The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 1)

Commentary on Promised Land Robert B. Parker

Promised Land, from which this excerpt came, is the first book in which Hawk appears. As I was writing Promised Land, it was not my conscious intention to make him a recurring character. He seemed merely a suitable antagonist for Spenser when I began. It is one of the cliches of the word business to say that a character takes over an author, or in some way acts as if he (or she) had a life of his (or her — liberation do get clumsy) own. This is, of course, tripe. As I have better reason to know than anyone, Hawk is a figment of my imagination and has no existence outside of it. No character does; to believe otherwise is to believe in some sort of literary voodoo. What did happen, however, is that Hawk offered a lot of artistic opportunity.

Hawk is, and the racial pun is intended, the dark side of Spenser. He is what Spenser might have been had he grown up black in a white culture. The hero of books like mine is often outside of the culture. It could be argued, and I’d be willing to so argue, that the hero of most American books is poised, if not in opposition to the official culture, at least in counterbalance to it. If such a hero is non-white, his poise will be more radically asocial, because his exclusion will be more complete. While Spenser is both in and out of the culture, Hawk displays no such uncertainty. His presence in the books provides me an opportunity to examine some aspects of the American Myth, and to comment, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, on racism.

These things and several others occurred to me, not so much as I was writing Promised Land, but next time out, when I was working on The Judas Goat and had occasion to call Hawk back. I’m glad they did occur to me. Hawk in his containment and invulnerability adds substance and ulteriority to the work. Like Susan, his presence helps define Spenser and enlarge our ability to think about the issues Spenser engages. Like Susan, he is interesting in himself and interesting in the context he provides.