Title: Double Play
Author: Robert B. Parker
Published: 2003
Genre: Crime Thriller, Historical fiction, Baseball
by Arunabha Sengupta
1947. On 15 April, at Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a crowd of 26,623 spectators gathered. More than 14,000 of them were black. Starting at first base, Jackie Robinson became the first player since 1884 to openly break the major league baseball colour line.
Robert B. Parker is famous for the lean, entertaining novels featuring his Boston private eye Spenser. He wrote 40 Spenser crime novels between 1973 and 2011. By 2003 he had written 30 of them. And then he detoured to script this engrossing thriller centred around Jackie Robinson and the 1947 season.
Joseph Burke gets peppered by five .25 calibre slugs from a Japanese light machine gun in the Pacific War. While he fights for his life, his considerably older wife runs off with her true love. He leaves the hospital at the end of the War, deeply scarred and devoid of emotion. He tries his hand at boxing but with limited success. Thereafter, he becomes an enforcer in the underworld, which puts him in a bit of girl-linked mafia trouble. It is at this juncture – in the 17th of the 52 brief, fast-paced chapters of the book – that he is hired by Branch Rickey, former baseball player, sports executibve and part-owner of Brooklyn Dodgers.
Burke’s assignment is to be the bodyguard of the controversial new recruit, Jackie Robinson. Rickey instructs him to ‘do what is necessary to help Jackie and I and the Brooklyn Dodgers get through the impending storm.’
Thus Burke meets Robinson –‘he moved as if he were working off a steel spring … He’s dark black. And did not seem furtive about it.’
The story continues to trace the season, moving from city to city and looping back to New York, as Robinson and Burke navigate the complicated, and often dangerous, challenges the savagely segregated society throws at them. Not only are the white supremacists out to get the coon who has tarnished the great game. When they are in black neighbourhoods Burke is often met with hostility and non-cooperation. Very few restaurants are willing to serve both, very few hotels agree to house both. There is one occasion when they are refused by both white and black cabbies, and they decide to use their enlistment experience – in the marines and commissioned in the 761st Black Panthers Tank Battalion respectively – to call cadence and walk an hour and a half to the marching beat.
The prose is lean, Hemingwayish. The plot is simple enough, even when it covers attempts of assassination, threats, coercion, bribery and entrapment.
In between there are snatches of revealing dialogue between the two main characters, neither of whom are great talkers. After visiting a birthday party hosted by Robinson’s black friends, Burke says: ‘Pretty much like any other birthday party I’ve seen.’
‘You seen many?’
‘Mostly in the movies.’
‘Where they were white?’
‘Except for the butler.’
Jackie explains what they do in the parties … ‘eat…drink…talk about the kids, and how they doing in school, who oughta be president and how taxes are looking … Jack Benny .. Sometimes, we ain’t married, we flirt a little and try to get laid … some folks even if they’re married.’
‘Sounds pretty USA to me.’
‘It seems to.’
‘So why is it that everybody is bullshit about you playing with the white guys?’
‘Damned if I know.’
What makes the book stand out is the way the baseball season is captured. Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Bruce Edwards, Clyde Sukeforth, Eddie Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Spider Jorgensen are all there; Hilda Chester is ringing her cow bell, the Dodger Sym-Phony marches back and forth, Eddie Bettan is blowing his whistle, Red Barber’s southern voice describes the action on the airwaves, subtly joking: ‘Robinson is very definitely brunette.’
That and the apparently disconnected, italicised inserts from the diary of a 15-year-old called Bobby, who relives the life and times and baseball during the summer. It does not take much to guess that these are Parker’s own recollections. During the season he makes the trip from Boston to Brooklyn, and at Ebbets Field he sits among the Negroes – a slender white boy – between two big, black women.
“They asked me where I was from. I said Boston. They asked me what I was doing there. I said I was a Dodgers fan and wanted to see Jackie. One of the women announced this loudly to the group. ‘This boy done come all the way from Boston to see our Jackie.’ She made Boston a long word. Everyone applauded. I imagined that Red Barber, high up in the catbird’s seat, might notice and remark that they’re tearing up the pea patch over there in the stands behind third.”
Bobby also reads every box score in the papers. And Parker inserts box scores of the season’s matches between chapters. As Bobby writes in his italics: ‘You can learn a lot from a box score.’ Yes, Cardus can suck it.
Is it Parker’s finest novel? I don’t know. The ending is again a mix of touching sensitivity in simple, terse prose, while the crime fiction component is perhaps a wee bit too simplistic to satisfy the connoisseur. But it is indeed a very, very pleasing read.
In lieu of an explanation – why this review?
One question may automatically arise? Why review a baseball novel in these pages, in a website dedicated to cricket and largely dealing with cricket books?
The honest answer is as follows.
There are often claims that cricket – the nature of the game, long hours spent on idyllic green and all that smorgasbord of cliché – produces the best literature across sports. While it is difficult to test the veracity of such statements – indeed, who can formulate a method to quantify the quality of a book – it is nevertheless often repeated as gospel, in the fashion of far too many cricketing myths.
In this regard, it is perhaps a good idea to be aware that other sports have bodies of literature as well – often sparkling and substantial.
There is rather pronounced ignorance or denial or both about this amongst the portion of the cricket fraternity who proclaim themselves as ‘readers’.
Well, to a great extent cricket fiction is ignored in this regard: As discussed in the review of the excellent Netherland, many are still waiting for the great cricket novel to be produced in their postcode, and time has stopped in the 1920s with Selincourt. But, even then cricket ‘readers’ are quite prone to presume a manufactured literary superiority over the riffraff associated with other sports.
An honest look at the extensive literature across sports will ascertain this is definitely not so, and the assumed superiority is largely illusory.
Hence the review – if only to spread awareness about sports literature.