It all started with Robert B. Parker and his damned Spenser detective novels. I think the key to my personal addiction was the humor in the detective novels, mostly set in the Boston-Cambridge areas. The laughably tough Spenser, a former professional boxer, had an even tougher alter ego, Hawk. He also has a fabulous, if overeducated girlfriend he refused to marry and a sharpened appetite for both food and drink.

The books always made me hungry and made me laugh. What more can you ask? I have all the Spenser novels in either paperback or hardcover.

That was just the beginning.

Cobb Manor is now lined with books, mostly paperbacks, mostly detective novels with most traced back to the Spenser genre. I wonder if I can sue Parker for causing my addiction like the smokers did to the tobacco companies? Then, I could afford some bookcases to get the book piles off the floor. I buy so many books that Amazon.com e-mails me. The more I buy, the more they send me their “recommendations.”

Some are good. Some are bad.

The Leo Waterman series by new author-hero G.M. Ford is my latest addiction. Not as good as Spenser perhaps, but closer than anything else I have found.

The Waterman series is based on an earnest private detective located in Seattle, with a fabulous, if overeducated girlfriend.

Waterman has no superhero sidekick like Hawk. It seems that Waterman’s father, “Wild Bill” Waterman, was a semi-reformed labor thug who served on the city council for a few generations before he passed on to his reward. He left behind a group of “residentially challenged,” or homeless, former City Hall employees. When Waterman is in a pinch (every book), he marshals the forces of the homeless to stake out a doorway or a suspect. For the price of a few beers and a high calorie meal, he always gets results, and a few laughs.

A nepotic superstar, Waterman’s father also left behind a relative in each and every nook and cranny at City Hall. When the detective needs some crucial info, he calls up an aunt or uncle for the inside dope.

In “Last Ditch,” the latest Waterman series book I have read, Ford describes his relationship with his surly uncle Pat as “an air of discord which for the last 30 years had drifted over the field of our linked lives like cannon smoke.” I like that. I have a few relationships with cannon smoke still fouling the battlefield.

On relationships, Waterman observes, “Love may be blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener.”

After taking a fearsome beating from an earless man, Waterman says, “For the next three weeks my activities were limited to low-impact needlepoint and the contemplation of my navel.” The books are very funny.

The plots are great. In “Last Ditch,” Waterman tears down a greenhouse and digs up the long-lost best enemy of his father. In “Bum’s Rush,” Waterman investigates the claim of a homeless woman that she is the mother of a Kurt Cobain-like rock star. In “Where the Hell is Wanda Fuch?” Waterman leaves the city streets to search the woods for a mob heiress. He stays in the woods for “The Deader the Better” to find the murderers of the area’s star fishing guide.

There are many more to come. Ford has penned Waterman novels including “Cast in Stone” and “Slow Burn.” He also started a new series based on Frank Corso, a defrocked newsman turned investigator. Now you know I have to read them.

In an interview on “Book Bytes,” Ford said the Waterman series started to get stale, hence the Corso series. When praised by the interviewer for creating strong and intelligent women, the author admitted, “Everything regarding women that I’m absolutely sure of would fit on the back of a postage stamp.”

Ford too was thinking of Spenser when he started. “I had in mind something between Fletch and Spenser. Funnier and not quite as macho as Spenser but with something of an edge to it.” He quickly fell in love with his “residentially challenged” supporters. “Three or four books in, I would have loved to have written a book without the bums, but it turned out to be impossible.”

Ford plots out his books as much as possible, but not too much to “stop the magic” from happening. He wishes that he had started writing earlier and tells new writers to either “enjoy it” or to try low-impact needlepoint. Like many “hard-boiled” writers, Ford admits to an addiction to the genre, favoring J.L. Burke, Dennis Lehane, Harlan Coben, Scott Phillips, Daniel Woodrell and Steven Hunter.

I have all the books by Hunter, Woodrell and Lehane. I will now check Amazon.com for Burke, Coben and Phillips.

The beat goes on. I need bookcases.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.