Alison Gaylin on the Challenges of Bringing a Robert B. Parker PI into the Social Media Era

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I’ve always loved Sunny Randall.  Introduced at the dawn of the Millennium, Robert B. Parker’s youngest—and only female—PI is also his most modern creation.

Divorced and sex-positive, Sunny has always enjoyed the company of men, yet she’s never needed a male presence to complete her. Right out of the gate, she’s been unabashedly great at her job (In one of the first scenes I remember reading in 1999’s Family Honor, she impresses a chauvinistic would-be client with her shooting skills.) And she unapologetically puts that job first. At a time in which women were typically relegated to supporting roles in crime fiction, Sunny earned herself a place alongside such shining exceptions as Kinsey Millhone, VI Warshawski and Tess Monaghan—even though she was created by a man.

Her effect has been lasting. Twelve years after Parker’s death, she’s still out there, solving crimes, dealing with an increasingly complicated world around her. And though she’s aged less than a decade in the past 23 years, Sunny has managed to stay thoroughly modern… in most ways.

When I signed on to write the 11th novel in the Sunny Randall series (taking over from the talented Mike Lupica, who re-introduced Sunny to the world after an 11-year hiatus, with 2018’s Blood Feud) the one anachronistic thing I noticed about this 39-ish woman was her lack of online engagement. In a world in which 75 percent of adults are on some sort of social media—with Sunny’s demographic representing the second largest group—I figured there had to be a reason why she wasn’t tweeting out her witticisms, chatting with her dad on Facebook messenger, posting photos of her artwork on Instagram, or making reels of her adorable dog Rosie for TikTok. And while she certainly does seem to have no need for Tinder—or any dating app, really—it’s a little surprising that a woman of her worldly tastes hasn’t at least given Raya a try.

For a new legacy writer like me, bringing a classic and beloved series lead into the modern age is a balancing act. How can you maintain the integrity of a strong and multi-faceted character who was introduced at the time of flip phones, while still acknowledging that much has happened since 2007, when her creator released his final Sunny Randall book, Spare Change?  I mean, back then, MySpace was barely a thing (and it was completely understandable that Sunny wasn’t signed up.)

I decided to explore all of this by writing a story in which our intrepid PI is hired by a woman who manages influencers—and, as a result, becomes immersed in the world she’s managed to (mostly) avoid until now.

My first step was to reread several of the earlier books, in order to figure out what Sunny’s feelings might be toward social media. Clearly, she knows what an influencer is. In fact, there’s mention of a local social media star named Carly Meme (nee Carlotta Espinoza) in Lupica’s Payback (2021).

And even if there wasn’t, Sunny doesn’t live under a rock. Someone who has survived lockdown without social media has to be avoiding it for a reason, I reasoned. And it should be a compelling one. I decided that, after a bad Facebook experience in her early 20s, this skeptical investigator decided she had no need for online “friends” or followers. And being a stubborn person as well as a contrarian (remember, she’s a Bostonian who hates baseball!) she’s stuck to her guns over the years.

Certain family members, though, seem more susceptible to the allure of Insta-fame. Though she has little contact with her sister Elizabeth or her mother, I imagine they both have active online presences—they really do sound like selfie queens to me.  It might irk the two of them that Sunny isn’t a follower of theirs – and their efforts to convert Sunny would definitely make her dig in her high heels even more.

 I saw an opportunity to illustrate this when I was writing Bad Influence.  In Revenge Tour, Sunny broke up with detective Jesse Stone—leaving her single for the first time in a long while. In Bad Influence, she reveals that she actually does have a never-used Instagram account—which her sister Elizabeth created for her after the split, signing her up for a dating app as well. Sunny, of course, used neither. But it did force her to reflect on her sister’s good intentions.

She does just that in an early scene, when she logs onto Instagram for the first time in many months in order to direct message her new client, and remembers the circumstances leading to the creation of her account.  [Elizabeth] even posted a few shots of my paintings, Sunny recalls. A gesture that I must say I was moved by.

Of course, she wasn’t moved enough to try the dating app. While she didn’t delete the account altogether, she renamed it @RosieRandall and switched out Elizabeth’s curated photos for glamour shots of her dog.

Bringing Sunny into the modern world was an interesting way for me to get to know her. Discovering her feelings about influencing (Harder work than she thought), Only Fans (Good business model! Sunny doesn’t judge.), and paid product endorsements staged to look like regular posts (Okay, maybe she does judge sometimes…) made it easier for me to understand how she’d relate to life in general. As a person who disdains social media—using it only as tool in researching her clients—Sunny is clearly a free thinker, who takes more pleasure in the real world than the virtual one.

But on a different level, she knows also knows more than most of us what it feels like to be truly alone. No matter how much time she spends with her BFF Spike (who is notably not on social media either—unless he just doesn’t talk to Sunny about it) her beloved dad Phil, or whatever man she’s involved with at the moment, Sunny goes home to a life in which there are no dinging notifications, no ongoing gossipy group chats on messenger, no blush-worthy compliments from an unexpected Instagram follower. She’s never tagged in anyone’s Facebook memory. And when she finds herself blessed with great news or coping with personal tragedy, she’ll never know what it feels like to receive congratulations or words of encouragement from hundreds of friends – many of whom she’s never met before. In fact, she probably finds that entire concept as weird and disturbing as most of us did 23 years ago.

In that way, I discovered, Sunny Randall truly is a classic lone detective.

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