"Was there a specific point at which the Spenser novels
became less interesting?"
Which was the one that ends with Spenser setting up a meet
with two mobsters, knowing they'll try to take him out, and
uses the opportunity to kill them? This was a fairly
hardboiled sequence, but Parker grossly undermined it by
having Susan deliver a prolonged explanation of what Spenser
did, why he did it, and how it is making him feel. That scene
shut down my reading of the series permanently. It wasn't so
much that Susan served as Spenser's conscience as that the
author felt obliged to guide the reader, step-by-step,
through the protagonist's thoughts and mental state. Geez,
talk about telling rather than showing. Seemed to me to fly
in the face of all the best noir and hardboiled writing I'd
found by discarding one of its primary virtues.
John
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