Of Sex And Dough - Bad Business-A Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Bad Business, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2003  

Funny what will turn up on your summer reading list and why. Sure I am like any other heated, roasted urban dweller and am looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Most days I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. But those kinds of books cannot survive the summer heat siege. Which brings us to the book under review, one of Robert B. Parker’s seemingly never-ending Spenser series efforts, Bad Business.  Or rather I will bring us to the book under review after I go through a little of how I came to read this book. How I came to read yet another Parker crime novel for crying out loud.

See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This year when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989. Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character continuing through some forty books in the series to dwell on his eating habits, his off-hand racial banter with his black compadre Hawk, continually touting his physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his love affair with Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.

While checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out what turned out to be Parker’s last Spenser effort, Sixkill. And because we still have several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

Sex and dough mesh together in an odd way in the Parker book under review, Bad Business. A woman hired Spenser to find out if her high-level executive of a speculative energy company husband was having an affair seemingly in order bail out of the marriage and take him for all he was worth. This despite the fact that under the guidance of a Boston sex therapist radio host he and she were engaged in an “open marriage,” were screwing other people with each other’s consent . Go figure. So Spenser did his Spenser thing of finding that the husband was in fact having an affair with a fellow high-level executive’s wife. Before long though that philandering husband wound up dead, very dead, murdered in his office, and although that solved the woman’s dough problems it perked, as usual, Spenser’s interest in why he had been killed, and by whom if not the wife. (Wives and girlfriends as the “logical” suspects and visa versa husbands and boyfriends in most murders, crime detection novel murders anyway)      

Naturally Spenser had to figure that the company the husband worked for maybe had something to do with that late husband’s demise after he grabbed some additional facts about the financial state of the business. That suspicion only got additional confirmation when the head of company security was also murdered, murdered most foully. So by an interesting sleight of hand, using his long time amigo tough guy Hawk and Hawk’s then current girlfriend, he was able to con the CEO of the company into having Spenser’s accountant audit the books. What that accounting wizard found out about the “cooked” books would eventually lead back to the sex part of sex and dough. That the sex therapist radio show host turned out to be “light on his feet,” you know a faggot in Spenser and Hawk’s terms, today gay and leave the other stuff out and had a serial killer boyfriend who was trigger-happy twice in this story. Guess what the two trigger-happy events were. Here’s where the sex and dough thing got really squirrely, that gay sex therapist was “boffing” the woman that the dead company executive was boffing in order to grab all the company’s dough (by cashing in proxy-held stock, okay ) before it went belly up.

So sex and dough drove this one for sure but also along the way we got the usual description of every food and drink, hard and soft, that Spenser inhaled, all the usual sex and tough guy black and white together back to back talk between Spenser and Hawk, and the increasingly inevitable sexy pillow talk between Spenser and Susan. I am not sure how much longer I can hold up reading every few pages about their torrent love affair and mutual declarations of love that would embarrass even today’s teenagers.