Robert Parker is best known for the Spenser novels, which portray the impossible adventures of an anti-noir private eye in America's most interesting small city. What I like about the stories is that they feature completely unbelievable characters in a believable setting. Before I moved to the Boston area I read the books with a vague notion of the landscape they were set in. Now that I can actually walk on the same sidewalks and look at the same buildings as the hero I enjoy the literary experience even more.
Parker populates real places with fake people, occasionally changing the names of towns in Massachusetts, but always staying faithful to their spirit. And over the course of several decades he accurately documents the conversion of Boston from a place where Eddie Coyle feels at home, to the place that it is now. In the most recent novels (before his recent death), Parker touched on the suburban housing boom and the continuing gentrification of the downtown, while continuously celebrating the remarkable walkability of most of the neighborhoods. He also makes point of depicting the academic environment of Massachusetts in scathing and sarcastic terms.
Boston, in some respects, is just as much a fiction as Spenser. Land created from ocean, commerce created from knowledge and luck, and a diversity of architecture and urban layouts that reflects and preserves approximately 250 years of European settlement.
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