RIP Robert Parker and Erich Segal

Two authors passed on recently whose styles and genres were, to say the least, very different. One of them was Robert Parker, author of the Spenser detective series. The other was Erich Segal, author of the late 60s popular novel "Love Story."

Robert Parker, along with other novels, is best known for the Spenser for Hire series, featuring a larger than life, hard-boiled detective named Spenser. The Boston Herald describes Spenser as, "the larger-than-life private eye with an equally large heart - a private eye committed to righting wrongs whatever that may take" and "Boston's - and Bostonians' - own modern day knight errant." In many ways Spenser was a classic detective character, while operating in the seamier side of society, maintaining his own code of honor. Spenser was very much in the mode of Philip Marlow, though some of his back story resembles that of Robert Parker himself.

Spenser for Hire became a successful TV series in the late 1980s, starring Robert Urich as Spenser and Avery Brooks as Hawk, the somewhat mysterious, somewhat shady partner and friend of Spenser. Spenser was also the subject of three made of TV movies on A&E starring Joseph Mantega.

Erich Segal was a professor of Greek and Latin Literature at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and recently lectured at Oxford. Besides certain scholarly works on classical literature, Eric Segal wrote the screenplay for "The Yellow Submarine," the animated musical film starring the Beatles that was released in 1967.

Erich Segal is most famous, though, for "Love Story," a short, romantic novel about the romance between two college students in the late 1960s, one a rich boy, the other a working class girl. "Love Story" is, like most of its kind, one in which the love ends in tragedy. The book and the hit movie version starring Ryan O'Neil and Ali MacGraw tends to be a bit sappy, in this writer's opinion. "Love Story" lent a catch phrase, "Love means never having to say you're sorry" to the popular lexicon.

Ericg Segal wrote a sequel to "Love Story" called "Oliver's Story," which was also became a film and was not as successful. Other books by Eric Segal include "Man, Woman, and Child," about a married man who must deal with the revelation that he has a child out of wedlock, and "The Class," about the four members of the Harvard graduating class of 1958.

Sources: n Spenser, Robert B. Parker created one of crime fiction's best, Mat Schaffer, Boston Herald, January 19th, 2010

'Love Story' author Erich Segal dies at 72, Nick Owchar, LA Times, January 19th, 2010