You have to understand: Helen Hunt is Sunny Randall. Or she will be. So far Sunny is merely the protagonist of Parker’s 34th book. But he created this character specifically for Hunt, at her request. Last year, after she’d won her Oscar and was able to do pretty much what she wanted, she decided she wanted Parker to write a book for her. A man who has 5 million copies of his books in print does not do anything he doesn’t want to, but Parker took the meeting out of curiosity. He also took his wife, Joan, along, and as he remembers it, Helen and Joan mostly talked about their dogs while Parker wondered aloud, “Is there a deal here someplace?” There was–as soon as he found out Hunt wanted him to write not a screenplay but a novel. “Then I said, ‘Yes!’ " So Parker created Sunny Randall, and Sony bought the rights to “Family Honor” for Hunt, and if all goes well Sunny will become a franchise, like James Bond.
“Family Honor” (Putnam. $22.95) is a first-rate piece of entertainment. Sunny Randall is a Boston private detective who paints on the side, can’t cook, owns a miniature bull terrier and has a weird relationship with an ex-husband that she’s sorta maybe kinda–OK, definitely–still in love with. Sunny is, in the words of her sidekick, the gay waiter and karate expert Spike, “shooter, shrink, painter and sex symbol.” What actress wouldn’t kill for a part like that?
“Family Honor” has its share of formulaic touches: Sunny’s dad is a retired cop; her ex’s dad is a mob boss. But the core of the book is a heartfelt story of emotional rescue. Tracking down a runaway teenage girl, Sunny quickly finds herself tutoring her clueless charge on what it takes to be a functioning adult. But while Parker virtually invented the sensitive detective, he never forgets he’s writing a murder mystery. Bullets and wisecracks aplenty balance out the emotional stuff.
It’s the emotional stuff that got Hunt and Parker together. Parker wanted to see if he could create a believable female protagonist. “It was very hard,” he admits, and if Sunny is believable, he gives his wife the credit. “I don’t know if I could have done it if I didn’t have a smart woman to help me. Joan would go over the manuscript and female-ize it for me. Big stuff, little stuff.” Such as? “At one point, she said, ‘Bob, we’re not calling it rouge anymore’.”
Hunt wanted to see a series of books and then movies that would check in with a woman over the course of her life. “I got excited about putting a messy woman on the screen–not messy in terms of how she keeps her house but how she keeps her head.” Sunny has a dog because Hunt and Parker are both dog crazy, and Sunny is a painter because Hunt likes to paint. “I confide in you that I am very bad. I can’t do perspective, so it’s folk art.”
Otherwise, they both insist, Parker was left on his own to create Sunny as he saw fit. Both are wild about the way she turned out. Enough that Parker is game to try another Sunny book. Hunt just wants to get the first book on film. But now, as she is all too aware, it’s her turn to face the dilemmas Parker encountered. “Getting in the head of a woman is as hard for women as it is for men,” she says, “because by definition women tend to be–I don’t know–‘more complex’ is overly simple, ironically. But you know it when you see it. You really know it when you see it bad.” But she doesn’t sound too worried. Thanks to her pal Parker, Sunny Randall is as good as it gets.
