Free In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler Page A

goes down, Susan asks him, “Why not, Hawk? I knew you wouldn’t but I don’t know why.”
    Hawk shrugs: “Me and your old man there are a lot alike.I told you that already. There ain’t too many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there’d be one less. I’d have missed him. And I owed him one from this morning.”
    The wry end of his explanation only underscores their similarity.
    Once Hawk becomes Spenser’s best friend, his former mob connections sometimes prove humorous; it is a joke shared between them. In Early Autumn , when they are working out on the speed bags at the Harbor Health club, Hawk gets a phone call from Harry Cotton, the mob boss Spenser taunted, who has just put out a contract on Spenser’s life. Hawk comes back rather amused. Spenser asks:
    “That him on the phone?”
    “Yeah. He want me to whack you.” Hawk’s smile got wider. “He ask me if I know who you are. I say, yeah, I think so.”
    I did a left jab and an overhead right.
    “How much he offering,” I said.
    “Five Gs.”
    “That’s insulting,” I said.
    “You’d have been proud of me,” Hawk said. “I told him that. I said I wouldn’t do it for less than ten.”
    That isn’t the only subject that should be sensitive between them but isn’t. Hawk often falls into parodies of racial stereotypes when talking to Spenser, who gives it right back. In The Judas Goat , Spenser picks up Hawk in the airport:
    I saw him leaning back in a chair with his feet on a suitcase and a white straw hat with a lavender band and a broad brim tipped forward over his face. He had on a dark blue three-piece suit, with a fine pinstripe of light gray, and awhite shirt with a collar pin underneath the small tight four-in-hand knot of a lavender silk tie. The points of a lavender handkerchief showed in his breast pocket. His black over-the-ankle boots gleamed with wax. The suitcase on which they rested must have cost half a grand. Hawk was stylish.
    I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Fetchit, I’ve seen all your movies and was wondering if you’d care to join me for a bite of watermelon.”
    Hawk didn’t move. His voice came from under the hat. “Y’all can call me Stepin, bawse.”
    But where Spenser and Hawk often kid like that, Spenser is sensitive to racial slurs from other people, and even before he and Hawk are friends, he is ready rush to his defense. In Promised Land , he tells Susan,
    “I got no special interest in playing Russian roulette with Hawk. Shepard called him a nigger.”
    Susan shrugged. “What’s that got to do?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I wish he hadn’t done that. It’s insulting.”
    “My God, Spenser, Hawk has threatened this man’s life, beaten him up, abused his children, and you’re worried about a racial slur?”
    Spenser has his own code of honor—even though others don’t always understand it, and even though he frequently sounds as if he doesn’t take it seriously. At one point in Early Autumn , Spenser beats up the thugs trying to kidnap Paul. As they slink away, one taunts Spenser for not killing them, as if it is a fault: “You never were a shooter . . . It’s what’s wrong with you.”
    The boy asks Spenser why he doesn’t kill people. Spenser says, “Something to do with the sanctity of life. That kind of stuff.”
    Except Spenser actually believes what he’s saying. He’s expressing a moral code he actually agrees with, while at the same time scoffing at it as a silly idea. Which, of course, is actually ridiculing the notion that the sanctity of life is a silly idea.
    Spenser is always complicated. In Pastime , he finds himself confronted with Jerry Broz, a small-time mobster determined to kill him. Ordinarily, this would be no problem, because Jerry isn’t good enough to do it. Spenser could easily take him out. But Jerry is the only son of Joe Broz, a crime boss who in the past has ordered Spenser killed himself. Joe feels Jerry is honor bound to kill Spenser and