Double Play (Parker, Robert B.) (Hardcover)

Burke is a tough guy, and (like Spenser) takes up boxing. But he's better at pounding away and surviving a punch than "floating like a bee" and he soon has to find another line of work. Having scruples makes him a poor enforcer, so he finds himself becoming a body guard. His first job is for a woman who needs to be protected from an abusive boyfriend who's connected . . . and her own bad habits. When that job ends, Burke finds himself in Brooklyn being asked to play the same role for Dodger rookie Jackie Robinson.

The book reminds me of Huckleberry Finn with Jim on the Mississippi in many ways, as Burke finds himself not fitting into either the African-American or the WASP communities as he does his bodyguard work. Burke's awareness of what Jackie Robinson is going through grows, and the reader finds himself taken back to a world that we are hopefully leaving behind as fast as possible where race counted rather than what you did.

Atop of this setting, Mr. Parker overlays gangland vendettas, a love story and his own perspective as a 15 year old on that fateful season in Brooklyn.

For secondary entertainment, you can match up each character in the story to a character from the Spenser books. Although I think Susan would be annoyed to be matched to many of these female characters.

The book has a weakness though that's annoying. It's a little too glib and easy about dealing with the racial hatred of the times. You end up feeling like you are reading about hazing rather than hate.

Any Spenser fan will enjoy seeing the variety of seeing the challenges of doing the right thing from the perspective of pain and numbness rather than from joy and happiness.

Rickey is bringing Jackie Robinson up from Montreal to play with the Dodgers in the 1947 season. Burke is hired to protect Robinson. Primarily Burke is to protect Robinson from people who might want to kill him for being a Negro, but Burke also has to protect Robinson from himself. Rickey has made Robinson promise to turn the other cheek for two years, and tells the ballplayer: "You can't ever let down. You're under a microscope. You can't drink. You can't be sexually indiscreet. You can't have opinions about things. You play hard and clean and stay quiet."

Given that speech, and the picture of a baseball with Jackie Robinson's signature and a bullet hole that appears on the cover, we are not surprised that in "Double Play" things get out of hand. What is surprising is that the precipitating act is Robinson's refusal to accept a bottle of champagne (who offers the bubbly has more to do with it). So with all of the death threats Robinson is getting for daring to play baseball with white players, it is something else that threatens to get him killed. Fortunately Burke is there to help. Unfortunately, Burke's presence ends up complicating the situation to the point that he needs help.

Parker admits in the author's note before the start of his novel that this "may be more Burke's story than Jackie's," which is certainly true. But he also contends that "without Jackie, Burke would have had no story," and I am not willing to buy into that. After all, Rickey does not make his offer until Chapter 17 and when we come to the final power play Jackie is not around. More importantly, throughout the book Burke is very much in mode of Spenser for Hire, both in terms of his manner of speaking and his way of persuading people to take him seriously or to help see things his way. Jackie Robinson is Jackie Robinson, but here he is a supporting character and it is hard not to want to have more of him in the book because he is such a compelling figure.

Given that I wanted less Burke and more Jackie, and did not really care for Lauren's plight, I was less enthralled by this novel than I had hoped to be. But what salvages "Double Play" is that scattered through the chapters are memories from "Bobby," as Parker recalls what it was like as a 15-year-old living in Boston to follow Jackie Robinson's historic 1947 season. These reminiscences do not exactly parallel the story or even Burke's careful thoughts on what Robinson is doing, but they do give the book another dimension that adds some necessary depth.

Parker makes a conscious decision to pretty much ignore what Jackie Robinson does on the playing field. There are rare mentions of anything he does during a game. In this novel if Robinson tries to steal home he is thrown out. Burke might note that Robinson has a hit and a stolen base, but not how it mattered to the game. If Jackie gets hit by a pitch and the crowd is buzzing in anticipation of a stolen base, then Pee Wee Reese is hitting into a double play on the first pitch. For that matter, Robinson's teammates are silent as well. Burke recognizes that Reese supports having Robinson on the team and Dixie Walker does not. Yet none of that matters. What does is that Jackie Robinson is playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the Major Leagues. It his first game Jackie did not get a hit, but the color barrier was broken and that was all that really mattered.