The Way Some People Die was the third of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and it’s remarkable how much his individual formula had already been set.
In the first place we have a woman coming to Archer with a problem. It’s the ladies who get the ball rolling. That’s how the first Archer short story, “Find the Woman,” kicks off, back when Archer was still “Joe Rogers.” It’s Elaine Sampson in The Moving Target, Maude Slocum in The Drowning Pool, and Mrs. Samuel Lawrence (more on that later) in this book.
Second: most of these women have the same problem they want Archer to solve. Millicent Dreen wants Archer to find her daughter. Elaine Sampson wants him to find her husband. In The Way Some People Die Mrs. Lawrence wants him to find her daughter, Galley. The Drowning Pool is the one exception to this rule, with Maude Slocum asking Archer to investigate a poison-pen letter she’d received, but this is just something to get the ball rolling. The main action of the novel surrounds Archer’s attempt to find the missing Patrick Ryan, just as in this book the search for Galley is passed off to being a search for Joe Tarantine. In short: finding missing people is what Archer does.
Third: the women who hire Archer are all “of a certain age,” meaning perhaps middle-aged though often still possessing a sexual charge. They each, however, also have kittenish daughters who like to sleep around: Una Sand in “Find the Woman,” Miranda Sampson in The Moving Target, Cathy Slocum in The Drowning Pool, and Galley Lawrence/Tarantine in The Way Some People Die. That Galley is the friskiest kitten yet, bordering on being a “crazy for men” nymphomaniac, shows that there was something about sexually liberated young women that fascinated Macdonald. And also worth noting is the conflict in every case between these women and their mothers, something Macdonald often linked to classical myth and Freudian psychology.
Galley is different from earlier kittens in that she’s a bad ‘un. It’s not just that “frank sexuality is her forte.” She’s bad. Bad and dangerous: “a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.” Put a gun in this babe’s hand and she gets ugly, and “an ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.”
In case you were wondering, her full name is Galatea. And what was her mother’s name, you ask? Why she’s Mrs. Samuel Lawrence. Or just Mrs. Lawrence, for short. Back in the day, married women didn’t have first names. Mrs. Samuel Lawrence is even how she introduces herself to Archer, and this despite the fact that her husband Samuel is dead! I still sometimes see letters being addressed to a Mrs. Man’s Name, but only ones that have been written by people who are now in their 70s. In any event, Mrs. Lawrence ends up a lot like James Slocum, withdrawing into her own preferred alternate reality, though, surprisingly, it’s not one that is antagonistic to Archer. She’s just not as fiery a character. I guess Galley got all of her spunk from her dad.
I felt a real tension in this book between Macdonald’s penchant for complexity with his desire to tie everything up neatly in the manner of a well-made plot. Which just means that the narrative of what “actually happened” here is very hard to follow. I’m not sure I managed to keep it straight, though I don’t think it matters much in the end. You’re in it for the atmosphere, that landscape of unreality and dream/nightmare that Archer operates in. One where everyone is guilty of something and blood seems to follow him everywhere (the yolk of an egg “leaked out onto the plate like a miniature pool of yellow blood,” and a bottle with a candle stuck in it at a restaurant is “thickly crusted with the meltings of other candles, like clotted blood”). There are few heroes in an Archer novel. This makes his morality cut and dried. Or is it even morality? Here he is trying to explain to Mrs. Sampson: “She lived in a world where people did this or that because they were good or evil. In my world people acted because they had to.” But then “Perhaps our worlds were the same after all, depending on how you looked at them. The things you had to do in my world made you good or evil in hers.”
My takeaway from this is that good and evil don’t exist in Archer’s world, at least in a form where we can judge people by their actions. There’s no free will. But that’s not an assumption he seems to operate under. It’s more like a crutch or rationalization he’s come up with, something to help him sleep at night. True, when people get in a jam their options start to be reduced, until they’re finally just trapped by a naturalistic drawing of fate. But at some point they chose a path, and their fate is no longer random.
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Alex Good 