Robert B. Parker

In brief

A short blog this time:
#HIGH PROFILE (by me) debuts next week at #4 on the NYTimes list. Thank you!

#For those in the Boston area, Joan and I are an auction item at next week's fund raiser (2/24) for Theater Offensive and it's Youth Outreach Program. High bidder gets cocktails and hors d'ouevres at our home, with us (low bidder has to do it twice). . . . for more info call Scott, at the theater: 617-621-6090.
#My first young adult novel appears in April. It's called Edenville Owls. Adults will probably like it too. I do (though my adulthood is often debated).
#We have begun putting together a CD to be called something like SONGS THAT SPENSER TAUGHT ME, featuring my son Dan singing songs from the books. It may include a guest appearance by Old Golden Throat himself. It'll take awhile, but I thought I'd warn you early.

Talk to you soon.
rbp

Pre pub posting

First, a word from our sponsor: High Profile, the new Jesse Stone novel, will appear on February 6. It will answer some questions about the relationship between Sunny Randall, and Jesse Stone. The next Jesse Stone movie, "Sea Change" will be aired on CBS in May. Tom Selleck stars once again as Jesse Stone. Great star, swell cast, good story, and a passing resemblance to the book. . . . I've been asked who I'd like to see playing Sunny to Tom Selleck's Jesse. The part was originally created for Helen Hunt, but if she were not available, then I'd love to see Kate Burton do it, or Dana Wheeler-Nicholson. As for Spike: The role was created in an old Spenser For Hire movie by my son Dan. He would be the perfect Spike. As they say in the ads:  Daniel T. Parker is Spike.. . . It's sort of interesting now and then when I look into one of my earlier books (trying to remember a name or a description or whatever) and see how Boston changes through the books. Spenser had to keep moving his office because the new Boston kept urban renewing the places I put him, until I got smart and put him in a post renewal building in the Back Bay where he has managed to survive for some years. When I was a little kid we lived about 90 miles west of Boston (in Springfield) and drove through Boston occasionally on our way to visit my maternal grandparents who lived in a three decker, a little bit north of Boston (in Salem). In a '36 Chevy and then a '39 Plymouth, we would drive route 20 all the way, in those days a two lane highway. We'd come through Boston and into the Sumner Tunnel which was one lane in either direction and the primary available route north out of the city. My overwhelming impression of Boston in that time was red brick. And despite the rate and size of the change since then, it remains, red brick and brownstone, not yet overwhelmed by the steel and glass and architectural oddities which have cropped up. The common is still there and the public garden, the swan boats still cruise in the summer and Fenway Park still stands in the shadow of the CITGO sign (once a Cities Service Sign). I don't mind change. Boston is a better city, I think, than it was when I was a kid. Except for one thing. I cannot pass Braves Field, the remnants of which you can view from the Mass Pike, without feeling sad. It is now a BU athletic field, ringed with high rise dormitories. It always makes me think of the Sinatra song, "There Used to be a Ball Park, Right Here."  Sic transit . . .
rbp