this one, and Parker does a good economic job of making the reader feel it. That is especially true as the story races toward its conclusion. A blizzard in fact augments an exciting and well written explosion of violence as Pale Kings and Princes reaches critical mass. A very good entry in the series, entertaining and wildly readable. show less

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 show more 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.

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. show less

The first couple of pages of this book irritated me with their conformance to so many hard-boiled detective cliches. Then I read the other 295p in two sessions - and I wish it had been only one, because the break came just before the denouement and it lost a bit of tension because of that. Not the author's fault, rather the tyrany of clocks combined with my ridiculous (lack of) sleep rhythm.

Apparently this is the bajillionth book in the series of novels about Spenser, former cop, PI with a Code of Honour. There are approximately another bajillion that come after it, too. It's a genuine 'friller, page-turning, not easily predictable. It's also not quite as cliched as it appears (in the first two pages). Spenser isn't a womaniser, for show more instance. He is also humanised and raised "above the streets" not so much by hints of intellectual depth (e.g. Marlowe's chess games and Joe Kurtz' reading list) as by the peeks behind his mask. The hard-boiled detective is a persona - Spenser uses it because it is expected of him and because it offers emotional protection. Also, Spenser does not really have a Code of Honour, after all. Instead he just has a sensse of right and wrong that isn't necessarily rigid or overly informed by the concept of duty - nothing about it seems codified at all, in fact.

So initially Spenser is a lone gunman going up against a corrupt town, single-handed. It could have gone into A Fistful of Dollars territory but actually never strayed a step in that direction and by the end Spenser had put together such a regular little Scooby Gang that I was half surprised that a Slayer, a werewolf, a vacuum-head, a brainy girl and a wise-cracking side-kick didn't show up. Or a brainy girl, a vacuum-head, a jock, a coward and his cowardly mutt...

Anyroad, this was such fun amusement that I would happily read more from Parker, but I have heard rumours that the latter part of the series shows a decline in quality. Maybe I shall try to hunt up the first one. Perhaps I should hire a PI to do it for me, but I think the trail of corpses might make me feel both scared and possibly guilty. Spenser wouldn't feel the former of those two; maybe the latter. show less

There are just some things you know you can count on. You know your driver’s license photo will make you look like an axe-murderer. You know a dropped piece of toast will land jelly-side down. And you know that a Robert B. Parker Spenser novel will give you a solid read.

‘Pale Kings and Princes’ is no different. Sent off to a small Massachusetts town to investigate the murder of a young reporter, Spenser quickly finds himself up to his neck in cocaine dealers, crooked cops, and people who aren’t quite telling the truth. How he gets past the not quite part and deals out his own particular kind of justice forms the backbone of the story. The usual cast of characters is on hand, the usual wry dialogue is spoken, and satisfaction show more happens all around. show less

Pale Kings and Princes is the fourteenth of Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels. The title comes from the poem La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad by John Keats.

In this book, Boston P.I. Spenser is hired by a local newspaper to investigate the murder of one of its reporters who had been looking into the drug smuggling industry in a small town in west central Massachusetts. When Spenser arrives in town, he finds that none of the local people want to talk to him and the local police are very uncooperative.

With the assistance of an honest and competent state policeman and Spenser’s super macho buddy, Hawk, Spenser is able to solve the mystery of the reporter’s death, break up the drug-smuggling ring, and dispose of two very show more dishonest local cops.

Before the final showdown with the drug dealers, Hawk suggests that the safest course of action would be to just shoot the dealers when they weren’t looking. Spenser replies:

“Yes, But I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. What I don’t know,” Hawk said, “is why you can’t.”
“Remember those guys in Maine got busted for shooting bears in cages?” I said.
“Didn’t get bit by the bear,” Hawk said.
“Would you do it?” I said.
“No,” Hawk said.
I didn’t say anything.
“The analogy sucks,” Hawk said.

Thus, as always, Spenser maintains his knight errant code of ethics.

Spenser’s girl friend, Susan Silverman, is not as cloying as she is in other Spenser novels, and plays an important role in this one. As all Parker novels, this is an easy read, but it does not stand out among the others. Nevertheless, it is a good companion for a long airplane ride.

(JAB) show less

Spenser is asked to look into the murder of a reporter who had been investigating drug sales in a small town in Massachusetts. He does what he usually does, asking questions and bothering people until he eventually figures out what is going on. Unfortunately, as usual, people die who would not have if he hadn't been doing what he usually does.

Another excellent Spenser, although it finished up rather abruptly with a shootout in the snow. A nice palate cleanser after the pseudo-mystery of The Geographer's Library.