Early Autumn, Audio Edition

Early Autumn, Audio Edition (1981/1992) Robert B. Parker narrated by Michael Prichard

I remembered that I really liked this book, but I’d forgotten was that really, I’d loved it.

All the complexity of Spenser, and all the things I love are here in this story.

“You have this at a restaurant?”
“No. I made this up.”
“I don’t know how you can do that,” he said.
“It’s easy once you know that sauces are made in only a few different ways. One way is to reduce a liquid till it’s syrupy and then add the cream. What you get is essentially pineapple-flavored cream, or wine-flavored cream, or beer-flavored cream, or whatever. Hell, you could do it with Coke, but who’d want to.”
“My father never cooked,” Paul said.
“Mine did,” I said.
“He said girls cook.”
“He was half right,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Girls cook, so do boys. So do women, so do men. You know. He was only half right.”
“Oh, yeah.”

“Why don’t you just let me alone?”
I sat back down beside him. “Because everybody has left you alone all your life and you are, now, as a result, in a mess. I’m going to get you out of it.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean you don’t have anything to care about. You don’t have anything to be proud of. You don’t have anything to know. You are almost completely neutral because nobody took the time to teach you or show you and because what you saw of the people who brought you up didn’t offer anything you wanted to copy.” “It’s not my fault.” “No, not yet. But if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault. You’re old enough now to start becoming a person. And you’re old enough now so that you’ll have to start taking some kind of responsibility for your life. And I’m going to help you.”

“Lots of men dance ballet.”
“Yes,” I said.
“My father says they’re fags.”
“What’s your mother say?”
“She says that too.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about their sex life. What I can say is, they are very fine athletes. I don’t know enough about dance to go much further than that, but people who do know seem to feel that they are also often gifted artists. That ain’t a bad combination, fine athlete, gifted artist. It puts them two up on most people and one up on practically everybody except Bernie Casey.”
“Who’s Bernie Casey?”
“Used to be a wide receiver with the Rams. Now he’s a painter and an actor.”

And, he’s still served in Korea as of this book.

“That is about the ugliest goddamned getup I’ve seen since I came home from Korea,” I said.

Published by Random House

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