Word: spenser
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When things went bump in the night, it was far better to suspect the hobgoblins than creatures more substantial and threatening. Most important, the winged folk held out the prospect of an airy, insubstantial and blissfully frivolous life beyond the reach of the wealthiest voluptuaries. The highest compliment Edmund Spenser could pay Elizabeth I was to call her the Faerie Queene. The Little People could do everything that the big people could...
...Against Racism and the Sociobiology Study Group, part of Science for the People of Boston, yet she dares to continually attack those who dispute her brand of ideological orthodoxy with being "unscientific." She seems to posit some grand conspiracy advocating "immigration restriction, eugenics, imperialism, and anti-communism," originating in Spenser's Social Darwinism, continuing with the actions of "Nazi biologist[s]," and exhibiting itself today in "Arthur Jensen's revival of the doctrine of black genetic inferiority, thereby initiating a new wave of academic racism." She then tries to advance Professor E.O. Wilson's recent book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis...
...tries to extract literary criticism from the kind of scholarly biases that determine what's "good" and what's "bad" on some kind of stock market of literature. He parodies the idea in Anatomy of Criticism by talking about how T.S. Eliot used to say Milton was bearish and Spenser bullish one year, and vice-versa the next. He also warns against attaching certain cultural values to particular works and therefore making them important, or parts of the "myth" of a particular society. This, anyway, is his ideal for criticism as scholarly endeavor...
There are other bouquets. At one point Spenser even calls himself Nick Charles to relieve the tedium of an inquiry. His Boston office, a block or so away from the infamous bar in George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, could be Philip Marlowe's in Los Angeles: "Second floor front, one room with a desk file cabinet and two chairs in case Mrs. Onassis came in with her husband, mail slot and pile of mail." L.A. has long been the culture capital of suspense fiction. Boston may now be moving up. In Parker's God Save...
Parker, however, lacks George Higgins' obsession with the city and uses his local details more sparingly. He works a more middle-class milieu; the reader gets to know suburbs like Lynnfield and Marblehead too. He is also careful to keep his echoes just that. Spenser is not Marlowe or the Continental Op. He is a naturally optimistic and even-tempered fellow. In so far as he can afford it, he loves the good life. A bachelor at 37, he has a fine, selective eye for women. He is also an excellent cook, and Parker does not hesitate to halt...