Free In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler

emphasizes how tough he is. Even in danger, Spenser’s wit never leaves him. If anything, the worse the odds against him, the more he quips—and the more brazenly insulting those quips become. In Early Autumn , when he beards crime boss Harry Cotton and three goons in the man’s office, Harry says, “I don’t want you sticking your nose into my business, you unnerstand?”
    Spenser replies, “Understand, Harry. With a D . Un-der-stand. Watch my lips.”
    Harry’s voice gets shriller: “Shut your fucking mouth. And keep your fucking nose out of my fucking business or I’ll fucking bury you right here, right out front here in the fucking yard I’ll bury you.”
    Spenser, to the boy, who he brought with him: “Five. Five fucks in one sentence, Paul. That’s colorful. You don’t see color like that much anymore.”
    It’s actually two sentences, but the gangster doesn’t notice. He’s too busy failing miserably at intimidating Spenser.
    Spenser frequently uses humor to deflect his own vulnerability—not just physically, but emotionally, too.
    In The Judas Goat , Susan gets misty because Spenser is leaving for London on a dangerous case.
    “I’ll come back,” I said. “I won’t die away from you.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” she said, and her voice filled.
    My throat was very tight and my eyes burned. “I know the feeling,” I said. “If I weren’t such a manly bastard, I might come very close to sniffling myself.”
    He won’t, but he feels that way. And he’s not afraid to express it, even if it does come veiled in a wisecrack. Humor is an important part of how Spenser expresses intimacy.
    For instance, in a restaurant where he takes Rachel, Spenser encounters Susan sitting at the bar next to a young man who is trying to pick her up.
    “This is Tom,” she said. And then with the laughing touch of evil in her eyes she said, “Tom was nice enough to buy me a glass of Chablis.”
    I said to Tom, “That’s one .”
    Susan gets it, but Tom is confused. Spenser tells him it’s the tag line to an old joke, but he doesn’t tell him the joke, which could practically be a parable from The Taming of the Shrew : A man and his new bride are riding home on a donkey. The donkey stumbles, the man says, “That’s one.” The donkey stumbles again, the man says, “That’s two.” The donkey stumbles a third time, and the man takes out a gunand shoots him dead. The wife, horrified, berates her husband for his cruelty. He waits until she’s finished, then points at her and says, “That’s one.”
    This is typical Spenser, not sharing the joke with Tom but enjoying it as an in-joke with Susan. In two words, their relationship is succinctly defined. They have a companionable intimacy that allows each of them to understand what the other is thinking. Spenser would not have taken the guy out and shot him, and they both know it. Still, he is Susan’s protector, and she is comfortable with that and loves him for it, in spite of the violence within him and the violent lifestyle that being with him exposes her to. She’s also comfortable and conversant with his sense of humor.
    When Susan Silverman catches him watching a girl in a white T-shirt and no bra walking away, she says, “That a suspect?”
    Despite the implication that he is a sexist pig, his response is not the least defensive. He quips: “Remember I’m a licensed law officer. I was checking whether those cut-off jeans were of legal length.”
    And Susan is not offended by the remark, because she knows for all his macho joking, he is actually a feminist at heart.
    Humor is also a key part of Spenser’s relationship with the other most important person in his life: Hawk.
    Hawk wasn’t always Spenser’s friend, of course. They started out as respected adversaries, back in the days when Hawk was an enforcer for mob boss King Powers. In Promised Land , Spenser warns Hawk of a police setup. Later, Hawk refuses his boss’s order to kill Spenser.
    After it all