I think you would know this was a Lew Archer novel without seeing the name on the cover just from the opening pages. There’s the detective driving out to the big house built on old oil money and being hired to find a missing person. Or really two missing persons, as it’s a mother and a daughter who have disappeared. And the mother is a bitter wreck and the daughter is a sexy kitten. That’s a set-up that could be taken as a given for most of the Archer novels and short stories up to this point.
Moving along, there are plenty of other familiar signposts. For example, the cultural references that are now quaint or obscure. The Wycherly Woman was published in 1961 and I had a smile when the angry sister-in-law of the missing woman says to Archer that “Where my former sister-in-law is concerned, we have had it, as the young people say.” The emphasis is in the original. I didn’t know that in 1961 the expression “I’ve had it,” meaning “I’ve had enough” or “I’m fed up” with something or someone, was that new. Then, when Archer goes to a sleazy motel (or motor court, I talked a bit about the use of the word motel in my review of Find a Victim), he interrogates the woman in charge and casts doubt on whether the man and woman who had rented a particular cabin were man and wife and she responds that if she was supposed to “ask to see their marriage license and the results of their Wasserman tests.” A Wasserman test sounded vaguely familiar but I wasn’t sure what it was referring to. In case you’re wondering, it was a test for syphilis that was in common use in many U.S. states in the mid-20th century. In many jurisdictions applicants for a marriage license were required by law to have a Wasserman test. I wonder how well it would go over if a requirement like that were brought back.
That trip to the motel also provides a good example of Macdonald’s ripe noir style. I mentioned it’s a sleazy motel, and noir writers really love to evoke a sense of decadence and rot. When the owner, who is a “fat woman,” opens the cabin that Archer wants to get into he’s met with a squalid sight:
It smelled of breaths and bodies. The furniture in the greenish gloom resembled underwater wreckage at a depth where nothing stirred.
The fat woman pulled a chain that turned on the ceiling light. It shone through a white glass globe like a fly-specked moon on a peeling veneer chest of drawers, a rug the color of packed earth, a double bed that had been slept in. Its sheets looked as if a pair of cell-mates had passed the night twisting them into ineffectual ropes for some frustrated escape. . . .
I glanced into the kitchenette. On the sinkboard a half-eaten hamburger with pink insides reposed on a paper plate. The dusty bland eyes of a cockroach regarded me from behind the remains of the hamburger. He was almost big enough to have eaten the other half. I didn’t shoot him.
This is great. I love the plural “breaths” and the way the room’s underwater gloom is located at a depth so that the thickness and stillness is emphasized. The “color of packed earth” doesn’t just gives us an ugly colour for the carpet but lets us know that it’s been worn down to its base. And the cockroach is the chef’s kiss, with the line about Archer not shooting it being a perfect punchline.
As for the owner being a “fat woman,” well, writers back in the day weren’t so worried about fat shaming. Here she is a page later:
She placed one hand on her breast. Her fingers were pale and speckled like breakfast sausages. All of her flesh was lard-like: if you poked it the hole would stay. Some of it had run like candle wax down her ankles and over her shoes.
This is why you read a book like this. Or at least it’s a good part of the reason why. And there’s lots more of it. Another floozy is described as having hair that’s “dark at the roots, as if darkness had seeped up in capillary action from her mind.” These are noir people all the way down.
Veteran Macdonald readers will pick up on other items that are recurring, like the whale of a twist at the end. I think the only other Archer novel I can remember throwing me as much is The Chill. And there’s also the idea that the younger generation are OK at heart but are often the victims of bad parenting. This is a theme that Macdonald liked to pick up on, and maybe it was only in the 1950s and early ‘60s that it could be put forward so unreservedly.
But what I enjoyed the most is how literate a world it is that Archer inhabits. I’ve mentioned this before, and how the fact that Macdonald was a Ph.D. in English probably played into this. But it was also the times. People read a lot back then. When Archer goes to interview the missing girl’s roommate she talks to him about T. S. Eliot’s play Sweeney Agonistes, a work I don’t think anyone today outside of a graduate English program will have encountered. Then he goes through a box of books the girl left behind and finds among a complete Shakespeare and a selection of Romantic poetry some “Dostoevsky in translation.” I laughed at that “in translation.” It reminded me of the place in The Barbarous Coast where Archer himself confesses that he’s only read Flaubert’s Salammbô “a long time ago, in translation.” I think today we’d assume right away that if this kid is reading Dostoyevsky she’s doing so in translation. But obviously Archer’s a detective with high literary standards, if not as committed a reader as Salvo Montalbano.
Later in the book Archer will find the missing girl and she’ll tell him an anecdote from the life of the poet Byron. And Archer will refer to a pair of lovers as Paola and Francesca and the villain will quote Francis Bacon at him. It’s just assumed that everyone will get these references, and in 1961 maybe you could believe that they would. Today it seems highbrow indeed.
Archer index
