A Novelist Faces Up to His Critics : Professor-Turned-Writer Cries All the Way to the Bank

Spenser, a super-suave private eye with no known first name, has been a wisecracking weapons consultant, a feminist and a jailbuster in the detective novels of Robert B. Parker.

Now, because cultures are being cloned faster in the book publishing industry than in biomedical laboratories, Spenser is going to be a money maker. He’s bound to make Parker rich--with money, if not with critical praise.

As the 54-year-old novelist enjoys the return of royalties on his latest book, “A Catskill Eagle,” this winter, he is preparing to dot the ryes and cross the peas in a contract with Manhattan-based Mysterious Press to produce a cookbook. Another publisher wants to put out a Spenser exercise book. The TV series, mind you, is already on the air.

Parker, a Bostonian, has written about a book a year since his first, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” in 1972.

The former English professor’s efforts are Boston Globe best sellers as soon as they are published. Since 1982’s “Looking for Rachel Wallace,” in which Spenser rescues a lesbian lecturer from conservative zealots, each has been a national best seller as well.

Regrets Using Initial

Before having his initial success, Parker was afraid he’d have trouble with his middle initial. He thinks it’s pompous, noting that only Presidents--John F. Kennedy, L.B.J., F.D.R.--seem to wear middle initials well.

“I wish I hadn’t started that way, but I’m kind of stuck with it now,” he said. “I’d always signed my name Robert B. Parker--the B. stands for Brown, clever, huh? It was my grandmother’s--and when I sent in the “Godwulf” manuscript to be published, I just put my name on it, Robert B. Parker. Then it came out with that name on the book jacket, and I was kind of committed to it. I wish I had said Robert Parker. It’s less clumsy, it’s much easier to say.”

Most of Parker’s writing revolves around that same sense of expediency. It’s easy to say and not too clumsy. The plots are also simple: Save some woman from some bad guys before something thoroughly rotten happens.

A New York Times critic has termed the writing cartoonish. Parker calls it art.

“My guess is that people like my books for the same reason they like music or poetry: because the language works, and pleases them in the patterns it makes. But they don’t know that and they don’t have the way to express that, so they say they like the characters or the hero or the stories or the adventures.”

Parker saves the big adventures for his books. He seldom even shoots when he goes hunting.

“I have a shotgun because we hunt a little, me and Pearl, my 13-year-old shorthaired pointer,” he said. “What we really do is take a walk in the woods with a gun and try not to shoot ourselves in the foot.”

He laughed. “It’s wonderful to be in the woods with a dog. Pearl hunts and flushes. She looks at you kind of funny if you don’t shoot. I hate to disappoint the dog.”

Familiar Characters

He hates to disappoint readers, too, which is what brings the pejoratives from high-minded critics. While his villains range from arms merchants to mind-control cult leaders, the characters and relationships between them hardly ever vary.

“What I look for in a scene is how people act under stress, the relationship between men and women and adults and children,” he said. “So much is about love, some is about male bonding.”

Parker would much rather spend an afternoon holed up in a dusty saloon with Henry James than Jesse James. He doesn’t feel a need to experience deception and death to write about them.

“I think if you have been afraid in your life, or been angry, and have a certain amount of skill, you can translate that so it’s credible to an adventure story,” Parker said. “Henry James said, ‘It doesn’t matter so much what you have for experience, it’s what you do with it’--as a writer.”

On this day in Westwood, he looked more like a Hollywood type than a writer Hemingway would hang out with. He wore a pink shirt. There was a spray of fresh flowers in his hotel room. And he wore a gold chain.

“Simple but elegant,” the author said, holding the chain in his fingers.

Parker wrote technical manuals and advertising copy for Massachusetts firms before he went back to school to earn a Ph. D. and teach at Northeastern University. Was he an artist then?

“If one is not doing art, one is not an artist,” he said, twisting the gold chain around his neck. “It’s not intention, it’s execution. Having executed some art, I can claim that I’m an artist.”

Until his books contain fewer executions, however, he may have a hard time getting critics to agree.

Markman is a Times copy editor.