The Knave of Boston and Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters.

• Author: Higgins, George V.

The Knave of Boston and Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters.

Francis Russell. Quinlan Press. $17.95. Years ago an interviewer induced momentary speech-lessness (not my usual affliction) by suggesting that Boston itself is a character in my books, an insight so commanding that of course I stole it at once, using it to great effect on subsequent book tours (without, of course, crediting the source--this was before we were all joebidened into prim footnoting of others' better lines).

The passage of time tends to add nuance to such pilferings; the flaw in the seer's question was its neglect of the manifest fact that Boston, a state of mind that exists geographically east of Worcester, south of Lowell, and north of Plymouth, is a character in almost every book-- admittedly fictional or insistently factual--that is written about the people who consider themselves to be "from Boston." It is the strangest damned place. All you have to do is grow up in it, and for the rest of your life, everywhere in the world (that I have been, at least), all you have to do is ask for "Marlboro in the hard pack," and no one needs to see your passport.

J.P. Marquand was at home in Boston, though he lived in the city chiefly when he was seeing his lawyers about one of his divorces. Edwin O'Connor was from Boston, notwithstanding the fact that he was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (and died far too soon--in Boston of course). John Updike writes a good deal about the Pennsylvania of his youth, and lives on the North Shore today, but John Updike is from Boston as surely as Carlton Fisk, of Claremont, New Hampshire and the White Sox of Chicago, is a true Bostonian. Robert B. Parker grew up in the Fall River-New Bedford area, and he lives in effete Cambridge now, hard by Camelot High (as we call the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard), but Robert B. Parker is from Boston. Hell, Henry James spent most of his life "across the water," as my grandfather used to say, but he was always from Boston, and it showed in what he wrote.

And so is Francis Russell, whose reputation was deservedly made by his painstaking and unsparing...