A Novel for Jackie Robinson Day

 

 

 Double Play (2004)

By Robert B. Parker

G. P. Putnam & Sons, 288 pages

★★★ ★

 

A few weeks ago I reviewed Mortal Stakes, an older Robert Parker Spenser mystery with baseball at its center. I noted that the late Parker was a baseball fan. Later he wrote Double Play, an unusual book that’s part memoir, part history, and part fiction. Its pivotal character is Jackie Robison who, in 1947, broke the color barrier that had been in place in Major League Baseball since the 1887.

 

Fact: When Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he received death threats. Just how credible they were versus demented posturing by cowardly White racists is a hotly contested topic, but they were enough of them that they could not be ignored. Fact: Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1932, and spent much of his life in Boston, but was devoted to the Dodgers. The memoir voice of “Bobby” in Double Play is a thinly disguised homage to his childhood memories. Fiction: Robinson never had a White bodyguard named Joseph Burke.

 

Double Play is as much about Burke as Robinson. Parker was nine when World War II began and filtered his memories of the 1940s through Burke, a young man who hastily marries an older woman before heading off to war. He survives Guadalcanal, though he took five machine gun bullets and nearly died. Burke musters out and returns home to find his wife has left him. Burke is hollowed out by all of it: war, the metal in his body, his father’s death, divorce…. He copes by feeling nothing, caring about nothing, and saying as little as possible. He (like Parker) does a stint as a boxer, though he’s more of a brawler than a ring artiste. Through all of the character development Parker gets the rhythms and moods of the period letter-perfect: the movies, how the Japanese are reconfigured as “Japs,” the music, the tough guys and celebs at Toots Shor’s New York restaurant, USO shows, clothing….

 

Burke becomes a tough guy for hire and has no moral qualms about who pays his meal ticket. He signs on to chauffer/babysit 18-year-old Lauren, the daughter of Julius Roach, who has a fondness for bad boys. Her current obsession is Louis Bouciault, the spoiled son of another gangster. This doesn’t work out according to script, but his demeanor and work ethic leads Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey to hire him as Jackie Robinson’s bodyguard. Although the book is titled Double Play–a double entendre of the baseball term and criminal double crosses–there is enough intrigue that it could have just as easily been called Triple Play and even that might not cover it. Niceties go out the window when thugs are embarrassed and word on the street is that one spurned wise guy wants to take out Robinson.

 

Parker presents the Burke/Robinson relationship as fraught by indifference on Burke’s part and prideful distrust on Robinson’s. Burke has one job: Keep Jackie safe and he couldn’t care less about what Robinson thinks. Robinson, a Black man, views Burke as just a piece of White muscle. Well, we kind of know how that is going to change. Parker wrote a piece of what we now call alt.history wrapped inside his remembrances and an imagined mystery. It’s filled with contrivances–a good kid ruined by war, a damaged man redeemed by love, turf battles, two gun men on opposite sides who bond, the don’t- mess-with-family rule of thugs–yet somehow Parker makes it work.

 

Double Play, like most of Parker’s books, is a quick read. It might have been his singular talent to make his tales so breezy that readers are spirited along and don’t dwell on the unlikely. Call it an impressionistic novel that evokes the time period and gives a sense of what Jackie Robinson endured before he became an American icon. Read it in that spirit.

 

I emphasize again that this is not a true story in any literal sense. If you want an actual Robinson biography, I recommend Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. If, on the other hand, you want a thrilling read and some insight into how a Springfield White kid was transfixed and transformed by a Black man wearing an MLB uniform, Double Play is your ticket.

 

Rob Weir