When a world-famous author decides to donate personal papers documenting decades of output to a university archive, he might be expected to have conflicted emotions. But when mystery writer Robert B. Parker recently gave Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center his papers and drafts, a single consideration dominated.
“They were piling up in my cellar,” says Parker (GRS’57,’71). “It’s also true that the Gotlieb is rather widely known, so I said yes. The deal was that they could have the material if they’d come and take it away.”
Parker’s association with Boston University runs long and deep. He earned both a master’s and a Ph.D. in English here. His doctoral thesis, The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, now sits in the collection at Mugar Memorial Library.
“I was desperately trying to get my Ph.D. by the time I turned forty,” Parker recalls. “I made it, by just about a year. The actual writing of my doctoral dissertation took about two weeks — I know there are people who have been working on their thesis since 1918 who’ll want to shoot me for saying that. But I don’t get better by taking my time. My second draft is not an improvement, so I don’t do one. So in the summer of 1971 I went to the cellar of a BU building, and a woman took my diploma out of a box and handed it to me.”
That summer, Parker says, he started writing a mystery about a detective who recovers a valuable manuscript for a large university in Boston. The Godwulf Manuscript was published two years later. Since then, he has written more than fifty books for adults, including the Spenser novels and two newer series, featuring Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone, all regular fixtures on national best-seller lists. He also was a consultant on the late eighties television series Spenser: For Hire, based on his books. In 2002, he received the Grand Master award at the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards.
Parker taught literature at Northeastern University after getting his doctorate, an endeavor he remembers as less than brilliant. “I just wasn’t interested in it,” he says. “I knew a lot, and some people said I was fun in the classroom, but writing was my primary interest, and I didn’t want to spend any more time rereading Paradise Lost.”
The many years Parker spent in academia are evident in the literary references that pepper his work. Not every hard-boiled detective quotes T. S. Eliot.
“A writer needs to have what Frost called ‘ulteriority,’” he says. “Chandler called it ‘the sound of music beyond the hill.’ The background allows the characters to know more than they actually say. I’ve been known to pooh-pooh academia, but not the acquisition of a Ph.D. That didn’t make me smarter, but it gave me a lot of useful information.”
Parker continues to follow new directions. He ventured into the young-adult market for the first time with his recent book
Edenville Owls. “That was mostly a business decision,” he says. “I’m trying to build a suitable estate for my heirs, and they’re used to living well. In a young-adult book, the language has to be more careful, the subject matter more prudent. But I’d be a worse writer if I spent my whole life writing about the same guy.”
