The Mystery Men In My Bedroom

I’ve always preferred the company of men.   From a very young age I was attracted to and hung out with the boys in the neighborhood.  It wasn't  physical or romantic, I just fit in better with them.   I think like a man.  I hate to shop. I’m too lazy to dye my hair or bother with makeup. Women in groups give me the hives.  In high school and college I'd rather hang out with the players than the cheerleaders. At work I preferred working with men; most of them are not jealous or petty.  I liked having at least one man in each department – it made the women behave themselves.  One of my early bosses suggested I needed a jock strap.

That being said, I have been physically and romantically connected with my spouse for well over 50 years or about 73% of my living and breathing time on earth so far. That include the flirting,  dating and breaking up and making up that constitute a courtship.  It doesn’t change the fact that I still enjoy the company of other men.  Many of our male friends have gone on to whatever awaits us after death.  Nobody’s reaching out to me from beyond, so the pickings are slim for male companionship outside my marriage. 
 Thank heavens for my mystery men.   I have many of them and I’m grateful.  They live only on the pages of the many books I read and in my imagination, but they are as real as those neighborhood kids were back in the 40s.

Now for the bedroom part; I love to read in total silence. My spouse needs music and TV and all manner of distractions.  Therefore, he reads in the den and I read in my favorite chair in  the bedroom.  Let me introduce you to my bedroom companions, in no particular order.

MacDonald at work

 John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is  rugged,tall, tan, and lives my dream life on a houseboat in a marina in Ft. Lauderdale.  He won the boat in a card game, thus its name, The Busted Flush.  He is wildly adventurous and bills himself as a salvage consultant.  What he really does is recover lost or stolen property or people for a handsome fee.   He manages to attract the good at heart, but gone astray women who pop up in every mission he undertakes.  He and his chess genius, economist friend, Meyer, collaborate to bring these gals back on the path to goodness.  He is gentle with women, but doesn’t hesitate to bed them if he thinks it will help them.

 In spite of some of the scrapes he gets into and his sometimes unorthodox methods of dealing with the bad guys, he manages to stick to his principles of honesty and personal integrity.  He is a cynic and increasingly concerned about the demise of the environment in Florida. What’s not to love?  I could live on a boat, and drink martinis at sunset (although he drinks gin and I can’t stand it) and only work when the cash starts getting low. And I so enjoy the conversations between Meyer and Travis.  I want to join in.
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Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is a New England version of Travis McGee.  He doesn’t live on a boat, but in a house and sometimes with his significant other and their dog Pearl.  He is a private detective and ex-cop who has a mutually respectful relationship with several law enforcement officers. Unlike Travis, he is in a monogamous relationship with a smart, beautiful psychiatrist, Susan.  Women throw themselves at him, but he resists temptation every time.  His gorgeous, slightly criminal, black sidekick and boxing partner is as bright as Travis’ Meyer, but tries to hide it.  Women also throw themselves at him. He doesn’t deprive himself – well, almost never. 

Spenser and Hawk have taken on organized crime, both in Boston and on the west coast.  This provides me with a wide array of characters to boo and hiss.  I can picture their habitats from the sleazy bars in Boston to the mansion outside of L.A.  It doesn’t make me want to go there, but the pictures are as clear as photographs. There are several episodes that take place on the college campuses in and around Boston.  The students and administrators alike are well defined and while Spenser is less cynical than Travis, he cleverly illustrates the flawed characters of the privileged class and the bureaucracy, while still making some of them pitiable, but likable.

 The conversations between Spenser, Hawk and Susan are smart, clipped, and given to some one or two word wise-crack sentences and indeed paragraphs.  They also reveal that although they are in a tough business, they stick to their  ethical standards and honest values.  The literary references interspersed in the dialogue give me a  feel for their level of intelligence – but it’s not thrown in my face. 
 Spenser, too, is gentle with Susan. He also cooks for her.  I’ve used his chicken and linguine recipe.  His drink of choice is scotch – another spirit I can’t stomach.  I mentally join Susan in her occasional cocktail or her regular glass of wine instead.  I think Spenser and Susan are happy in a committed, but married state.  If they ever decide to get married, I hope they invite me.  I’ll watch Pearl for them, and I don’t even like dogs.

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Donna Leon

Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti has sparked in me a love affair with Venice, Italy.   Unlike Spenser or Travis, Guido Brunetti  He is a smart, highly principled and compassionate second in command of the Venetian Questura who solves crimes that are not always obviously  crimes.  His boss is a somewhat incompetent bureaucrat who is more interested in keeping bad news from tourists and shielding elected officials reputations, than fighting crime. 

Brunetti is married to the love of his life, Paola, who unlike him, is a child of wealthy aristocrats and the mother of his two teenage children, whom he adores in spite of their typical teenage ways.  The balancing of his home life and police life are sometimes as great a challenge as trying to solve crimes that his boss doesn’t want made public.

Unlike Spenser, he doesn't cook.  Paola does the cooking. The descriptions of the aromatic foods and fine wines that accompany them practically jump out at you from between the pages.  The fact that they’re talking about mid-day meals in these descriptions makes me think that maybe those three martini lunches in the 60s weren’t such a bad thing.  Civility seems to reign in the haze of the long lunch.   Brunetti has his favorite Inspector,  Vianello, who is as much a sidekick as Hawk or Meyer.  Vianello and Brunetti  complain at length if they have to settle for a sandwich instead of a decent meal for lunch.  The fact that when the Commissario goes home for lunch he has to climb up three flights of stairs to his kitchen, may justify the meals they eat.

He and Paola, a university professor with a weakness for Henry James, have no secrets from each other and are both intellectuals.  They dismiss organized religion in a way you wouldn’t expect in Italy. They don’t insult my intelligence by explaining references to great works or translating the occasional French or Italian phrase – although I admit, I sometimes have to look them up.  Brunetti is hopelessly behind the times, but his beautiful and savvy secretary, Signorina Elletra ,has the skills to hack into any data base and the connections to glean information from agencies all over Europe.

Although often showing the seamy and criminal side of Venice; most notably the problems with illegal immigration, fake artifacts, corrupt public officials and a totally broken judicial system, I still want to visit Venice and experience the architecture, the people and the food.  I am hoping the Commissario will invite me to lunch.  Paola will whip up a wonderful dish of pasta with fish fresh from the sea and vegetable concoction fresh from the market.  After walking up  those stairs, I will deserve that glass of chilled Moet.  At last, a drink I can share with one of my mystery men.

Note:  I have chosen to depict the authors instead of the protagonists.  As readers, we all have mental pictures of the characters.  To try to depict them universally would be a literary crime.