Hundred-Dollar Baby

Robert B. Parker Hundred-Dollar Baby 2006 Boston PI Spenser No. 34 Published in UK as Dream Girl Click on pages to enlarge Yosha Bunko scans

Robert B. Parker
Hundred-Dollar Baby
New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 2006
291 pages, hardcover, jacket/p>

Robert B. Parker (1932-2010), was born and raised in Springfield and died in Cambridge, both in Massachusetts. He got BA from Colby College in Maine in 1954, served 2 years in the US Army in Korea, got an MA in English literature from Brown University in 1957, worked for a while as a technical writer, then return to Brown University for a PhD in English literature in 1971, according to an obituary. His doctoral dissertation examined the private-eye heroes of authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald.

Parker began writing his own crime fiction, including the first Boston PI Spenser novels, while a professor at Northeastern University. He quit teaching in 1979 to write full time, and died of a heart attack while writing the 41st Spenser novel, which was finished by his literary agent. The Spenser series was continued posthumously by another writer, and a few shorter series characters have also been continued by other writers.

The ubiquitous Steamy East

Hundred-Dollar Baby is No. 34 in the Boston PI Spenser series. It was published in the United Kingdom under the title Dream Girl.

While not a Steamy East title, the story is a good example of how the Steamy East makes cameo appearances in fiction having nothing to do with Asia. Parker drew from his own experiences, and some of the characters are inspired by people he knows, including his wife and sons, and himself. The Steamy East vignette in Hundred-Dollar Baby in Hundred-Dollar Baby most likely originated in something Parker observed or experienced while in Japan on leave from Korea during a couple of years after the Korean War.

PI Spenser -- the only name by which he is known -- narrates his own adventures, and is thus poised to be a dummy through which his creator throws his own voice. Parker clearly uses his fiction as a foil for broaching the pros and cons of all manner of social issues.

"I love racial pride," Spenser says to Tony. "Without his heritage," Tony said, "what's a man got?"

Lot of things, Spenser says, and rattles of a list until Tony smiles, holds up a hand, and agrees that "Maybe heritage ain't everything.""

Tony runs half city and most of the whores, but Spenser points out that "heritage has nothing to do with it."

Later, Spenser and his wife, Susan, are sharing a sandwich at a bar while talking about sexual perceptions (see scans to the right). Susan in the novel, like Parker's wife Susan in real life, lives in her own quarters in the home they otherwise share. And one can imagine Parker talking with his wife about elements of his stories.

In any event, the fictional Susan is a sounding board for Spenser's efforts to understand how straight men and women imagine what it feels like to be a straight woman or man. He also wonders whether his client, April, who regards all men (except Spenser) as pigs, are capable of feeling love.

April, a high class escort girl who had availed herself of Spenser's services years ago, now semi-retired, manages her own escort service. And she seeks Spenser's help again, to deal with someone who is trying to extort protection money from her.

In the course of the conversation with Susan, Spenser relates how he felt about girls for hire when he and a couple of Army buddies, on R & R leave in Japan from Korea, stayed at a Tokyo hotel with some girls they had rented for the week. He later described the girls as prostitutes, but today they would be called sex workers or companions.

Some feminists and moralists will take Spenser's description of his R & R in Japan as an apology for sexual exploitation. But it strikes me more as an anthropological understanding of a semi-romantic commercial relationship that cannot be easily reduced to a matter of victimizer and victim.

The narrative arrives at a similar conclusion. The conversation segues from prostitution to pornography. Susan expresses concern that both "commercial sex and pornography dehumanize the object of desire". Spenser injects "And the object which desires" and adds "Works both ways." Susan says "So perhaps pornography and prostitution are not victimless crimes." Spenser agrees but says "The trick is to figure out which is the victim."