It wasn’t until recently that I discovered Ross Macdonald named his detective Lew Archer after Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer.
Makes sense. Many critics identify M
acdonald as the literary heir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as the writer who polished and redefined the classic detective hero. Macdonald said Chandler was one of his (other) main inspirations. He took Philip Marlowe and added a layer of psychosocial depth. But not right away.
According to a variety of writers, the early books in Macdonald’s 18-novel series were more hard-boiled, cynical. Later, perhaps after his sixth novel, according to today’s mystery critics, Lew Archer developed a stronger social conscience distancing him from Spade and Marlowe.
Debatable. Sam Spade has a code which he explains or demonstrates more than once in The Maltese Falcon. In one of the final scenes, Spade says,
“When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”
Hammett explored the theme of duty more extensively in another book, The Glass Key. But regardless, a number of Macdonald’s later books examined the responsibilities and consequences of personal relationships, especially family relationships gone bad, skeletons, black sheep, sometimes covering more than one generation. To solve his crimes Archer looked at family and community allegiances and probed the psychological makeup of suspects and victims.
The psychological element in crime is twisted and turned and studied in The Chill, Macdonald’s 11th Archer novel. One of the initial suspects is even kept under the care of a psychiatrist for much of the book. The plot moves from one suspect to another with a string of three murders, one dating back twenty years; another, ten years; another, two hours. Are they connected? That’s one of many questions Archer has to answer.
Alex Kincaid hires Archer to help him find Dolly, his wife of less than 24 hours. The couple, in their early 20s, were spending their honeymoon at a Southern California beach hotel when Dolly disappeared. Rebuffed by indifferent local police, Kincaid spends almost two weeks searching for Dolly in vain. Archer finds the runaway bride after only a day’s work, but the trouble for Archer and his client is only beginning.
Paul Newman was Lew Harper, not Archer, in two films made from Ross Macdonald novels.
The story takes place in a fictional Southern California city, Pacific Point, where Archer finds Dolly attending classes at a local college and chauffeuring part time for a wealthy woman. Shortly after he finds her and reunites her with her husband, Dolly suffers a mental breakdown, and confesses to shooting her college advisor, Helen Haggerty.
Archer had met the unmarried Haggerty at the university when he was looking for Dolly. She poured on the charm and invited Archer up her nearby house for a drink. She tells him she’s received telephone death threats and fears for her life. She asks him to spend the night. He turns down the attractive woman’s offer. As he drives back to his Pacific Point motel he tells himself there was “no right thing to do—only sins of commission and omission.”
Here’s where it gets complicated, and complications soon pile on. When Archer hears Dolly’s confession, he drives back to Haggerty’s home to find her dead in a pool of blood. In the dark he fails to stop a man running from the house. The stranger manages to drive away, but Archer makes note of his Nevada license plate number.
From here Archer follows leads—family connections of Haggerty and Dolly—that take him to Reno and a small town in Illinois. He suspects the murder of Haggerty and of Dolly’s mother twenty years ago are connected. It’s a confusing spiral, but it all makes sense in the end.
As you’re sorting out the complex story, Macdonald entertains you with philosophy and bits Chandleresque humor:
Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born, and Begley had some of the stigmata of the trouble-prone.
_ _ _ _
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” she said, as if I wasn’t.
_ _ _ _
“What are you trying to do, trap me into a mistake?”
“It’s an idea. [I said] What sort of mistake did you have I mind?”
One Goodreads reviewer said the book is “extraordinarily complex but never convoluted.”
Maybe. The last sixty pages make you think, remember. Pour over the clues, the conversations that Archer has in Pacific Point and Reno and Illinois. Is the resolution far fetched? Not really. Archer solves it by the process of elimination.
Praise for Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is everywhere. It’s a beautiful coming of age story, an invitation to explore and appreciate nature—from frolicking microscopic life to squawking gulls—a love story of sorts and a meditation on social isolation. It’s also a mystery. Blended seamlessly, these elements create a story that will carry you away to the coastal marshlands of North Carolina and make you forget just about all else. It was the first book I read when the lock-down began and was just what I needed.
Next, when the bad news completely seeped into my consciousness, I reached for The Plague by Albert Camus. I’d read it years ago and still had it on my Kindle. Very timely I thought, but I couldn’t read more than a few chapters. It’s too realistic. First, the rats start dying… It’s a classic by the French existentialist author, complete with allegory, but not for now.
I’ve been working my way through Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer PI series and picked up The Zebra Striped Hearse. This complex story, published in 1962, begins with a rich ex-military man hiring Archer to dig up dirt on his daughter’s fiancée who he suspects of being a gold digger. The repressed 24-year-old daughter has fallen for an itinerant artist who’s been traveling under a variety of aliases.
Takeoff by Joseph Reid is a thriller with mystery elements revealed gradually through the fast-moving story. The foundation of the book is the well-rendered relationship between Max, a rising sixteen-year-old female rock star, and Seth Walker an emotionally vulnerable federal air marshal assigned to protect the recalcitrant phenom on a cross-country flight. When they land at LAX instead of handing off Max and getting back to his regular job, Walker and his charge are greeted with automatic weapons fire. The two go on the run, pursued by unknown gunmen while Walker suspects betrayal by federal agents. Walker is an electrical engineer with more than a dozen patents to his name and uses his ingenuity to keep he and Max alive while he tries to uncover details in the young girl’s past that may be influencing her present. Likable characters in bad trouble make for an engrossing read.
My next read, after we’d finally made it home, was a book I’d purchased a few years before and never had much time for. Know the feeling? The Big Book of Pulps is a collection of dozens of noir stories from the 1920s through 1940s. The table of contents looks like a directory of the best authors in the genre. Rather than begin at the beginning, I started with my favorite authors. The book contains three stories each by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and Dashiell Hammett. Other authors include James. M. Cain; Carroll John Daly, credited with writing the first U.S. detective novel; and Earl Stanley Gardner. In one Gardner story, Ken Corning, precursor to Perry Mason, leaps on the running board of a car and battles gunmen. Not the deft courtroom-style exchange you might expect from watching Raymond Burr.
Then there’s the comparison of violence and inhuman acts vs. obscenities. Larmer says she’s baffled by people who take exception to profanity but “make absolutely no mention of the fact that in one book, for instance, I leave someone in a dank basement to be devoured by rats.”
One of my favorite writers of the past is Ross Macdonald. His novels spanned the period when profanity was unacceptable to the early 1970s when many of the restraints came off.
Nostalgia City Mysteries 