Tough guy private eye Spenser is one of Boston’s most recognizable characters. Over the course of 37 novels, Robert B. Parker’s signature creation introduced the city to millions of readers. I’ve read them all and will miss the big lug as much as I miss Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald’s legendary Florida beach bum. But as anyone who loves books knows, beloved characters roam the pages of old novels forever. Parker, who died of a heart attack at his writing desk at age 77 on Tuesday, wrote more than 65 books in all (some still to be published). In addition to Spenser, the prolific Parker wrote series featuring Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, westerns (notably “Appaloosa“) and other standalone novels like the baseball story “Double Play.” But it was Spenser, the one-named, wisecracking yet sensitive detective with a sense of honor (played by Robert Ullrich in the TV series “Spenser For Hire”) who left his mark on the genre. “He was responsible for a seismic shift,” best-selling writer Dennis Lehane (”Mystic River, “Gone Baby Gone“) said in The Boston Globe. “He suddenly made the private-eye novel sexy, in the coolest sense of that word. There’s private-eye fiction before Bob, and there’s private-eye fiction after him.”