Crime Scenes

Nearly all of my entertainment is crime-related these days: I'm making my way through the Parker and Spenser novels, and my current Netflix choices are the Inspector Morse series and, this past week, the first season of "Hill Street Blues," which is still, IMHO, the best show ever broadcast. Unfortunately, only the first two seasons ever made it to DVD legitimately (I've seen some stuff for sale that I think isn't quite legit that claims to provide all seasons of the show), so I am destined to be left wanting more. Back in the day, when HSB was first broadcast, I made no plans for Thursday night that did not involve being in front of the TV, watching the latest installment. (This was long before VCRs, DVDs, TiVo, Television Without Pity, etc., and you either saw it or you didn't.)

The show hasn't been on television much since then, despite having produced enough episodes for syndication, because the stories overlapped and the threads often ran through multiple episodes, and they'd make no sense if you didn't watch them in order, which, I imagine, would make syndicated broadcast difficult. In the first five shows of the first season, for example, there's some question of whether one of the cops is on the take. If you saw those episodes out of order, they'd make no sense. In the first three or four episodes, the precinct is preparing for a visit from the president, which involves a gang truce that Furillo negotiates. (Most amusing cameo so far: a gap-toothed David Caruso, as the leader of the "Shamrocks," an Irish gang. Which, really? An Irish gang? In which city, in the 1980s?)

The creators of the show never specified what city it was, though I do remember Philadelphia's city hall making an appearance in a couple of shows. I later learned that the scenes of the outside of the precinct house were filmed in Chicago, at the Maxwell Street house. I realize now--now that I've seen the originals, as it were--several other of the opening scenes, most particularly one with an Old Style sign outside a bar, were also filmed in Chicago; I think most of the rest of it was filmed in L.A., even though the city has the weather and the grit of an old industrial city--Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, something like that.

Anyway, one of the things that has become glaring is how technology has changed in the last 30 to 40 years. In the Parker (and Dortmunder) novels, for example, Parker acts and talks like someone out of the 1950s, maybe early 60s. I think, as Robert Parker did with Spenser, the origins get blurred a little in the later novels, so that he can still be doing his thing in the 1990s and not have to be 85 years old to make the math work out. (In one of the early novels, Spenser says something about serving in Korea--which would have been in the early '50s, and would make him around the same age as my dad, who is 79. I remember reading that in later novels, it sounds as though he served in Vietnam, not Korea. Similarly, Parker has a dishonorable discharge somewhere in his past.) But in one of the later novels that I read out of turn, Parker observes that it's harder to find wads of cash these days, where so many transactions happen electronically rather than with piles of paper in hand.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if Parker and Spenser had crossed paths. The reality is, they likely would not have. Both of them operate on the principle that people do stupid shit, and they find ways to exploit that, Parker for his own benefit and Spenser for his clients' benefit, but neither of them does a lot of stupid shit of their own. Parker doesn't mind killing someone, at least not in the early novels (though Dortmunder and Kelp and their compatriots never resort to violence), but he doesn't do it out of pure malice. If someone gets in the way--typically by intruding in some way on Parker's activities, rather than by innocently stumbling into the path--Parker does not hesitate to kill him or her, but in general it's not his preference. He doesn't kill for fun, and he doesn't kill if he doesn't have to do so, which kind of sets him apart from the crime that hits our newspapers, and, most importantly for this what-if, he avoids making stupid mistakes himself; killing someone unnecessarily is stupid.

On HSB, all of the phone calls are on land lines--many even on public phones--because no one had cell phones in 1982. Thus, communication is actually a plot point in many ways: where is this person, where that conversation can be held, what kinds of tracing are possible. By way of contrast, I have conducted about 85% to 90% of the business of buying a condo via email, other than actually looking at the place. I have never met the lawyers in person, though I have spoken with the lawyer and her assistant several times (including twice today, as we finalized the papers that are going back to the sellers). I have met the mortgage guy once. I never met the appraiser, though I have paid them money. Except for some mortgage papers that I signed in person--in part so the mortgage guy could explain things to me in person--I've even submitted a lot of paperwork to him via email. The papers the lawyers have sent on my behalf, for example--i've only seen PDFs of them.

But being so immersed in crime (and hockey and racing) is a little weird, even if the crime is fictional and even if my reading and viewing is on both sides of the line, as it were. It also makes me wonder what it is that makes someone decide that theft is the way to make one's money, and it definitely makes me sure that I have little or no interest in making my living that way.

I haven't forgotten kstyle's comments, either, about baking and cooking, but it's time for bed, so those musings will have to wait.