Spenser's major antecedent is Philip Marlowe, in novels by Raymond Chandler, as Parker has acknowledged in a variety of ways. Parker also is indebted to the hard-boiled private detective tradition, and indirectly to the stylistic innovations in American fiction by Ernest Hemingway and, prior to Hemingway, such writers as Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain, who made use of the American vernacular as a literary medium. Parker also draws on the canon of Elizabethan and nineteenth-century Romantic poetry for many of his titles.

Small Vices takes its tide from King Lear (c.1605), as its epigraph shows while making a sweeping comment on society's hypocrisies.

It should be noted that Spenser's personal origin in Laramie, Wyoming, identifies him in part with the tradition of the Western hero. Finally, this book suggests another precedent: since Spenser is taken to Santa Barbara by Hawk and Susan to recover...