Promised Land
by Robert B. Parker
Summary
Harv Shepard, a Cape Cod real estate man with a face full of worry, hires Spenser for the oldest job on the books: find my wife. Pam Shepard has walked out, no note that explains anything, and Harv wants her home. Spenser finds her quickly, which is when the case starts: Pam has fallen in with a pair of radical feminists whose politics run ahead of their planning, and a bank robbery meant to fund the revolution has left a guard dead, converting a runaway wife into a fugitive accessory. Meanwhile Harv's real estate troubles turn out to be heavy debt to King Powers, a loan shark with collection methods, and the enforcer Powers sends around is a tall, elegant, extremely dangerous man named Hawk, who knows Spenser from the old fight circuit and greets him with professional courtesy.
Parker runs the two collapsing situations toward each other, Spenser engineering a solution that requires playing Powers, the police and the fugitives simultaneously, and conducts, in the gaps, the book's real business: the state of the American couple, circa 1976. Pam and Harv's marriage is anatomised without contempt, Spenser and Susan Silverman argue the whole question of what men and women owe each other, and the hard boiled hero submits, warily, to the era's interrogation of his own code.
Hawk walks away at the end, unarrested, unresolved, and permanent: the series' great partnership begins here.
Around one hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want the moment the private eye novel was successfully restarted, wisecracks, ethics and all, and the first appearance of crime fiction's best supporting character.
Historical Context & Significance
Promised Land won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1977, and the prize functioned as an anointing: Robert B. Parker, an English professor whose doctoral thesis was on Chandler, Hammett and Macdonald, had set out with the Spenser books to revive the private eye form his scholarship had embalmed, and the fourth novel's Edgar certified the resurrection. Critics and bestselling writers, Crais, Coben and Lehane among them, credit these books with reviving and changing the detective genre.
Hawk's debut proved the book's most consequential page: the Spenser books ran to forty novels, a television series, Spenser: For Hire, and a screen afterlife that continues, while the character's cool made him the template for a hundred lethal best friends.
Parker wrote to the end, dying at his desk in 2010 with the series past its thirty fifth volume and the Grand Master title long since collected; the estate's continuation authors keep Spenser in print, the revival still running on this book's ignition.