In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler Read Free Book Online

castle). I shouldn’t say “no one.”I’m repulsed. And Bob, judging by the glances we keep shooting one another, is pretty mortified himself. As we go on about our business that snowy afternoon, there are lulls in the signings and the chitchat and during those lulls, I sneak into the back room and watch the game until the next commercial break. And I begin to run into Bob doing the same thing.
    As the party winds down and we are relieved of our official duties, we both find ourselves back there, sitting on the couch, each with a Sam Adams in hand, watching a very tense game. And we are clearly in our element. And all the strange not-quite-tension-but-close that had managed to find its way between us begins to evaporate. Not because we “talked about our feelings.” We’re two Micks from working class backgrounds; talking about our feelings isn’t really on the dance card. But every time one of us gets up to get a beer, we ask if the other would like one, and a simple camaraderie begins to flavor the air in the room. So this is where we’re living, late in the fourth quarter, with the Pats clinging to a three-point lead when the Rude Kid walks in the room with his mother. The mother says, “He’s going to watch football with the manly men because he loves football.” And she leaves.
    I say to Bob, “Did she say manly?”
    Bob says, “She did.”
    “Manly men?”
    “Unfortunately,” Bob says, “I believe this too occurred.”
    The kid says, “I hate football.”
    Bob and I drink our beers and say nothing.
    “Just a bunch of stupid guys throwing a ball.”
    Bob and I drink our beers.
    “Why would you even watch something like that? Must mean you’re stupid.”
    Bob and I glance at one another and then back at the game.
    The kid walks in front of the TV. “I mean, look at how stupid they all are. Look at it. I’m going to watch something else.”
    And he reaches out to turn the channel.
    “Kid,” I remember somebody who sounded a lot like me saying, “if you touch that button, I’ll break your friggin’ wrist.”
    There must have been something in the tone of the guy who sounded a lot like me, because the kid visibly paled and looked back at me and then at Bob.
    I nodded.
    Bob said, “Oh, he’s serious.”
    The kid dropped his hand. He scurried over to the couch by us. He asked if he could sit on the couch, and we both shrugged. He climbed up beside me.
    Bob looked at me with a face so deadpan an F-16 couldn’t have shaken its cheeks. He said, “We should hang out more,” and clinked his beer bottle against mine.
    For the rest of the game, the kid sat on the couch, attentive and well-behaved. During commercials, he’d ask mostly intelligent questions. The only time he became a nuisance again was when his mother came to take him away and he kicked up a fuss because he didn’t want to go.
    At some point, though, as we all watched the game, Bob and I exchanged a glance, similar to the ones we’d exchanged when the kid was making a pain of himself during the party and his parents were wheedling and sniveling before him. It was a look that said something like, Where we come from, there are rules to how a boy and then a man behaves. There aren’t too many rules and they’re not written down anywhere, but they’re inviolate .
    Spenser embodies those rules. I’d hope Patrick Kenzie does as well. And in that moment, their creators recognized kindred spirits.
    Bob and I did hang out a few times between that moment and the last time I saw him, also at Kate’s Christmas party, in the final weeks of 2008, and they were always fine times.
    I miss him because I liked him but also because I’m not sure what Boston fiction is without him. We have many outstanding writers working in the region, don’t get me wrong, but Bob embodied the flat, deadpan, self-contained sarcasm of our regional voice better than any writer I can think of. When he wrote, “I smiled. Time was, they [women] would have started to