Robert B. Parker: The Man Who Imagined 'A Man Called Hawk'

The detective novelist Robert B. Parker, died last month, at the age of seventy-seven. Parker was primarily known for his series of novels based on the character Spenser and the television series Spenser for Hire. The novels and series featured a black enforcer named “Hawk” who was portrayed by classically trained black stage actor Avery Brooks in the television series.

Robert B. Parker:

The Man Who Imagined ‘A Man Called Hawk’

By Mark Anthony Neal

The detective novelist Robert B. Parker, died last month, at the age of seventy-seven. Parker was the author of more than 70 books of fiction and non-fiction, but was primarily known for his series of novels based on the character Spenser. The novels were the inspiration for the television series Spenser for Hire, which debuted in the fall of 1985 on ABC television.

The main character of the novels and television series was an urbane Boston-based private detective named Spenser. In the series, Spenser was portrayed by the late actor Robert Urich—an upscale version of Dan Tana, a character that Urich played in the late 1970s series Vegas. At the height of the popularity of Parker’s Spenser novels in the late 1980s, much was made about how much Parker’s identity informed that of Spenser. As one writer described it, both Spenser and Parker wear “polished loafers with tassels, blue denims with an open-neck shirt and expensive sport jacket.” Parker and his character Spenser embodied “business casual” well before such a term existed and in the mid-1980s such a style gave Spenser an air of sophistication rarely associated with those in his profession. That Parker, who earned a Ph.D. in Literature from Boston University in 1971 and was a professor at Northeastern when in the late 1970s, and Spenser were so closely linked, rendered the character of Spenser believable.

In both the novels and the television series, Spenser often collaborated with a black “enforcer,” simply known as “Hawk.” As described by Parker, “Hawk has the same skills and inclinations, but he grew up in another way with a different set of pressures.” Whatever sensibilities that Hawk might have shared with Spenser and however progressive Parker imagined the character to be, the reality was that Hawk was all too familiar for audiences who had grown comfortable with seeing a big black bald man, clad in black leather, with a big black gun. As a duel product of Robert Parker’s imagination and the American psyche, Hawk disturbed little with regards to long held popular beliefs about adult black masculinity.

According to Avery Brooks, the actor who brought “Hawk” to life on the small-screen, “I’ve been asked many times whether I was I was exactly like the Hawk character.” Brooks, who has portrayed figures as diverse as Othello, Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, is a classically trained actor who, in 1976, earned the first MFA (Masters of Fine Art) in theater granted to an African-American at Rutgers University. At the time that Brooks accepted the role of Hawk he too was a tenured professor of Theater at the university. None of Brooks’s accomplishments were apparent to those fans (many of them white) who approached Brooks and as he describes it, “think that I actually carry a gun, and that probably I was standing on a street corner somewhere and these producers saw me and asked me if I wanted to come on television.” In many ways Avery Brooks is as illegible—unbelievable—to mainstream audiences, as Hawk is so believable to those same audiences.

Watching Spenser for Hire in the mid-1980s, “Hawk” was absolutely believable and riveting for me as a 20-year-old who imagined living a “life-of the mind” while trying to negotiate the demands of the social spaces I called home. Hawk seemed to exist somewhere in-between Amiri Baraka’s Blues People and the vestibules where my boyhood friends were selling crack-cocaine and weed. At the time Hawk embodied what some dismissively call “street smarts,” though Hawk immediately struck me as a character that was highly literate.

As such it was a performance that I found quite alluring, as much because of the seamlessness in which Hawk navigated very disparate social and cultural spaces, as it was because of the intellectual gravitas that the character demanded—a gravitas that was perhaps more disarming than his bold physical presence. Fuck being a thug, in my mind Hawk was damned erudite; a combination of John Shaft’s street savvy, W.E.B. Du Bois’s scholarly acumen, Billy Eskstine’s modernist cool, Huey Newton’s politicized eroticism, Cecil Taylor’s improvisational instincts, and Tea Cake’s mysticism—in other words a cat who had to be conjured out of the wellspring of black masculine genius, both real and imagined.

In an interview with journalist and author Jill Nelson, Brooks says of his character, “Hawk lives somewhere, for me, between fiction and reality. That is to say that Robert Parker imagined this black man, this character,” but “I don’t imagine black people…I happen to be one, and I have studied and lived and loved them all my life.” Brooks’ comments highlights how the slither of agency he was given to shape the character had the potential to produce a character that could be read as transformative, though illegible, in relation to those black male characters that existed in mainstream television up until that point. Not surprisingly Brooks’ creative agency challenged the professional writers—many of them white—who were charged with creating a spinoff of Spenser for Hire, called A Man Called Hawk, which ran for thirteen episodes in the spring of 1989. Brooks had transformed “Hawk” into a distinct intellectual property that the writers were neither prepared nor inclined to create in the first place.