R.I.P. Robert B. Parker

This is one of those fleeting AP reports that causes a double take, since I wasn’t aware of any illness or anything.  Apparently it’s a sudden death, natural causes kind of thing, when the universe just decides your time is up.

I had a nice email exchange with Parker, who is most famous for his series of “Spencer” novels, roughly a year ago.  He agreed to a few questions on the western genre, the subject of my thesis at the time, and as I had already spoken to Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn and actor/filmmaker Ed Harris, I thought the author of “Appaloosa” would be a nice addition to the piece.  His perspective on the future of the genre and its evolution (the precise topic at hand) differed slightly from mine, but nevertheless was refreshing in its honesty and, most importantly, its confidence.

I dug back through my old emails to see if I could find our exchange, and there it was.  One excerpt was particularly indicative of the man, as far as I could gauge him from afar and electronically…

The classic western is, I think, the myth of America dramatized. It doesn’t need to evolve, indeed it shouldn’t. In fact, it probably can’t. It should not be revised, or updated…I’m not so sure westerns are reflective of the times. I would argue that it is precisely their charm, that they present a classical and fundamentally unchanging alternative to the times.  At its core the western has always been anti-establishment,  celebratory of individual freedom. It is, at bottom, about honor.  About men with guns who insist upon living life on their own terms, and who do what they think they ought to do, in an arena where civilization has not piled up thick enough to prevent that. And if it begins to, they, like Huck Finn, “light out for the territories.” The territories are gone. But the myth remains.

And on why he enjoyed writing in the genre:

The detective is, as Leslie Fiedler once suggested, merely “the cowboy dismounted, moving gracefully through the streets of the city.” As a writer I like the space that a western gives you, to write about characters in the simplicity of their action without much clutter of law and government and such. It allows most of their decisions to be moral, honorable perhaps. The moral complexity becomes easier to delineate. The consequences of the decisions are less muffled. The physical openness of the landscape embodies the moral openness of the drama.

I could have gone on for hours with a guy like that.  From one western fan to another, what more could I say other than a lofty “Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”