Goodbye, Robert B. Parker

My favorite writer died last week.
Not my Favorite Writer, the literary person whose work I would talk about at a cocktail party. Nope. This was the regular-guy writer who still managed to have a literary sensibility. The guy who wrote books that I actually read. Each and every year, for decades at a stretch.
The writer is Robert B. Parker. And if you have not checked out the Spenser novels over the years, you have missed something special.
There’s a practical problem when a writer this good, this essential to one’s reading life, dies. And that’s the simple matter of not having him produce any more books. But I do take satisfaction—and like to think that he would—in the nature of his death. Apparently he died at his desk while writing.
That’s the writer’s equivalent of dying with your boots on. And it fits this Parker fellow, who apparently equated writer’s block with laziness.
Thank you, Mr. Parker, for so many hours of entertainment.