Looking for Rachel Wallace, Audio Version

Looking for Rachel Wallace, Audio Version (1980/1987) Robert B. Parker narrated by Michael Prichard

I’d somehow forgotten how good this story is.

I’d forgotten that at the start of the series Spenser said he had fought in Korea, which would of course make him even older than I remembered.

“And you were in combat in Korea?”

I nodded again. “

And you were a policeman?”

Another nod.

“And now you do this.”

It was a statement. No nod required.

Spenser is hired to protect Rachel Wallace, a feminist writer who has been threatened for her expose of the patriarchy and male domination. Remember that this was written in 1980, so those were still shocking things.

“You’re begging the question, I think. We haven’t established my distaste for radical feminism. We haven’t even in fact established that you are a radical feminist.”

“I have learned,” Rachel Wallace said, “to assume a distaste for radical feminism. I rarely err in that.”

“Probably right,” I said.

It also has a lot of introspection of Spenser’s part, as to why he acts as he does, which is what makes the story so fascinating. Big tough men were not introspective in 1980, nor did they cry after having to kill.

It’s this complexity that makes Spenser so fascinating, and why although the setting is stuck in time, Spenser himself remains timeless.
Rating: 9/10 (for the story, I still don’t love the narrator)

Published by Random House Audio

• Browse the archives:
  
• The Watchman » »
• « « The Forgotten Man