(3 of 7)
250 pages; $15.95
In the archetypal hard-boiled private-eye novel, the cynical hero typically slept with the girls, shot the villains and kept the money. Robert B. Parker, the genre's leading writer, resurrects a more chivalric code for his beefy detective Spenser. The character's 13th adventure, Taming a Sea-Horse, puts him in grave danger on an all but unpaid quest to avenge the deaths of a prostitute he met briefly and a pimp he disliked. He confronts slick mob bosses, two-bit thugs and corrupt financiers, relying on his wits but not fearing to apply a little muscle. Parker's secondary characters are more whimsical than believable, and his dialogue a bit high-flown for the lowlifes who speak it: "What exactly is the conceptual schemata of this operation other than smut peddling, so to speak?" "We're not, as you put it, peddling smut. We're selling realized fantasy. We are marketing fully realized life- style--masculine, sexually fulfilled powerful, solid, complete." But his novels crosscut adroitly between puzzle solving and slambang action; and however much Spenser is disillusioned, he throbs with compassion.
RED
by Ira Berkow
Times Books; 302 pages; $17.95
Walter ("Red") Smith had a simple formula for sportswriting: according to his easy-to-follow directions, you just sat down at a typewriter and opened a vein. But the pain and labor were never evident in his work, and they make few appearances in this diverting but paper-deep biography. New York Times Sportswriter Ira Berkow recalls his colleague's life of affectionate domesticity and professional recognition; the conflicts remain almost out of view. What do appear are Smith's idiosyncratic columns--pieces like the study of a handicapper who prays for his horse until it breaks out in the stretch, then yells, "Thank you, Lord. I'll take him from here. Come on, you son of a bitch!" That work and others like it built Smith a following that included Ernest Hemingway, Playwright Marc Connelly and millions of other readers until Smith's death in 1982. To the end, Berkow reports, Smith's modesty remained intact. Summing up a career, he explained, "You spend a lifetime learning to find your way to the dugout at Yankee Stadium. It would be a shame to waste it."
< THE GREAT PRETENDER
by James Atlas
Atheneum; 277 pages; $15.95
Need anyone wonder why the difficulties of becoming a poet or novelist figure so prominently as the subject matter of poems and novels? There are at least as many stories out there in the world as there are people, but authors have a monopoly on the ones that get written down, and theirs tend to take precedence over the rest. Hence The Great Pretender, a first novel about a bright boy who pays sufficient dues during his literary apprenticeship to be able to write a first novel for which a title like The Great Pretender might be appropriate.