This was the second of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and it reads a lot like a rerun of The Moving Target. A damsel in distress, a rich lady unhappily married into money, comes to Archer with a problem. He heads out to the big house and meets the dysfunctional, decadent family, which includes a kittenish daughter with an eye for the wrong kind of guy. There’s a subplot involving real gangster types that leads to Archer getting roughed up, but that has little bearing on the family’s moral disintegration. Archer is slow on the uptake, which leads to the deaths of some innocents. Though being innocent is a relative term, since there are no heroes. As Archer recognizes at the end of this book: “Everyone had done wrong for himself and others. Everyone had failed. Everyone had suffered.”
Finally, I’m not even sure if Archer gets paid. Certainly not enough for the beatings he takes.
It’s written in the same cynically ornate style that stays just this side of parody. As so: “The thin scarp of moon hung in a gap of the mountains, like lemon rind in a tall dark drink of Lethe.” And then there’s tough guy patter delivered up with a seasoning of self-deprecating wit:
There had to be a difference between me and the opposition or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.
Of course, right from the opening sentence Archer is assessing feminine charms, taking Maude Slocum in from top to bottom: “If you didn’t look at her face she was less than thirty, quick-bodied and slim as a girl. Her clothing drew attention to the fact: a tailored sharkskin suit and high heels that tensed her nylon-shadowed calves. . . . About thirty-five, I thought, and still in the running.” Later on he’ll see Maude in a zebra-striped dress, with “her breasts pressed together like round clenched fists in the V of her neckline.” Trust Archer to be able to identity a physical threat.
But Archer is no dumb brute. Ross Macdonald had a Ph.D. in English literature, after all. So when Archer meets a broken gambler in Vegas he refers to him as “the young Dostoevsky,” assuming that the reader will make the connection. And I guess a reader of pulp detective fiction in 1950 might have made it. I suspect fewer people will get it today. When Maude will later tell Archer that her “fairy” husband has retired to his bedroom, there to “spend the rest of his life . . . like Marcel Proust,” and Archer responds “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?” she has no time for his games: “So now you’re going to play dumb again?” She knows he knows his Proust. Though I think he’s being honest when he tells Cathy that he hasn’t read Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection.” Oh, those were literary days indeed in the mid-century. Archer can drop lèse-majesté and impotentia coeundi into sentences as easily as he can tap someone on the head with the butt of his .45.
It’s a fun read that moves quickly. So quickly that at points I lost track of where I was. Then when I went back I found that such information had simply been left out. Where does it say that Archer is being picked up by the police and taken back to the Slocum’s place? They just put him in the car and the next thing we know he’s there, even though we haven’t been told where they were taking him or where “there” is when they get there.
And underlying everything is Archer’s disgust with the circles, high and low, that he moves in. In The Moving Target he had seen L.A. as an “excremental river” and in this book he has a moment of peace and communion with nature while swimming in the Pacific that’s set against the mess men have made of things:
I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.
Ah that was life in 1950 too. An ocean that couldn’t be tainted. Gone now, like everything else.
Archer index
I’ve said before how much I love this Visions in Poetry series, and in particular how the illustrations really offer up new interpretations of classic poems. Stéphane Jorisch’s take on Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” is another great example, presenting the poem in a way that I’d never thought of before.
Alex Good 