Robert Parker has identified crime writer Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) as the major influence on his fiction. In fact, Parker paid homage to the British-born novelist in 1989 when he completed Chandler's unfinished novel Poodle Springs, and again two years later when he wrote Perchance to Dream, a sequel to Chandler's 1939 classic The Big Sleep. What is more, Chandler's famous detective Philip Marlowe provided a heroic model for Spenser, and it is clear that Chandler's wise-cracking and ironic dialogue is echoed in Parker's writing.

However, apparently it was not Chandler, but rather the mystery writer Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), who inspired Parker in his writing of Sudden Mischief.

Macdonald (whose popular Lew Archer series includes such novels as The Moving Target, Underground Man, and Blue Hammer), along with Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Glass Key, etc.) and Chandler, are considered to be the godfathers of...