Robert Parker, the American crime novelist, died Monday at age 77. The good news about that sad business is that he died at his desk. I was impressed by that.
Joan, his wife of 53 years, had set out on an errand. She came home to find him nose-down on his keyboard in the study of their Victorian mansion in Cambridge, Mass., just up the road from Harvard.
He was typing a page of his next book when it happened - heart attack, the fast kind. The scene could have been the opener to one of his Spenser novels, of which he wrote nearly 40 and managed to sell millions. Every one was dedicated to Joan.
How seldom it seems to happen that a man drops dead at his desk, doing what he loves. But Mr. Parker was uncomplicated on the subject of work, which made him a rare being.
Enslaved by technology and its uninvited demands, most of us exhibit a profound ambivalence toward the work we do - the work we are increasingly lucky to have, given the state of the North American economy, the work we take fewer and fewer vacations from, but love to hate more and more.
If you want evidence of our deep ambivalence, you need only compare the business and life sections of your friendly national newspaper.
The business section is full of dutiful tips urging employees to greater obedience and self-sacrifice on behalf of the team: We must play it safe, and then safer.
The life section is the antidote, zested with recipes and potions to calm your stress, focus your BlackBerry-blasted attention span and retrieve the orgasms your workload chased away.
Robert Parker's approach, by pointed contrast, was to work compulsively at what he loved, thereby improving his odds of dying at labour.
I had lunch with him once in Cambridge. It was 1986, back when he was helping revive the genre of hard-boiled (i.e., American) detective fiction.
He and Joan lived in a condo then, just down Brattle Street from where he died. His study was billiard green with a matching desk blotter, an old Royal manual typewriter and a collection of baseball caps (he was obsessed with baseball) precisely arranged in the same direction.
Back then he was already making $15,000 a week. By the time he died, his advances were $1-million a title, and he could produce three a year. Maybe that makes it easier to stay at your desk and to die happy there. By the end of his life he'd written more than 60 books, three separate lines of mysteries, westerns and young-adult tales.
To write that many books, Mr. Parker rose at 5:30 every morning, walked his short-haired pointer, ingested toast and coffee, read The Boston Globe, answered e-mails and phone calls, and then set about writing five double-spaced pages of prose - 1,250 words a day, every day of the week except Sunday.
At that rate a Spenser novel took three months. By the time he'd written five of them, his close friend and fellow suspense writer Gary Goshgarian told me the other day, "writing a Spenser novel was like having a beer on a summer afternoon."
It was a simple equation: Mr. Parker liked to write, so he wrote like hell, and then he died writing.
There are worse ways to go, and talent has nothing to do with it. The gifted Ontario writer Paul Quarrington died this week of lung cancer at the brutal age of 56, after a furious flurry of work. American prodigy David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his garage. Elvis crapped out on the toilet. Judas Iscariot fell down and exploded (at least according to Acts I, Verse 18).
Everyone thinks about this stuff. You can spend hours trolling websites where people discuss how they would prefer to die: At an advanced age, following a short but steep decline, with one's affairs in order, preferably in one's sleep, surrounded by family - that is most people's ideal.
But that means there are witnesses to whatever burbles from your fading brain. Never forget the immortal last words of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., "I've never felt better in my life!"
After I heard the news of Robert Parker's parting, I phoned a friend. "He died at his desk," I said, "which is good, don't you think?"
"Yes," she said. "A friend of my parents died swallowing a bee."
"Was he allergic?"
"No, he was walking along the beach and swallowed a bee, and then he freaked out so much, yelling 'I've swallowed a bee! I've swallowed a bee!' that he had a heart attack. They have another friend who died dancing the polka."
Me, I'm with Woody Allen: I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
What I long for instead, like most people - and this is why Mr. Parker's desk-side demise is so instructive - is to have genuinely lived before I die. To that end, we tell each other we wish we'd "worked less," but we really mean we wish we'd worked at something more meaningful, more daring, more personally authentic.
"It was a perfect ending," Mr. Goshgarian said. "He lived brilliantly at the keyboard. And died in a burst of light at his desk. Fast, as he wanted. Elegant. Simple. It was the perfect ending for him."
Such endings are beyond our control. But they're also rare, as most of us lack the courage to be what we want to be.
Mr. Parker explained it to me at that long-ago lunch. "Spenser's not afraid of death," he said. "We are. He can't be bought. You and I can. Well, I can. He cannot be lured by sex. I can. Et cetera. He's freer than we are, and larger than we are, and what we might be if we could be."
Detective fiction is as popular as ever. No wonder. At work in real life, we're smaller and more frightened than we've been in ages.