Not cherchez la femme, because that means something different: find the mysterious woman who is the complicating factor at the root of a crime. Private detective Lew Archer would drop this tag in a later novel, The Chill, so he was well aware of it. No, finding the woman here just refers to Archer being hired to locate a missing person.

Specifically, he’s hired by a damsel in distress, a woman of a certain age who shows up at his “brand-new office” (this was the first Archer story) wanting him to find her daughter. He heads out to the woman’s big house (“huge and fashionably grotesque”) and then drives around L.A. asking questions. Some of the people he meets don’t like being asked questions, and at one point he gets knocked out. This comes with the territory in hard-boiled detective fiction; you have to be able to take your lumps. But ut all turns out to be a red herring because, as will so often be the case in Ross Macdonald’s fiction, the real rot turns out to be closer to home.

There’s a lot here that Macdonald would return to, again and again. “Find the Woman” feels a bit like a trial run, at speed. Archer jumps from place to place so quickly there’s almost no connecting tissue between the different scenes, as though he’s using a transporter to get around. And what actually happened to the woman is a bit far-fetched. But the family nastiness, also a Macdonald trademark, is on point and gives an indication of where he wasn’t going to be afraid to go as he settled in with Archer for the long haul.

Archer index

An index to my reviews of the Lew Archer stories and novels by Ross Macdonald.

Find the Woman
Death by Water
The Bearded Lady
The Moving Target
The Drowning Pool
Strangers in Town
The Way Some People Die
Gone Girl
Find a Victim
The Barbarous Coast
The Galton Case

Mystery and Detective Fiction

Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar

By Steven Murphy and Javier F. Peña

Page I bailed on: 104

Verdict: The title was a bad sign. This is a book about a couple of Drug Enforcement Administration agents who were part of the international effort to “take down” the Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s. By the time I quit, a hundred pages in, I don’t think they’d even mentioned Escobar yet. It was all about the two agents telling their life stories and how they got into law enforcement.

I’m not a fan, to put it mildly, of the true-crime/memoir hybrid so this really wasn’t my sort of book. I didn’t care for El Jefe: The Stalking of Chapo Guzmán by Alan Feuerbook for much the same reason: the focus on the work of the agents rather than their target. Now for some readers that’s what they want, and to be fair neither book advertises itself as being anything else. But it wasn’t for me.

The DNF files

This is a follow-up to Guy Adams’s first Holmes pastiche The Breath of God. It takes a very similar approach, drawing in a grab-bag of fictional characters from the pulp fiction of the time while telling a slam-bang, highly cinematic (sometimes even cartoonish) action story that climaxes in subterranean London (in The Breath of God the subway system, here the sewers).

As the title indicates, the jumping-off point is H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. It seems the not-so-good doctor might still be alive and practicing his dark arts somewhere in London, as a string of grisly deaths have been occurring, with the victims appearing to have been mauled by animals. Things are complicated somewhat because it turns out that the British government had been funding Moreau, and his experiments had progressed to the point where he was no longer just putting together his creatures through vivisection but had invented a serum that triggered rapid evolution from the human form to various other species. “Darwinism haunts our steps in these matters,” Holmes opines.

One can’t call this new process much of an improvement, or less cruel, or even more plausible, but it is something different anyway. It also leads Watson to a humorous reflection: “What manner of creature would Holmes become if exposed to such a concoction – a swollen brain hovering over a pair of massive, tobacco-hardened lungs? The thought of such a beast, despite the serious context, could not help but make me smile.” I got a chuckle out of it too.

Among the team assembled to fight the new Moreau and his mongrel army are Professor Challenger from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Lindenbrook from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Abner Perry from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, and Professor Cavor from Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. When you throw in all the nods to the plot of The Island of Doctor Moreau and a lot of fan service commentary on the Holmes canon (Watson even kicks things off by answering some readers’ FAQs), you have a book that should feel a lot more meta. That it plays so well as what Adams describes as “a bit of pulp fun” is testament to his sure hand with the material. It’s thrilling and comical by turns, and while never taking itself too seriously also never makes fun of our heroes. For a while Holmes takes over narrative duties and he speaks with just the sort of arrogant, superior voice you’d expect, though without slipping into parody.

So it’s wilder and woollier than anything in the canon, but I thought it a successful blend of a contemporary storytelling style with an affection for the nineteenth-century sources. Adams likes to do his own thing with these characters and I’m happy to let him.

Holmes index