I rarely read Steve. I fessed up to this. We once talked about doing a book together, and he said, "No, Spenser's world would not allow the people from my world." It was a good point. But I think he's a genius, in his way.

EB: Back to Spenser for a second and his place in American literature. I thought about what makes him work so well as an enduring character and I realized he was the idealized American male. He's tough yet sensitive. He has a degree of freedom yet he's in a loving relationship...

RBP: That's the autobiographical part - rough but sensitive.

EB: Obviously you took a lot of that from yourself and your own life, but was it intentional to create this idealized guy who walks in a shady world and can get things done?

RBP: Well, it's less important than it might sound, but my doctoral dissertation was on the evolution of the American hero, from the frontier to the private eye: gunfighter, frontiersman, private eye. I have a whole theory on the Turner Theory and the frontier and the effect of the Protestant ethic and the relationship between a white hero and a non-Caucasian companion, which goes back in our literature almost all the way to the beginning.

I'm a little over-educated... [laughs] I could devote a lot of time to this but it would generally clear the classroom. I like playing with all of those ideas, but having a PhD? Joan says I conceal it better than anyone she knows.

And particularly in the beginning, when I was setting up to do my first novel, you sort of get your ducks in sort of a row, to think, "What do I know, what can I think about? How do I know what to write about?" So that was semi-intentional.

He was intended to be the archetypal American hero. Even Hawk, who fitted in nicely by the fourth book, I thought I had fit in nicely the non-white companion.

Did you ever read Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel?

EB: No.

RBP: He talks about this at length and he says that it is repressed homosexuality, that the companionship is so close and loving that to cut it down it has to be with a different race so that the homosexual implications won't be apparent. I frankly think that's bullshit, but it's a whole hypothesis that starts back with D.H. Lawrence and is studied across American literature. I just think that it is what it is: a friendship among men, despite race or beyond race, who understand the same things.