Robert B. Parker

I hated Spenser for Hire. It was young when it was a popular TV show, but I didn't care for it. I particularly didn't care for Robert Urich, the actor who played Spenser. It wouldn't be until just a couple years ago that I read a novel by the author who invented the Spenser series, Robert B. Parker. He passed away, and I'm sorry about that. I loved his books. Never ready (yet) a Spenser novel, but I have enjoyed the novels I have read. The first was called Hugger Mugger. It was about a race horse with that name. My grandfather saw the title and quickly quipped, "sounds like a prostitute's name."

Nevertheless, I read about Parker in the WSJ. Apparently he never edited his work. Just boom, first draft to final draft. I guess when you've written 40 books and have a following you can do that.

These are from the WSJ regarding Parker:
But Mr. Parker—whose oeuvre also included series with a small-town sheriff, Jesse Stone, and a woman P.I. named Sunny Randall, as well as a handful of westerns and other novels—of course had a very real job, working five days a week turning out five pages a day. "It's like running a small business," he told fellow writer Stuart Kaminsky, adding: "'Writer's block? That's just another word for 'lazy.'"
"I like to make things," the fictional Spenser told a fictional interviewer in 2007. "I know how to do it." He had good carpentry skills, he said, and could build a house—as could (and had) Mr. Parker. No surprise then that the Spenser books were well-constructed, functional, and comfortable to spend time in.

And from an interview:
WSJ: You wrote your Ph.D. thesis on the American hero, and included authors Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald in it. Do you think any of them will be read in 50 years?

Mr. Parker: I don't think Ross Macdonald will be read. The other two, yes. Dashiell Hammett because of "The Maltese Falcon," which is an excellent novel, and Raymond Chandler because he was a master of the language. I don't know many who wrote better than he did. It seems to me that Macdonald became one note, one theme. I never found the wit there that I was hoping for. He was almost, but not quite.

WSJ: What does that say about the genre novel, then? In theory, only literary works survive.

Mr. Parker: I don't think of myself as a genre novelist. I think of myself as a person writing novels about people involved with crime. I go through the same process that Updike went through, but he may have gone through it a little better. It's all about the limits of your imagination and the limit of your skill.
WSJ: You'll publish three books this year. What's your daily schedule like?

Mr. Parker: I write five days a week unless there is something I have to do instead. I normally write seven to 10 pages a day, which means I generally finish a new book every three months. It comes easily, and I don't revise because I don't get better by writing a new draft. Indeed, I sometimes get worse. When you reread, you never like it as well, which means I won't like the second draft either. So I don't do it… If I were single and childless, I'd probably write fewer books and venture off to more exotic fields. But I'm content. It's not a grind.
I look forward now to reading my first Spenser Novel, and perhaps to one day have a following like Parker's.