Dumpster Bust Interviews: Robert B. Parker – Part III

In this third of three installments, Robert B. Parker talks more about his philosophy on writing, the vagaries of the Internet, and the importance of a good cardiologist.

Read Part I of the interview here and Part II here.

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EB: You talked about music with regard to your writing, how it makes sense as music. Does any specific kind of music or films influence your writing at all?

RBP: Probably, but not in any sense that I can tell you. Since the private eye, like the gunfighter, is a fictive creation and at one time or another it occupied predominantly in films. I’ve probably been influenced more by Western movies than by detective movies. I’m a great fan of Western movies. I’ll watch a Randolph Scott Western… I’ll watch the crap on the Western channel, if there’s nothing else! So probably Western movies most of all.

I have the kind of mind – it’s not intentional – where I can’t stop anything even if I wanted to, that tucks away cuts and pieces of experience. I know a lot of literary allusions, I know a lot of song allusions, I know a lot of movie allusions. I almost never go to the movies anymore, yet I can still hold my own in the movie trivia games, just because things stick in my head. And that creeps in and perhaps adds a density to the prose, but conscious influences – after [Raymond] Chandler – I don’t know any. Unconscious influences, there’s bound to be. I have consciousness – I’m alive, still, even though I’m on a book tour!

EB: Do you visit websites often? Are you influenced by the online world?

RBP: No, it doesn’t. To my knowledge, I don’t have a website. I’m not entirely certain what a website is. I write on a computer and I order books on Amazon, and I think that computers are great. I’m not anti-computer.

I know there are websites devoted to me, but I don’t read them any more than I read reviews and everything else.

EB: There’s something called the Spensarium. I’m not sure what it is.

RBP: I’m not either, except that I know that it exists. There’s something called Bullets & Beer, or Beer & Bullets, which I know exists. I once looked myself up on somebody’s website, I think it was in Japan, and I noticed that I was five-feet tall and weighed 250. Maybe they don’t get it all right… the weight, okay, but the height was a little bit of an issue.

EB: That might be a microcosm for the Internet right there.

RBP: [laughs] Yeah, half right.

What would be interesting – and somebody’s PhD thesis could dwell on this – would be what happens to a writer when he moves from typewriter or handwriting to computer. I know that Henry James, in his later years, when he was losing his eyesight, had stopped writing and began to dictate. And what came out was often referred to as James’ “later manner,” which was convoluted, quite difficult. The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, that era. Some professors pointed out that the later manner coincided with James starting to dictate his novels, and suggested it wasn’t his intention.

Article Author: Eric Berlin

Eric Berlin is the publisher of Online Media Cultist. He's also prone to referring to himself in the third person in author bios in an attempt to make it look like someone Less Important wrote it for him.
Contact: dumpsterbust@gmail.com

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