I’ve been reading the Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories in the collection The Archer Files edited by Tom Nolan. In a prefatory note to the reader for “Gone Girl” Nolan explains how it incorporates some elements from the story “Strangers in Town,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime (“Strangers in Town” was also expanded into the novel The Ivory Grin). This is fine, but the note doesn’t explain why Nolan (I assume it was him) changed the title. “Gone Girl” was first published in 1953 under the title “The Imaginary Blonde.” Why is it “Gone Girl” here? Because The Archer Files came out in 2015 and Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name had been published in 2012 and the movie released in 2014? I guess. That seems kind of cheesy to me though, and personally I prefer “The Imaginary Blonde” anyway.

Given how Macdonald mined his own material I wasn’t surprised at how familiar it played. And it was interesting to note how he held on to stuff. I noted in my review of “Strangers in Town” the description of the gangster’s eyes looking “like thin stab-wounds filled with watery blood,” which he cuts and pastes here. I can’t remember though if sand “drifted like unthawing snow” was used previously. Sand as snow is good but unexceptional; it’s the awkward rightness of “unthawing” that really lands. If you look unthaw up in a dictionary it’s synonymous with thaw, but that’s not how it’s being used here. The sand is snow that will never thaw because it can’t. It’s sand! I love it.

Archer index