BOSTON — Robert B. Parker, the blunt and beloved crime novelist who helped revive and modernize the hard-boiled genre and branded a tough guy of his own through his “Spenser” series, has died. He was 77.
The cause of death was unclear. Parker’s longtime agent, Helen Brann, said the author’s widow, Joan, called her Monday right after finding him dead at his desk in their Cambridge, Mass., home.
“They had had breakfast together Monday, and he was perfectly fine,” Brann said. “She went out to do her running and when she came back about an hour later, he was dead.”
Prolific to the end, Parker wrote more than 50 novels, including 37 featuring Boston private eye Spenser. The character’s first name was a mystery, with his last name emphatically spelled with an “s” in the middle, not a “c.”
The character was the basis for the 1980s TV series “Spenser: For Hire,” starring Robert Urich. Parker later said the only thing he liked about the program was the residual checks.
Parker admired Raymond Chandler and other classic crime writers and helped bring back their cool, clipped style in the first “Spenser” novel, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” from 1973. Within a few years, with “Looking for Rachel Wallace” and “Early Autumn,” he was acclaimed as a master in his own right.
Parker also was known for his Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series. His other books included a novel inspired by the life of Jackie Robinson, “Double Play”; the Westerns “Appaloosa,” “Resolution” and “Brimstone”; and “Perchance to Dream,” a sequel to Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”
Parker won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and a Grand Master Edgar in 2002 for lifetime achievement. A new Jesse Stone novel, “Split Image,” is scheduled to come out next month.
More than 4 million copies of Parker’s books have sold worldwide, Brann said.
A native of Springfield, Mass., Parker studied as an undergraduate at Colby College and received a Ph.D. in English from Boston University, where his dissertation was on Dashiell Hammett and Chandler, whom he made no secret of imitating. He was teaching at Northeastern University when he created Spenser, observing later that he was inspired in part because Chandler was dead and he missed his famous detective, Philip Marlowe.
