The Godwulf Manuscript (Spenser, #1)
author: Robert B. Parker
name: Paul
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2011/09/02
date added: 2011/09/03
shelves: mystery, novel
review:
For the first half of The Godwulf Manuscript, I had a hard time understanding why I was reading the book. I had been recommended the series as being solid detective stories featuring a wise-cracking protagonist and a good example of how to craft snappy dialogue. But for the first 100 pages or so I just couldn’t get a handle on Spenser as a character. His “wit” seemed to be a casual sneer in the direction of everyone he encountered—most of whom he could have gotten to be much more cooperative if he’d not been such a tool right off the bat—and it wasn’t even all that witty to me anyway.
But then, curiously, Spenser started to grow on me. By about halfway through the book I was appreciating his sense of humor more, and his disregard for the kinds of social convention like assigned parking and not beating puffed-up bullies senseless endeared me a little. Robert B. Parker never does a great job at describing Spenser physically so in part I think my inability to connect with him early on was that I couldn’t get much of a mental picture going, but eventually this straightens out.
A more pointed critique for The Godwulf Manuscript is that, as a mystery, it’s only so-so. There’s an economy of characters problem throughout in that very few individuals (left alive) could possibly be the guilty party meaning the reveal is less whodunnit but whydunnit. That’s okay, I suppose, except very early on the mystery stops having anything to do with the titular manuscript and becomes about <spoiler>drugs and a series of murders</spoiler>. In fact, I was never terribly clear on what the manuscript had to do with anything at all, other than to conveniently get Spenser involved in something that otherwise would have been a routine police matter. Maybe that’s all it was, but by the end it felt a bit like Fridge Logic.
The real question, I suppose, is whether this book made me want to continue reading Mr. Parker’s novels, because by most accounts I’ve seen, the series gets better as it goes along. I guess the highest praise for The Godwulf Manuscript I can muster is that it was interesting enough to put the series on come-back-to status: I haven’t entirely written off Parker as a novelist and Spenser as a character so I can see going back and trying book two at some future point. But, this certainly didn’t have me racing out to see desperately what happens next.