‘Double Play’ combination of baseball history, imagination
At the age of 72, more than 40 years since publication of his first book, best-selling mystery writer Robert B. Parker has written his finest novel.
It is a book about baseball, about race relations, about redemption and, of course, about crime.
Best known for his 29 tightly written novels about a private detective named Spenser — an occasionally excellent but wildly uneven series — Parker has mixed it up in recent years by introducing two new series characters: crime fighters Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall. But “Double Play” is a major departure.
The year is 1947, and Jackie Robinson is about to integrate major league baseball. Branch Rickey, the team’s general manager, hires a World War II veteran named Joseph Burke to keep Robinson out of trouble and to keep trouble away from Robinson.
That much is history; Burke was indeed Robinson’s bodyguard. And those who remember Robinson or have read about him will be satisfied that Parker has captured the nobility of the great man. Also genuine are nine Brooklyn Dodgers’ box scores Parker uses to end some chapters. But the incidents in the book and the personality Parker ascribes to Burke come entirely from his imagination.
Burke, seriously wounded in battle at Guadalcanal, returns home to find that his wife has left him for another man. He recovers from his physical wound but not from the emotional bludgeonings delivered by warfare and his woman.
He finds muscle work with a series of mobsters, first in Boston and then in New York City. He’s perfect for it because, as he keeps saying, he doesn’t care about anything — not even about staying alive.
Once Burke is hired to protect Robinson, they go everywhere together, sleeping in seedy blacks-only hotels on the road and struggling to get rides to Ebbets Field because white cabbies won’t pick up Robinson and black ones won’t pick up Burke.
Along the way, Burke protects Robinson from assaults, murder attempts and white women who want to bed him. There is a lot of rough stuff, including several shootings.
As the odd couple travels from one major league city to another through a long season, the white man who cares about nothing is in the constant company of a black man who cares a great deal about several things. He is passionately in love with his wife. He truly loves baseball. And he willingly risks his life to integrate the major leagues.
The season gradually transforms Burke as the elegant story unfolds.
The plot is delivered in the lean, tough-guy prose fans of the Spenser novels will welcome. But Parker breaks the narrative occasionally with short, sometimes lyrical passages in which a boy named Bobby reminisces about growing up during World War II and listening to Red Barber call Dodger games on the radio.
A sample:
“And when the Dodgers played the Braves on Opening Day, Jackie Robinson played first base for Brooklyn. April 15 was a Tuesday, and my mother let me stay home from school to listen. It was as if I saw the event. Burnished black face. Bright white uniform. Green grass. I remember Red Barber’s familiar Southern voice saying, I believe, ‘Robinson is very definitely brunette.’ ”
Toward the end of the book, Bobby — obviously the author himself — is finally old enough to travel alone to Ebbets Field to see Robinson play.