From just another wise-cracking Philip Marlowe impersonator in The Godwulf Manuscript (1974), Spenser has evolved into something larger-than-life, almost mythic. In his first novel, however, Parker indicts those who would sacrifice individuals in the name of some greater, abstract cause—in this case, radical quasi-Marxist politics. Parker returns most obviously to this theme in The Judas Goat (1978), in which Spenser and Hawk hunt terrorists in Europe and Canada.

In God Save the Child (1974), Spenser for the first time meets Susan Silverman, the woman who becomes his lifetime companion. Parker rescues a young boy from a seductive, predatory homosexual bodybuilder and returns him to his loving but inadequate parents, demonstrating a commitment to traditional ideas of family that some critics have seen as heterosexist. Parker treats issues of homosexuality in later novels more sympathetically, most notably in 1980's Looking for Rachel Wallace (one of the few titles...