Parker’s latest book. His dialogue is a lesson in economy and precision. No sentence is left unsharpened. Spenser, Parker’s favorite character, and a lady friend are sitting in a bar with a great view. She orders a lemon-drop martini. I don’t know what that is. “Smooths out a day,” she says, taking a sip. I do know what that is. She drinks her lemon-drop martini, and Spenser drinks beer. And I drink nothing. I bought this book for somebody else, a big Spenser fan, and picked it up because I wanted to escape a Sunday sadness. It’s not much of an escape, because I want to crawl into Robert B. Parker’s pages, into this lounge, and join Spenser and the woman sipping the lemon-drop martini. It occurs to me that Robert Parker might have been a drinker, not necessarily of notable proportions, but a man who might have stopped drinking once or twice and then gone back to it. I wonder, Why can’t I do that? I’m old enough to be dead, so why am I not old enough to hang out in a cocktail lounge?
