I read Parker's Double Deuce the summer I turned 16. A friend of my parents' left the paperback at our house and, for whatever reason, I gave it a try. Unless I am forgetting something, it was the first crime novel I'd read since putting aside the Hardy Boys.
By the end of the summer, I'd blitzed through every Spenser story in our local library as well as All Our Yesterdays and Wilderness. By that point, the next paperback in the series had come along, I and I've read a Spenser book a year ever since.
It took me a few more years before I really took off reading other writers in our genre or to even figure out that I'd read many different types of stories by reading the Spenser books. For instance, I'd read two or three Town Tamers long before I'd heard the term or knew that they tread in the footsteps of The Red Harvest.
This post was supposed to be about Robert B. Parker, but I've only written about myself. It will be fun in February to reread the books I remember as being the strongest and discuss them.
Chris
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 19 Jan 2010 EST