When Robert B. Parker was alive, we gobbled up his Spenser novels faster than a load of IHOP pancakes.......you could easily devour them in less than two hours, since 90 percent of the books consisted of pithy, dryly witty dialogue from cool, sardonic Boston private eye Spenser. Spenser always had an inexhaustible supply of verbal barbs as he dealt with friends and enemies alike....and we could never get enough of him.
After Parker's passing, his estate gave mystery writer Ace Atkins the privilege of writing Spenser novels, performing the literary tightrope act of duplicating Parker's unique style while adding something of his own talents to the stories.
The effect is the same as watching some comedy club impressionist do an uncanny imitation of an instantly familiar celebrity........you admire how close he came to the original, but you're aware you're not experiencing the real thing.....
Atkins labors mightily to duplicate Spenser's banter but you can sense the sweat and strain he's putting into it, as opposed to the effortless feel of Robert Parker's prose. And to many a fan's displeasure, Atkins' Spenser at times reacts, behaves and speaks quite differently than Parker's Spenser. We're willing to roll with that only up to a certain point......if you think Atkins takes too many presumptuous liberties with the character, then Spenser's not Spenser anymore.....and then putting Robert Parker's name on the books in front of the title smells like a con job...
Speaking of cons, one element we did admire in "Little White Lies"......Atkins creation of Spenser's latest quarry, M. Brooks Welles, a slick pathological liar so cloaked in false identities and fictionalized backgrounds that Welles himself has swallowed his own lies and lost all touch with reality. Like Donald Trump, he's tailor made as a poster boy for the Time magazine cover that recently blared, "Is truth dead?"
Welles, supposedly a former top secret U.S. military operative, has conned CNN into using him as a commentator and hoodwinked a lonely woman, Spenser's client, out of 300,000 dollars. Spenser goes on the hunt for this self made fantasy figure, but his brief confrontations with Welles prove maddening......Welles resides in his own bubble of falsehoods, he sounds like Trump wailing about Obama's birth, the tapping of his phones, the size of his crowds and New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9-11.....
It's a lengthier tale than master of brevity Robert Parker would have written......and we couldn't help speculating how Parker's Spenser might have handled such a supremely annoying charlatan, and how it would differ from the even-handed way he's treated by Atkins' Spenser...
Still, the book's an entertaining enough read, if you can live with the fact that Atkins can skillfully revive Spenser and mimic Parker's style, but never, never recapture that singular, lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original. So we'll close the case on "Little White Lies" with 3 stars...(***)....not quite Parker, but always nice to see his creation in action again.....
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