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does. He is open to epiphanies, new journeys and perspectives, a challenging of his personal status quo.
    That doesn’t just make him interesting, it makes him human. And when a character is recognizably human, he is vulnerable. You fear for him. So even though Spenser is not only the self-professed “toughest man in Boston,” and is also the “toughest man in New England” (in Pale Kings and Princes he goes to Maine or New Hampshire—I can’t remember which—to prove it by beating a guy’s ass to the ground)—he is admittedly flawed, which makes him vulnerable. And thatgives his mano-a-mano confrontations something at stake. He has something to lose, and we have something to lose too, because we’ve befriended him.
    Another pioneering aspect of the novels (particularly in the late ’70s and early-to-mid ’80s when they were hitting their stride) was that Spenser has a girlfriend. Not a girlfriend who stays faithful to him and is endlessly understanding as he fools around on her with exotic Russian hit-women or love-the-one-you’re-with damsels in distress. And not the girlfriend who exists to get kidnapped and then rescued by the hero so she can be held in his masculine arms and forever define herself by how she can best play a supporting role in his life. Not even a girlfriend who would appreciate being called “girlfriend.” No, this woman is a professional woman, far better educated than Spenser (no slouch himself when it came to referencing literature or the intricacies of food), utterly self-sufficient, a practicing psychiatrist. I’m speaking, of course, of Susan Silverman, a polarizing character in the Parker canon—hell, a polarizing figure in the crime fiction world as a whole. And while it is true that, as the series entered its later decades, Ms. Silverman becomes smug and tiring to a nearly indefensible degree, she is fresh air incarnate in the early novels.
    Girlfriends in detective fiction had, up until that point, existed to be discarded. They could be killed in order to give the detective a personal vendetta upon which to embark, as often happened in, say, John D. MacDonald’s brilliant Travis McGee novels, to the point where I found it hard to believe a self-respecting South Florida insurance company would underwrite a policy for any woman who bumped uglies with McGee. Or, as mentioned above, they could get kidnapped (pretty much a guarantee if our hero was facing off against a serial killer or thugs who also owned a warehouse by thedocks). Or they could just sort of hang around, keeping the home fires burning, until our hero came back and needed to get himself some. No wonder women hated to read PI books back then. They couldn’t find themselves in them.
    Susan Silverman is her own woman all the way. She loves Spenser, has lusty, regular sex with him, and often psychoanalyzes him at convenient moments in the narrative so he can continue on his course with the assurance that he is, in fact, truly the bravest and most virtuous man in the book (or all of New England). But Susan also fights with Spenser, challenges him and his assumptions, refuses to be defined by him, and for one long stretch, breaks up with him until he stops expecting her to be anything but what she is.
    Some of the reason that male readers dislike Susan is because of these very attributes. (And, yes, in later books some of the reason is because an air of smug entitlement and self-regard covers her like a second skin.) But one can never discount how, through her, Robert B. Parker created a new archetype in American PI fiction—the woman-as-equal.
    That would have been enough of a day’s work, but Parker wasn’t through. Once he’d gotten Susan up and running, he introduced Hawk, the Cristal-drinking, shaven-headed (long before shaven heads were cool; hell, it was Hawk who probably made them cool), mostly heartless but endlessly loyal “dark angel” to the author’s more virtuous Spenser. Hawk’s descendents are