The Sincerest Form of Something

It seems that when Robert B. Parker isn’t reworking his own good story ideas into new novels, others are borrowing them from him. In 1981, just a year after this Boston novelist heralded the publication of his sixth (and, I still believe, his best) novel, Looking for Rachel Wallace, he was back in the limelight with Early Autumn, a tale in which his Beantown private eye, the single-monikered Spenser, rescues and then helps to rehabilitate a 15-year-old boy named Paul Giacomin using exercise, music, and cabin-building up in Maine. It was an unusual and memorable plot--so remarkable, in fact, that Parker pretty much ripped it off for his 1999 book, Family Honor, which introduced another Boston P.I., the comely Sunny Randall.

Now, another writer, Baltimore’s own Laura Lippman, acknowledges Parker’s inspiration behind her ninth and forthcoming Tess Monaghan novel, No Good Deeds. As she explains on her Web site,

No Good Deeds deliberately invokes Donald Westlake, Michael Chabon, Kate Atkinson, Phillip K. Dick, Walter Mosley, Stephen King. But it is, first and foremost, an homage to Early Autumn, my favorite Robert B. Parker novel.

I’ve tagged Parker before in my books. (Didn’t anyone pick up on the coffee house called Pearl’s in By a Spider’s Thread, the one decorated with photos of German short-hair pointers? No? My editor must be right about these inside jokes.) But No Good Deeds was meant to be a straight-up tribute, a reworking of a classic story, in which a man helps a boy become a man. Dave White has called the result “Early Autumn on speed.” ...

But a funny thing happened on the way to the homage. It turned out that the teenager in my tale, Lloyd Jupiter, was even more truculent and difficult that Spenser’s protégé, Paul. He’s also African-American, a high school drop-out and essentially homeless, while Paul was a rich white kid. Could I really give Lloyd a straight-up happy ending, or should I acknowledge the more formidable odds against him?

To say more would be a spoiler ...