A Gawain for our times

As a subject for literature, virtue and its celebration is fairly unfashionable. This is particularly true in Britain, where we like to maintain ironic detachment. This perhaps explains why Robert B. Parker and his private eye, Spenser, have never found their way into regular dinner-party chat on this side of the Atlantic.

In America, as this festschrift demonstrates, Parker is seen as the natural successor to Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and Spenser the latest in a line that runs from the Continental Op through Sam Spade to Marlowe and Lew Archer.

In his preface to the Fairie Queene Edmund Spenser wrote that his aim was ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’. The poem is full of knights vanquishing dragons, virtue triumphing over vice. The poet’s modern namesake would have been very much at home. The name of course is not an accident, and it has a twofold resonance in its nod to Chandler’s hero, also named after an Elizabethan poet.

Spenser is a Boston private eye who, while respecting the law, feels that the law does not always serve justice. When talking with his partner, Harvard PhD psychotherapist Susan Silverman (as far from a floozy as it possible to imagine), there is often talk of Spenser’s ‘code’. It is this code that defines him, and it is astonishingly simple given the weight it carries. The code is: do the right thing.