Robert B. Parker. Walking Shadow. Berkley, 1994.

I have always had in the back of my mind to read a Spenser detective story. I knew they were set in my favorite city, Boston, and I recall back in the eighties students of mine talking about the TV show and Spenser’s buddy Hawk. Now I can say I have done it, and it was fun.

Spenser’s Harvard PhD girlfriend is on the board of a theater company in Port City. This fictional city sounds a lot like New Bedford, Massachusetts, except that it is north of Boston—a fictional mashup of a couple of towns. During a performance which they are attending, an actor is shot and killed while on stage. The shooter disappears before anyone can catch him, and Spenser gets involved.

There is a lot to get involved in. As is true of many such charitable boards, the board is mostly made up of serious donors. One of the board members is Rikki Wu, wife of a local tong leader. For the uninitiated, a tong is a Chinese criminal gang. Spenser gets a visit from Rikki’s husband and two bodyguards warning him to stay out of Port City. Of course, he doesn’t.

The chief of police in Port City is an acquaintance of Spenser’s, a former state policeman who left that force under some dubious circumstances. Port City was once a thriving mill town with a well known college (if it had not been in Massachusetts, I would have figured it for Brunswick, Maine). It also has a significant population of Portuguese fishermen and Chinese immigrants who work in fish processing or other menial labor in the area.

We get interesting views of Chinese immigrants (legal and illegal), organized crime, and struggling regional theaters. It also has a lot of the elements of classic noir: rain, beautiful but untrustworthy women, a criminal gang, kidnapping, corrupt officials, and dangerous love affairs. For those who like such stories, it is a lot of fun. And, yes, it gets the Boston vibe pretty well. (Spenser is fixing up a recently purchased house in the town next to the one where I grew up. Parker knows what he is writing about.)

As is usually true in such tales, things are not what they seem in Walking Shadow. The plot keeps twisting. The characters and stories keep us guessing with numerous interesting details and surprises. It also is quite literary with allusions to Chaucer, Shakespeare (more than just the title), Hemingway, Eliot, and Merle Travis among others.