Read In Pursuit of Spenser for Free Online Page B

and a lack of airs or pretension. But it’s also a provincial town with an insecurity complex about its own provincialism. The local media sometimes manifests this insecurity by refusing to give its local authors, actors, artists, or directors any kind of hometown pass, even if the pass isclearly deserved. Boston talent, some have argued, are not babied by the Boston media, they’re targeted by it. Even when they do give a prop or two, it helps if they can do it at the expense of another in the same line of work.
    So it was that in the early stages of my career, the headlines of some reviews of my books read “Move Over, Spenser” and the like. This became an elephant in the middle of the room Bob and I never talked about when we would run into each other at the annual Christmas party thrown at Kate’s Mystery Bookstore just outside of Porter Square in Cambridge. Kate Mattes, who founded and ran Kate’s Mystery Bookstore, threw that Christmas party every year, and every local mystery writer showed up to drink eggnog and beer and wine and schmooze with local fans who supported our work and supported Kate and were—and continue to be—the reason I’m not greeting you through the voice box at the McDonald’s drive-thru, asking if you’d like to super-size your order.
    Kate’s was a very small store—it comprised, essentially, the living room and dining room of the first floor of a Victorian. Where the kitchen should have been was the shipping and receiving room. Where you’d put a mud room and washer and dryer, however, Kate had fashioned a small study at the back of the store. I have no idea what went on there during regular business hours, but during those annual Christmas parties, that room was a place to sign stock or step out of the dense crush of the crowd for a moment. And, if the gods aligned, it was the room in which to catch a Patriots game if they were playing that day.
    The Christmas party in question, they were. It was 1998 and the game had potential playoff implications. I was (and remain) a serious Patriots fan. I don’t name my sons Bruschi or Ben-Jarvis Brady Lehane or anything, but I’ve missed onlyone game in fifteen years and only because I was out of the country.
    So this is a game that has a bearing on whether we enter the post-season or go home. And this is pre-Tom Brady. This is the Bledsoe years. The Pete Carroll years. The never-wona-Super-Bowl years. So I’m keeping in mind how lucky I am to be at the party, to have fans, to be rubbing elbows with the likes of Linda Barnes and Jeremiah Healy and William Martin and, of course, Bob Parker. Except Bob and I have sort of been avoiding each other of late because of those headlines and the pissing contest the local press seems determined to start between us.
    There’s a child at the party. Well, actually there are several of them, but one is hard to miss because, while he’s only nine or ten years old, he’s kind of a prick. Actually, that’s not fair—strike “kind of.” He pushes through the crowd without ever saying “Excuse me,” and pushes his way back again the same way. He whines constantly to his parents— When are we going home? I don’t like it here. This place smells. The food sucks. These people are boring. Books suck. I don’t like you .
    This is not impolite behavior. This is rude behavior.
    To which his parents, well-meaning Cantabrigians that they are and thus choking on politically correct language to an Orwellian degree, mention that his behavior is verging on the “inappropriate” and ask him to “please respect the rights of others,” etc. But mostly they beg and bargain with him and tell him they “understand his feelings” and he’s being such a “trooper” putting up with boring adult things and they’ll be sure to buy him an ice cream on the way home.
    No one else seems aware of how repulsive this is (we are in Cambridge, after all, where political correctness didn’t just find a home, it built a