Free In Pursuit of Spenser by Otto Penzler Page B

will not let his son back down, even though he knows Jerry isn’t tough enough. Spenser doesn’t want to kill Jerry, not because he’s afraid of what Joe might do, but because he feels sorry for him and doesn’t want to have to kill his son.
    Susan says,
    “You are the oddest combination.”
    “Physical beauty matched with deep humility?”
    “Aside from that,” said Susan. “Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusions than anyone I’ve ever known. And yet you are as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty.”
    Spenser sees himself as a protector, a knight errant. As Susan explains to Rachel in Looking for Rachel Wallace :
    “What he [Spenser] won’t say, and what he may not even admit to himself, is that he’d like to be Sir Gawain. He wasborn five hundred years too late. If you understand that, you understand most of what you are asking.”
    “Six hundred years,” I said.
    Spenser makes a joke, but tellingly, he doesn’t disagree with her.
    Despite his often contentious relationship with Rachel, once hired, Spenser considers himself to be responsible for her. He never backs down defending her person and her honor against all comers, often against her will, until, finally fed up (with his actions, not his words), she fires him. Needless to say, he does not take firing personally, or at all, really, and when Rachel is kidnapped because she has no bodyguard, he still feels morally obliged to find her.
    Spenser’s role as the knight errant takes an unusual turn in Promised Land , in which Spenser is hired by Harvey Shepard to find his wife, Pam, who has run away. He finds her, talks to her, ascertains that she is healthy, happy, and not being held against her will, and then refuses to tell Harvey where she is. Spenser has decided Pam is better off where she is and the husband will only make her life miserable. On the other hand, he is willing to defend Harvey from the mob’s chief enforcer, Hawk, who is, at the time, if not a personal friend, at least a respected adversary. This is not the action of the ordinary PI, but Spenser has his own code of ethics that he will not violate.
    In not betraying Pam to her husband, Spenser is confident he made the right choice but he isn’t happy about it. He feels he’s failed them both. As he tells Susan, “I’ve been with two people whose lives are screwed up to hell and I just can’t seem to get them out of it at all.”
    Susan, who understands him perfectly, has no problem putting it in perspective, with a humorous edge: “Of courseyou can’t . . . You also can’t do a great deal about famine, war, pestilence, and death.”
    Spenser immediately counters with a quip: “A great backfield.”
    Why does he care? It’s not his problem. Is it because he took the job for the husband and failed to do it? Because his duty is to his client, but he can’t bring himself to betray his client’s wife?
    He’s hard on others who don’t share his same sense of honor. Later in Promised Land , Spenser meets up with Pam, who has gotten involved with militant feminists who robbed a bank and shot and killed the guard. She is wearing large sunglasses, which she also wore for the robbery. Spenser tells her to ditch them, because they are no longer a disguise, they are a means of identification. The woman, feeling stupid about not having realized that, says, “I never thought—”
    Spenser isn’t about to let her off the hook.
    “No, probably you don’t have all that much experience at robbery and murder. You’ll get better as you go along.”
    His scathing irony is doubtless due to the fact that she deserves it, but probably also out of the frustration he feels from realizing if he had told the husband where she was, he would have come and gotten her and she wouldn’t have been involved in the robbery.
    Susan tries to defend Pam: “She feels bad enough.”
    Which only frustrates Spenser more: “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t