By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(This post was published on December 17, 2010 on my blog draupadiarjun.blog.co.in, hosted by a site called "Indiayogi")
ROSS MACDONALD (1915-1983) wrote twenty-four books during 1949-1976. Eighteen of those featured his private eye Lew Archer in a popular series. Macdonald’s early paperbacks sport lurid covers advertizing the pulp elements of the “fast-paced, hardboiled action” within. It makes me smile; the joke is on us, the people who have read and re-read the books. It made Macdonald smile too; with the complex irony he loved, he has Lew looking around in a girl’s “hot-plate apartment” in The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962). Among other things, there were “a few paperbacked novels with young women like Fawn portrayed on the covers”.
Ross Macdonald had a day name, Kenneth Millar, but I’m going to stick to the one gracing the lurid covers.
So, when Macdonald was 11, he discovered Oliver Twist “and read that novel with such intense absorption” that his mother “feared for (his) health”. Although Macdonald went on to admire many other writers, ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge (on whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation) to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James A. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is of Dickens I think when I read Ross Macdonald — a pared-down and dryer-eyed Dickens, after Freud and two World Wars. Obviously aiming at the mass market, but always concealing truffles among the potatoes.
Like Dickens, Ross Macdonald gave you more than your money’s worth. Writing was a serious pursuit, and plots thickened over months — at one time twenty years (Black Money, 1966) — of filling notebooks with cross-entries. Once the intense drawing-board work was done, the writing was easy, the action flowing, the words spinning the crafty web of memories and lies. So dense and suggestive is the writing that it is impossible to skim through a Macdonald book, even if you have read it before and recall whodunit. With so much happening, so many people talking, and so many consequences of a tainted past weighing in on the present, it is a bit of a shock to be reminded that only “thirty hours” have passed since Lew took on a case, or that someone was killed “yesterday”. In one never-ending day or night Lew sometimes traverses years of emotional history and catalyses events that lead to a violent renaissance of truth.
The characters, main and supporting, all have bits and pieces of the story in their keeping, not just the crime story, but the California story, the 1950s story, the 1970s story, the broken-dreams story, whatever. Mr. Raisch, landlord of Acacia Court, and Marjorie Fellows, who followed Lew “like an embarrassing bulky shadow”, are quite as memorable as Galatea in The Way Some People Die (1951). When Marjorie’s troubles are over, and she and George Barron invite Lew to a celebratory meal, Lew (who is thirty-seven years old in this novel) reflects: “They were nice people, hospitable and rich. I couldn’t stand their company for some reason, or eat their food. My mind was still fixed on death, caught deep in its shadow. If I’d stayed I’d have to tell them things that they wouldn’t like. Things that would spoil their fun, if anything could spoil their fun.” The Galton Case (1959) has a forlorn, brittle mood and teeters throughout on the brink of losing the future to the past. A person hiding a crucial piece of the Luna Bay puzzle is the gentrified former wife of an ex-con. Lew interviews this woman, Marian Matheson, who tries to ward off the visiting calamity with her hard-won middle-class armor, the way Mrs. Kershaw did in Ruth Rendell’s Sins of the Fathers (1967). But talk she must, calamity or not, and the confession finally comes in a tragicomic scene that even the fastidious Mr. Chandler (who died in 1959) could have approved of perhaps. Black Money is studded with characters quite as vivid as Skimpole and Smallweed — though Macdonald has to work with fewer strokes and, of course, unhappy endings. But he has this talent, at his best, for shining a light on a character, however minor, such that we seem to catch them bang in the killing act of living. They aren’t dressed up for the brief appointment. Peter Jamieson, Ginny Fablon, Bess Tappinger, Professor Allan Bosch, Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks, and Mrs. Sekjar all have something to say about the human condition. The pictures in Mrs. Sekjar’s living room, Lew notes, “were all religious, and there were so many of them that they suggested a line of defense against the world”. In The Chill (1963) the name “Letitia Macready” “drew a net of lines” across Mrs. Bradshaw’s face, “reduced her eyes to bright black points and her mouth to a purse with a drawstring”. Looking for Phoebe (in The Wycherly Woman, 1961), Lew lands in a shabby Sacramento hotel where “the migrant years had flown through … and left their droppings”. There he meets the old bellhop (“Jerry Dingman’s no troublemaker”) who may remind today’s reader of Dobby the house-elf. Lew needs the passkey to another room, and Jerry’s principles are run over. “Forty years as a bellhop hollows a man out into a kind of receptacle for tips. Twenty years as a detective works changes in a man, too,” Lew muses.
Every book has gripping drama that the characters embody. People who smile at the lurid covers can’t stop marveling at Macdonald’s subtle invention considering that Lew, like many real-life private detectives, is mostly hired to trace missing persons. (In Sleeping Beauty, 1973, Lew mentally fills in an empty registration card: “Lew Archer, thief catcher, corpse finder, ear to anyone”). You might think that the repeating themes would spin off stereotypes, but mostly they don’t. To cite just one example, Laurel Russo (Sleeping Beauty), Harriet Blackwell (The Zebra-Striped Hearse), Phoebe Wycherly (The Wycherly Woman) and Galley Lawrence (The Way Some People Die) were all missing daughters at points in the respective novels, but certainly they were very different young women.
Not all the characters work for me, Martel/Domingo of Black Money for one. Macdonald was personally invested in this creature. “Francis Martel …, like John Brown in The Galton Case, was suggested by my own experiences. Both Francis and John crossed a border, as I had, into the United States, and attempted to start radically new lives in California,” Macdonald wrote in 1971. However, the cruelty we witness from Martel cuts too deep to be reconciled with what we subsequently hear. In contrast, Q.R. Simpson (The Zebra-Striped Hearse) who also grows in our hearing, is a man we clearly see.
And then there is Lew, who is not an insignificant man. We met him as a handsome, wisecracking young man who, without the backing of either money or a badge can talk his way into and out of any situation. Years pass, Lew ages before us. At the end of his journey, we fear, (in spite of Betty of The Blue Hammer, 1976) there will be only a handful of mourners, a few good cops and perhaps a DA who valued his integrity. Lew is good at smelling loneliness, and doubly good holding his nose at self pity. Towards the end of a long career he has no money (recall his habit of keeping what he considered tainted pay in a separate pocket), a reputation (as the best one-man gig in the business) in the local police force, lots of wry philosophy and the sometime-sting of loneliness. Fawn, the girl I mentioned before, asks Lew why his marriage did not last. Lew replies evasively but “the pain stirred like a Santa Ana wind in the desert back reaches of my mind. I’d begun to talk to the girl because she was there. Now I was there, too, more completely than I wanted to be.” These lines also tell us about Lew’s trade. Lew finds out people’s secrets by old fashioned legwork and conversation. Detectives, Macdonald once wrote, (in a tip worthy of Clovis Andersen!) “are able to submerge themselves in the immediate milieu and behave according to customs and talk the language: a little Spanish in East Los Angeles, a little jive in Watts, a little Levi-Strauss in Hollywood”. But mingle as he may, and reflect on the human condition as he does, Lew clearly operates by disengaging Lew Archer from the scene, concentrating on being an “ear to anyone”.
As Lew passes through the great houses and the mean streets, of California and of the human mind, a time is evoked with grim candor. The main people in the Dickens stories were always good in the end. The main people in the Macdonald stories are not. They embody the passions, heartbreaks and sicknesses of a certain time, and like priests burdened with living in our own time, Lew and us, we hear the confessions of the damned as they echo in a theatre both known and unfamiliar.
The Blue Hammer is the last Lew book Macdonald published. I don’t know if anyone would agree with me when I say I wish it wasn’t! To me this book is a caricature almost of all that was exceptional about Macdonald, as though a second-rate writer had pinched Macdonald’s plot and fleshed it out without the imagery and the understated humanity that lifted the novels above their superficially kitschy raw materials. I wish the elegiac book with the California oil spill as its backdrop, Sleeping Beauty, was the farewell Archer. That book bore all the prints of this great American crime fiction writer.
Ross Macdonald died in 1983. In one of those stranger-than-fiction ironies, the man who played with time past in all his best stories was stricken with Alzheimer’s disease in his last years.
***
“At its very best, where it ‘grazes tragedy’ and transcends its own conventions, detective fiction can remind us that we are all underground men making a brief transit from darkness to darkness.” – Ross Macdonald
*** Macdonald readers may want to read this April 1999 article by J. Kingston Pierce in January Magazine:
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