When Ross Macdonald started writing mystery stories he was doing so consciously under the influence of a style of writing made famous by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Like film noir, this wasn’t so much a matter of the stories’ content, though there was a lot of overlap in that respect, as it was a function of style. It’s there on the first page of The Moving Target, with private detective Lew Archer visiting a wealthy enclave on the Pacific coast that’s beset with a light-blue haze that’s like “a thin smoke from slowly burning money.” You just want to stop reading and enjoy lines like that. On the drive to a nightclub we hear how Archer’s “tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top” while “the neons along the Strip glared with insomnia.” Macdonald’s L.A. is a living thing, and the night club, though “no longer young” has a heartbeat that’s “artificially stimulated.” “An arch of weather-browned stucco, peeling away like scabs, curved over the entrance.” I love those scabs, just as I love the sedan we see later that’s “acned with rust.”

Then there are the babes. The young Miranda Sampson, “wearing a black-striped dress, narrow in the right places, full in the others.” She’s “the kind who developed slowly and was worth waiting for.” She makes “the blood run round in my veins like horses on a track.” But this sort of temptation only angers Archer, makes him hate her. She seems “like a dog, like a bitch in rutting season.” And then there’s the faded movie star that Archer meets at a bar. Faded, but she’s still got something going on.

I let my glance slide down her heavy body revealed by the open fur coat. It was good for her age, tight-waisted, high-bosomed, with amphora hips. And it was alive, with a subtly persistent female power, an animal pride’s like a cat’s.

Ah, women. Even the switchboard operator, a character briefly seen and of no importance, is swiftly appraised: “a frozen virgin who dreamed about men at night and hated them in the daytime.” How does Archer know this? Because that’s his job. He notices things. Plus he doesn’t really like women that much. Near the end of the book it will even seem to him “that evil was a female quality, a poison that women secreted and transmitted to men like a disease.” Probably not the kind of thing you’d say today.

To be sure, some of the slang is now obscure. When Archer tells one woman to “douse the muggles” I think he’s telling her to put out her cigarette, but I really don’t know. Then when Taggert complains that he doesn’t like “taking chicken from a lush” I can only try to understand what is meant in context. I think we’d be more likely to say that we don’t like “taking shit” from anyone.

Elsewhere the language can feel like it’s trying too hard. What does it mean that a face has “too many nerve ends showing like tortured worms”? Or how would you picture a face with “a violent nose like the prow of a speedboat inverted”? These really stumped me. Does the first simile refer to rosacea? I don’t know.

Who is Lew Archer? Well, he’s a tough guy. That doesn’t mean he wins every fight he’s in though. It’s just that he can take a beating and keep coming back. Which he does. One of the keynotes of tough-guy fiction is the ability to describe the hero’s slip into unconsciousness. Here Archer is swarmed by illegal Mexican immigrants who “kicked consciousness out of my head. It slid like a disappearing tail light down the dark mountainside of the world.” This is nice, and works well because Archer had been following taillights earlier. Then there’s this quicky:

The movement behind me was so lizard-quick I had no time to turn. “Ambush” was the last word that flashed across my consciousness before it faded out.

“Sucker” was the first word when consciousness returned. The Cyclops eye of an electric lantern stared down at me like the ghastly eye of conscience.

It goes without saying that Archer is a cynical bastard as well. When he started out as a detective he used to believe that “the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty.” But now he’s just “going through the motions.” He’s come to realize that “evil isn’t so simple.” Everyone has it in them, and whether it ever expresses itself “depends on a number of things. Environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece of bad luck, a wrong friend.” So he’s become less judgmental, though harder as well. I’ll admit I laughed out loud when he drowns the ex-boxer Puddler after a fight in the ocean:

I had to let go of him to reach the surface in time. One deep breath, and I went down after him. My clothes hampered me, and the shoes were heavy on my feet. I went down through strata of increasing cold until my ears were aching with the pressure of the water. Puddler was out of reach and out of sight. I tried six times before I gave him up. The key to my car was in his trousers pocket.

That punchline is terrific. The way the passage is constructed it seems as though Archer is actually trying to save Puddler. But all he really wants is to get his keys.

The mystery itself is a bit muddled, which is again the Chandler fashion. What makes it confusing is that all of the characters are up to no good. There are some narrative points of interest though. There’s the way the dominating figure of oil tycoon and family patriarch Ralph Sampson is kept off-stage the whole book, only for his corpse to be revealed in a changeroom (or is it a toilet stall?) at the end. And then there’s the motif of Archer feeling that somehow everything around him is unreal. “I felt unreal,” he says on the novel’s first page. And then on the last page: “As we rolled down the hill, I could see all the lights of the city. They didn’t seem quite real.” In-between we get several other moments like this, the point of which I think is to underline how phony all these people’s lives are. Archer can move among them, but he is definitely not of them. In a dream he will cross over the “excremental river” of the city walking on stilts and then mount an escalator to rise above the “zones of evil.”

But only in his dreams. The all-too-real city of shit would exert a more powerful draw.

Archer index