This week it’s a little dimmer in Boston. A brilliant light is out. A literary light. Robert B. Parker, extraordinarily successful author of dozens of books about Boston sleuth Spenser, as well as other novels and young adult stories, died on Monday at his writing desk.

There isn’t a bookstore or airport in the free world that doesn’t have his titles on their shelves. And although he didn’t put Boston on the map, he helped keep it there, making this great city accessible to the reading public – its glory and feisty independence, its rich and varied culture, its history and beloved teams. Collectively, his Spenser books are a symphony to this city by the sea.

But I didn’t know Bob Parker just through his novels. He was my oldest and closest friend. He introduced me to Kathleen Krueger, my wife of 30 years. With his wife, Joan, we played tennis and double-dated and traveled to England. We watched each other’s kids grow up. His death is like the loss of a gravitational force in our lives – something solid and strong and dependable.

I knew Bob Parker five years before he became Robert B. Parker. I met him on my first day as an instructor in the Northeastern English Department in September 1969. I was just out of grad school, and he was in his second year of teaching. He was to be one of my officemates. The first time I saw him, he was standing in running shoes and swinging an invisible baseball bat while reciting a recipe for chocolate mousse to a colleague.

Bob Parker was probably the smartest person I’ve known and the quickest wit. His observations, never labored, were always incisive and sensible. His writing was brilliant and lean, which in part accounts for his immense popularity. Like his archetypal knight, Spenser, he was a fixer, a corrector. If you needed something, he was there – whether it was advice on children, carpentry, or someone to pick up the other end of a couch. And his love and devotion to Joan and his sons, David and Daniel, was immeasurable.
Bob was also a baseball encyclopedia who could quote stats back to the 1930s. He could recite the lyrics of most love songs. A phrase would come up during dinner, and he’d sing a bar from Vaughn or Sinatra or Mercer. How many people do you know who can recall the words from “Aba Daba Honeymoon’’?

One of Bob Parker’s greatest virtues was how true he was to himself – void of pretense and affectation which in part made him uncomfortable with academic life. One morning while jogging the NU track, he told me he was thinking of writing a novel. How could he? He didn’t know any big words. He wasn’t the sensitive artiste. In spite of that – or, perhaps because of that – he began writing his first Spenser novel, “The Godwulf Manuscript’’ which gave him a chance to take swipes at academe. It also got him fantasizing about writing his way out of the classroom. He was a good teacher, and taught a popular course on the Novel of Violence, but that wasn’t him. He preferred to write his own. And so he built a dynasty that added brilliantly to Boston’s rich literary landscape. There are fans who come to town from afar, armed with his books as walking and dining guides.

Although he enjoyed the benefits of celebrity, he was never taken by it – his or anyone else’s. If you met him and didn’t know who he was, he wouldn’t tell you. He hated self-promotion. He groaned in anticipation of book tours. He long ago wearied of interviews. But he did what he was supposed to do as Robert B. Parker. And he always came home Bob.

Over 40 years, we jogged hundreds of miles and shared hundreds of meals. And, although he has given the world some 75 books, I cannot recall a conversation about his writing that went more than a couple of sentences. “What are you working on?’’ “Spenser #42.’’ “What’s it about?’’ “Truth and beauty.’’ Books were what he did, and he seemed to turn them out once every two weeks.
He wrote about the things that were most important to him: love, family, and human decency. Behind the scenes, he lived a quiet, simple, and ordered life, spending most of his days at his writing desk, surrounded by photos of Joan and his sons, his dog Pearl on the couch. It was a life well-composed, just as he had wanted it – and perhaps his most successful creation.

So was his death – in a brilliant flash at his keyboard.
(Originally published in The Boston Globe.)

Interested in finding out a little more about Gary’s new book, Skin Deep?  Check out the new video below:

Like what you see? Share this video with your friends and family! Spread the word that Beauty is Only… Skin Deep.

On July 8, my seventh novel, Skin Deep, comes out in hardback. And soon after that I’ll do some touring in the Northeast, then in Los Angeles in mid-August on the way to the Maui Writers Retreat and Conference, this year in Honolulu.

And in preparation for all that and a bunch of radio interviews, I’m polishing my response to what might be the most asked question of any writer: “Where do you get your ideas?”
The boring answer is that we make them up. But ideas come from almost anywhere: an experience, an overheard conversation, a news item, a movie scene, a dream—a notion that has been with you for years, sitting in the middle of your brain like an artifact. I have a separate book that evolved from each of those. And so do hundreds of other writers.

Like other genre writers, my publisher expects some basics from me: High concept thrillers centered on the development of a “hot” medical or biomedical breakthrough. For instance, the development of an anti-aging drug (Elixir); boosting the intelligence of slow children for parents intent on raising geniuses (Gray Matter); rushing to market a cure for Alzheimer’s disease (Flashback). Each story should be centered on ordinary American people—family folks with kids, cats and dogs. And each with the message: Beware what you wish for. So those are the basic ingredients of my assignments. But every time one book is finished, it’s like getting fired. I find myself trying to come up with the next big What If?

Well, after weeks of thrashing around, that happened. I was drifting through the family room where my wife was watching “Dr. Phil.” There on the screen was a young mother woefully confessing that she could not walk past a mirror without being depressed at how she didn’t look like Jessica Simpson in spite of 18 separate cosmetic surgical procedures. And she was lined up for more. It was unbelievable, because the woman was rather attractive, except for the grouper lips. What she needed, of course, was not another cosmetic surgeon but a good shrink. She was surgically addicted, obsessed with Jessica Simpson’s face, and miserable she would never look like her no matter how many times she’d go under the knife.

That story episode told me a lot and formulated the core idea for Skin Deep.
What that “Dr. Phil” moment brought home was how obsessed people were with their looks and how they were turning to cosmetic surgery for the quick fix. Losing your hair?

Get plugs. Look like a dork in glasses? Call a laser clinic. Lips too thin? Get them plumped with collagen. Eyelids a tad thick? Get a lid lift. Nose too ethnic? Get it snipped. Crows walking all over your face? Get Restylane injections. Frown line too deep? Botox it. Got a belly that won’t quit? Call the liposuction doc.

That woman’s obsession also got me thinking about the nature of beauty and a concept known as the Golden Ratio or the “divine proportion.”

During the Renaissance, artists and mathematicians determined a formula for the most aesthetically pleasing creations of nature and art—flowers, seashells, trees, as well as music, paintings, and architecture. Also the human face. They determined the ideal facial beauty had a fixed ratio of various proportions: facial length to the width, mouth length to nose width, length of lips to width of nose, nose tip to chin to lip to chin, and several others. The ratio turns out to be a constant of 1.67 to 1.0. Philosophers say it’s the ideal that beauty aspires to. The closer that a face’s various proportions approach that ratio, the more attractive the face. And that is why most iconic beauties have heart-shaped faces, with wide-set eyes, thin noses, full mouths, and short chins.

Skin Deep is a novel about an obsession with an ideal of female beauty—an obsession that drives women to seek enhancement; an obsession that is like catnip to a killer who stalks these very alluring women. A killer who is quite unlike any other you will have met.

But that’s all I’m going to say. You’ll have to read the book to find out for yourself. So far the critics are loving it. And I hope you will also.
Until next time…