Another Robert Parker western to come

Entertainment Weekly have revealed that author Robert B. Parker was working on a Spenser novel when he passed away at his desk earlier this week.


The death of crime-genre master Robert B. Parker caught everyone by surprise, including Helen Brann, his agent of 37 years. “It was a complete shock to all of us,” Brann told EW. “His wife, Joan, had breakfast with him [Monday] morning, went out for her walk, came back an hour later, and he was sitting at his writing desk, dead.”

According to Brann, Parker was 30-40 pages into a new novel featuring Spenser, his iconic Boston-based PI, when he suffered what appears to be a fatal heart attack. However, due to his notorious prolific writing habit, there is substantial Parker material still to be published. According to Chris Pepe, his longtime editor at Putnam, there are two books set for release early this year (Split Image, a mystery featuring Jesse Stone, will be out next month, while Blue-Eyed Devil, a Western, hits bookstores later this spring) as well as a couple more in the pipeline. Brann says the author’s tremendous productivity was due to his strict, Updikean writing rate of five pages a day.

“Anybody that has that kind of output, some books are better than others,” she admits. “They weren’t all at the peak of his form, but many were. And at his peak form, he couldn’t be beat. If there’s any justice in the world, he’s got to be up there with the best. With Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald, and all them.” FULL STORY