Author: Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker finished a Boston University doctorate in 1971 on Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, titled The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality. Two years later he added to the form himself. In The Godwulf Manuscript, issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1973, a university hires a Boston private investigator named Spenser to recover a stolen illuminated manuscript, and readers met a narrator who quotes poetry, cooks seriously, and had been dismissed from an investigator's post for insubordination. Parker, who lived from 1932 to 2010, taught at Northeastern University, was made full professor in 1976 and left for full-time writing in 1979. Spenser eventually reached forty books and produced the television series Spenser: For Hire in 1985. Promised Land took the Edgar for best novel in 1977, and the same body named Parker a Grand Master in 2002. He also created the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall series and the westerns featuring Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, and in 1989 completed Poodle Springs from the four chapters Chandler had left unfinished.