At the end of my review of The Drowning Pool I drew attention to the scene where Lew Archer goes for a swim in the “cool clear Pacific.” The ocean is an oasis of purity despite the foul run-off dumped into it from the city, which in an earlier novel he had likened to a river of shit. “They poured their sewage into it,” he says of the ocean, “but it couldn’t be tainted.”

Only a few years later in The Barbarous Coast things have gotten worse. At the end of this novel the mentally shattered Isobel Graff sits on the beach and shakes her fist at the “muttering water” of the Pacific, calling it a “dirty old cesspool.” So much for not being tainted. Things have taken a grim turn, even in Malibu.

Or maybe I should say especially in Malibu. And Hollywood. Archer casts a very cold, dyspeptic eye on L.A.’s la dolce vita as he once again takes on a missing person case that ends tragically. The beautiful people of Malibu and Hollywood are all somehow on the make, not to mention in bed with gangsters. They disgust Archer. At the Channel Club’s upscale (and naturally decadent) pool party he grumps how “I felt like slugging somebody. There wasn’t anybody big enough around.” The men are “faeries” (which always means a wimp, going back to Chandler) or phonies. Simon Graff has “lived too long among actors. He was a citizen of the unreal city, a false front leaning on scantlings.” That “unreal city” is I think an allusion to The Waste Land, and when Archer overhears a conversation about arranging an abortion at a party it also made me think of that poem.

Macdonald, who had a Ph.D. in English and was, according to his biographer, “one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan,” knew what he was doing. And as I’ve mentioned before, Archer is a learned man as well when it comes to literary matters. When his screenwriter friend asks him if he’s read Flaubert’s Salammbô he responds “A long time ago, in translation. I don’t remember the story.” It’s hard to imagine another private detective of this or any other age apologizing for this. (For the record, I haven’t read Salammbô, even in translation, and don’t know the story either.) In a later conversation at the same party a drunk woman explains how her words don’t always come out like she wants them to. “Like in James Joyce,” she says. Then she goes on to ask if Archer knows that Joyce’s “daughter was schizzy?” Now this is something I was aware of, but it’s not a factlet I would expect to hear at a Malibu party, even in 1956.

Given this highbrow showboating, I enjoyed it all the more when Archer tells the screenwriter that detective work keeps him in beer and skittles, then immediately asks “By the way, what are skittles?” The writer says he lets the studio’s research department look things like that up. In case you are wondering, skittles weren’t a candy back then but a pub game where you try to knock down wooden pins.

The story plays out in a similar fashion to the earlier novels. As noted, it’s another missing person case, though that’s not how it starts out. Archer is feeling his age, which is pushing 40 (the same as Macdonald when he wrote the book). And nearing 40 was middle-aged in the 1950s. Archer’s even giving some thought to dating, as “A man got lonely in the stucco wilderness, pushing forty with no chick, no child.” As it is, his sidekick is a poor romantic sap from Toronto who ends up getting the living crap beaten out of him on several occasions. It’s not a good idea to hang out with these hard-boiled types. “Call me trouble looking for a place to happen,” is how Archer describes himself and his job. No wonder he’s got no chick.

Again the plot is set in motion by a hot girl. Or a couple of them actually. You could blame the older men who chase after them, but the one girl is referred to as “a loco mare in heat” (that’s from her father) and the other a “sexburger.” Archer himself is chaste, though as always his male gaze lingers on every breast in his area code. And one can understand why when they overflow the front of a strapless dress “like whipped cream.” But when we get a description of a breast rising when a girl raises her arm to brush her hair we may wonder at why this part of the female anatomy so fixes his attention. That is what breasts do. Why is Archer always staring?

The plot is bonkers. Macdonald tosses us a kind of explanation at the end and you’ll really have to focus to keep it straight. There’s blackmailing and double crosses and a lot of what seemed to me to be pretty indiscriminate murder. Not to mention some dodgy pop psychology that the head shrink at a sanatorium walks us through. I thought it was all a load of hooey, and the ending really felt rushed, but by this point I think an Archer novel was pretty much set and readers knew what to expect. And they wanted more.

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