He acts as the protagonist of a series of detective novels written by Parker and later continued by Ace Atkins and Mike Lupica.
Spenser was born and grew up in Laramie, Wyoming[2] and is a Boston private eye in the mold of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, a smart-mouthed tough guy with a heart of gold.
He is an ex-boxer who likes to remind readers that he once fought the former heavyweight champ Jersey Joe Walcott, and he lifts weights to stay in shape.
Spenser is a former State trooper investigator assigned to the Suffolk County District Attorney's (DA) Office (although some novels state that he also worked out of the Middlesex County DA's Office; Walking Shadow and the pilot episode of Spenser: For Hire say he was a Boston Police detective), and regularly seeks help from (or sometimes butts heads with) Martin Quirk.
Spenser seems to agree with William Faulkner's assessment of Scotch — "that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.
Of course that's probably true of antifreeze as well, but illusion is nearly all we have.” One of the inconsistencies or possible cases of retroactive continuity within the Spenser series surrounds his mother.
Silverman, originally a high school guidance counselor, continues to assist Spenser in his cases after becoming a Harvard-trained Ph.D. psychologist.
Released in 2009, a young adult novel, Chasing the Bear, discusses some of Spenser's childhood, and further complicates the continuity issue with his family.
In the novel The Widening Gyre, Spenser carried a .25 caliber semiautomatic as a backup, and had it in his hand when confronted by two assassins - killing both.
Four made-for-TV movies based upon the series were produced by the Lifetime cable network between 1993 and 1995, again starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks.
The movies were based on four of Parker's novels: Ceremony, Pale Kings and Princes, The Judas Goat and A Savage Place.
Beginning in 1999, Joe Mantegna played Spenser in three TV movies on the A&E cable network: Small Vices (1999), Thin Air (2000), Walking Shadow (2001).
Spenser Confidential (formerly called "Wonderland") is a mystery film directed by Peter Berg and written by Sean O'Keefe.
The film stars Mark Wahlberg as Spenser, Winston Duke as Hawk and Alan Arkin as Henry Cimoli.
Spenser and Hawk live in the same Boston literary universe as Parker's other, later series characters: private investigator Sunny Randall and small town police chief Jesse Stone, the former of whom was possibly mentioned in passing as a blonde jogging with an English bull terrier,[citation needed] while the latter had a much larger role in Back Story.