The Lew Archer novels
More on my reading: the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald are the only "hard-boiled" detective novels I read regularly. Some years ago I read all the Raymond Chandler I could, including the serialized predecessors of the novels, and then somehow I went off Chandler. It is hard to forgive the fact that one murder in The Big Sleep is simply never explained.
The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon are, as anyone would say, classics of their kind. Much of Hammett's other work, however, is just creepy. The vast majority of crime fiction leaves the impression that the big cities are run by gangs and the corrupt police officers they pay off, but somehow Hammett delivers these messages in a pedantic way that is just boring. This may have been his membership in the Communist Party showing through. There is a collection of short stories by Hammett that is good: "The Continental Op," where you can see both Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy (from The Maltese Falcon) taking shape.
All the hard-boiled detectives are somehow weary, and perhaps some ways down the road toward giving up, thinking that good can never triumph over evil, or the fight isn't worth it. Yet they keep on going. In The Thin Man, Nick Charles has married a much younger woman who thinks it would be fun to spend time with gangsters. They socialize (at least at Christmas time) with drunks who are mostly nihilists or radicals of some superficial kind. No one except Nick really seems to think it matters whether the guilty are punished; Nick, despite his worldliness and cynicism, does think it matters. Yet he has almost entirely given up detective work in order to make money. Sam Spade may be an even more interesting character. He plays so many different roles, to so many different people (in a way out-Brigid-ing Brigid) that he is almost forced to explain near the end of the story: "Maybe I'm not as bad as people think I am."
Macdonald keeps all the metaphysics and big themes to a minimum. There are a few hints that you might learn something from novels, maybe even from philosophy. (In real life, Kenneth Millar, who wrote under the name Ross Macdonald, was an English professor). The contrast between beautiful California scenery, and grubby human beings, is always present. Archer does his job because it is his job. He tries to make sure he gets paid--he doesn??????t want to be a sucker--but he often makes it clear he will keep investigating whether he gets paid or not. As with all his colleagues in this genre, he will go without sleep, eat terrible meals if any, and endure a variety of beatings, to get the job done.
Some of the details in Archer novels are odd; some are hilarious. The general idea is that murders that seem unrelated in time or space are actually closely related--maybe committed by the same person, who has now aged dramatically, changed his or her name or identity, and may be unrecognizable even to spouses or old friends from high school. Children who witness a murder, or are asked to help cover it up, are screwed up for the rest of their lives.
In the two Archer novels I recently re-read, there are innocent people who, we eventually find out, could have explained the whole mystery of the book at an early stage, but they don't. The price they pay for not confiding in Archer is often that they get themselves killed.
In the Instant Enemy (1968), young Davy Spanner has begun to realize who his father is. He's enraged, he's been in fairly minor trouble with the law, he's determined to kill the man or something, so he refuses to talk to Archer in Ch. 4. If Davy is right (and he is), his father is a murderer. He ends up dead.
Young Sandy Sebastian, who runs off with Davy, has been brutally raped by Davy's real father. Between the two of them, they could clear up a lot of things--right at the beginning. But instead they kidnap the man, and things go downhill. Archer is hired to find Sandy; she hardly says boo to him.
A lady named Mrs. Krug could have cleared up a lot of things, and maybe even prevented a murder or two, in Ch. 19. When Archer asks her at the end of Ch. 32, "Why didn't you tell me Ruth Marburg was your daughter?" the answer is "You didn't ask me. It makes no difference, anyway."
In The Chill (1963), Dean Ray Bradshaw, a bit of a golden boy at a local college, has lived with his first wife for many years--pretending she is his mother. Young Dolly McGee has begun to figure something out about her mother's murder from many years earlier; she testified against her father, and did a lot to put him in jail for the murder. She feels guilty about being persuaded, as a young child, to give false testimony. She begins to investigate, rather than hire a detective like Archer. She tells her story to a woman who, remarkably, is able to connect Dolly's murder story from California with another murder in Illinois. The other woman (see below) doesn't tell anyone, and Dolly doesn't tell anyone but her. When Dolly finds this other woman dead (Chs. 8 and 9), she kind of cracks up, feels guilty about everything, and naturally, is locked up somewhere, unable to talk to Archer.
Professor Helen Haggerty is the woman Dolly confides in. She hits on Lew in Ch. 6, and says she needs protection. Someone has threatened to kill her. She knows Archer is a detective, but she doesn't tell anything she knows: the Illinois murder, which involved Bradshaw and his "secret" wife, and now the California murder; Dolly's mother was having an affair with Bradshaw. Helen, as frightened as she is, has tried calling the police, but she doesn't tell them the story either. She ends up dead.
In The Underground Man (1971), if Stanley Broadhurst had hired a detective instead of trying to solve an old murder himself, he might not have been killed himself. He is killed after he is seen digging at a site where an old body, is buried.
These books might be intended to convey the message that we should all hire private detectives when we need help. Forget the do-it-yourself approach when investigating murders and other violent crimes. Leave it to Lew.
More favourites of mine:
The Blue Hammer (1976): A murder is committed in Arizona, and then the murderer returns to his small home town in California and lives for 25 years under the name of the man he murdered. Even at the end Archer can't explain why the guy went home. It might have been to visit his daughter--but for obvious reasons of security, he never did visit her.
The Galton Case (1959): Archer solves the murders by noticing a "Canadian" spelling in a note. (Millar was originally from Canada). In one of the neatest arrangements in these novels, one character is directly involved in two murders, widely separated in time and place, and then becomes the victim of a third murder.
(p. 184 of my edition): "His life ran through the case like a dirty piece of cord. He had marked Anthony Galton for the ax and Anthony Galton's murderer for the knife. He had helped a half-sane woman to lose her money, then sold her husband a salf-sane dream of wealth. Which brought him to the ironic day when his half-realities came together in a final reality, and Gordon Sable killed him to preserve a lie." Almost fits on a tombstone.
In The Wycherly Woman, Archer kisses what he thinks is a woman of about 40, not realizing it is actually her daughter, a woman of about 20, in disguise.
My absolute favourite: The Way Some People Die (1951). Macdonald creates a female character a bit like Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The young woman thinks she is smart enough to frame someone else for murder, so she arranges for Archer to be hired. Unfortunately for her, Archer figures it all out:
"You went home to bed and, if I know your type, slept like a baby."
"Did I?"
"Why not? You'd killed two men and kept yourself in the clear. I have an idea that you like killing men. Ordinary people don't throw slugs into a dead man's back for the hell of it. They don't arrange their lives so they have to spend a week-end with a corpse. Did it give you a thrill, cooking your meals in the same room with him?"
Another Archer lesson: children suffer from growing up in broken homes, or homes full of hate. This may be as close as he comes to a "big lesson." The innocence of children is valuable, and should be protected. Many of the stories of murder and hate are the mirror image, or maybe the converse, of the "Victorian family"--a picture of what happens when adults don't maintain more or less happy families, where histories are more or less openly discussed so that they are not allowed to fester and hurt a child.
The Underground Man begins and ends with Archer's relationship with a young boy, and Archer's desire to protect him. In The Drowning Pool (1950), a teen-aged girl of about 16, still a child in some ways, initiates the letter-writing that gets Archer involved, and then commits the "first" murder. She's trying to "fix things," and get the people she thinks are her parents to be more together and loving.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Archer is drawn toward sexy young women, whether or not they are much too young for him, who show signs that their childhood was badly screwed up. He feels some stirring of sexual attraction; rationally he knows they are bad news; decently, and more or less consistently, he wants to help them. (There is some of this in Chandler's The Big Sleep).
More generally, these stories are a distopia of modern life. We see mostly isolated individuals, with little true self-respect (as opposed to empty boastful assertion) or ambition. The love of money moves into many lives to occupy a big empty space. Archer himself is divorced, alone, an ex-cop. He has no apparent friends except people he knows professionally, who have a certain respect for him (and send him clients). (A few happily married people would like to see more of him, as a friend, than they do).
There is no sign that he has any living relatives. At least he has work to which he is truly committed. It is not difficult to see how people could fall off an edge and have no hope at all. California, as has often been said, somehow highlights this drama--people leave families and roots to go there, full of hope for themselves.
Everyone is looking for love--even, probably, Archer. But whom would he marry? What if, to exaggerate almost comically, the only women he meets are mental patients?
In The Moving Target (1949), the murderer is actually an old friend of Archer's. Now that's turning the knife: you're better off having no attachments. Of course, an attractive but screwed up young woman is engaged to this lawyer, and thinks marrying him is the responsible thing to do. Then she falls in love with a younger man, who gets killed. Then her father is killed, and the body is found the same day she gets married--to the murderer.
Other titles I own: The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962), and Sleeping Beauty (1973).
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