Sun 30 Jun 2024
Diary PI Mystery Review: ROSS MACDONALD – The Wycherly Woman.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews[6] Comments
ROSS MACDONALD – The Wycherly Woman. Lew Archer #9. Knopf, hardcover, 1961. Published earlier in condensed form in Cosmopolitan, April 1961, under the title “Take My Daughter Home.” Bantam, paperback, 1963. Reprinted many times since.
Lew Archer is hired by Homer Wycherly to find his daughter Phoebe, who has been missing from school for two months. The case is not as simple as it seems on the surface, however, Two murders occur along the trail that Archer follows back, searching for both Phoebe and her mother. Illicit love has led to divorce, now murder, and blackmail of Phoebe for her mother’s death, which in neurotic fashion she blames herself for.
You know, it’s great to read a mystery with a complicated plot that doesn’t also need complicated explanation. Excellent writing, in spite of occasionally corny similes that Macdonald seems to feel are expected of him, with a perceptive view of all levels of life.
All of the characters are realistically portrayed, and become personalities rather than cardboard. Archer;s own outlook on life is succinctly summed up on page 10: Mr. Wycherly doesn’t trust himself “to do all the right things.” Archer doesn’t “trust anyone else to do them.”
Rating: *****
July 1st, 2024 at 1:01 pm
I’ve read the first few Archer novels in a very desultory way over the years, but while I dimly recall liking them, I’ve yet to build up any real momentum with him. One of these days (a phrase I use way too often lately), I must do several of them back to back and get a better sense of why they’re so highly regarded.
July 1st, 2024 at 2:06 pm
Matthew,
I wouldn’t recommend reading them back-to-back. Donald Westlake famously said that Macdonald had the greatest carbon paper in the world. Which is not exactly wrong. At the same time, I wouldn’t recommend starting with ‘the first few’ Archer novels since he had yet to find his own voice.
Most folks feel Macdonald/Archer reached his zenith with The Galton Case (or the Doomsters) and remained there for each and every book up to and including The Goodbye Look. Each of the books of this timespan share a ‘missing child’ theme based upon Macdonald’s own experience of the disappearance of his daughter. All of the books between Galton Case and Goodbye Look are powerful, yet powerfully similar. Enough so that back to back reads give you a bit of deja vu.
July 1st, 2024 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for the enlightenment! Maybe what you say about finding his voice accounts for my lack of momentum so far. I’m afraid that at this point in my life, I’m far too grindingly methodical to do anything but work my way through them in order, yet without them right in front of me, I don’t think I have too far to go to get to the “good stuff”…
July 3rd, 2024 at 9:49 am
I see now that I’ve read the first four novels so far, and that the collection The Name Is Archer (at least in its original seven-story incarnation, later retroactively augmented under multiple titles with the two subsequent stories published in Macdonald’s lifetime) comes in between the fifth and sixth novels. I’ve also seen the versions of the first two with the renamed Paul Newman (was “just whelmed,” as Dad used to say, by Harper, and liked The Drowning Pool, oddly made almost a decade later, better), but never the Peter Graves TV-movie of The Underground Man. How are the stories, four of which I see first appeared in bare*bones co-editor Peter Enfantino’s fave, Manhunt? I gather that the mercifully brief Archer TV series with Brian Keith, whom I loathe, did not adapt actual stories, giving me an even better reason to avoid it like the plague.
July 5th, 2024 at 11:44 pm
At this point Macdonald is still basically overly conscious of being an academic Raymond Chandler. As said above that begins to change with THE GALTON CASE and stays true through his best period.
I have to agree too that you don’t want to read even his best too close together or look for Archer to ever coalesce into anything but a voice.
The movies gave the character a face not Macdonald (in fairness he always intended for Archer to be a cypher feeling Chandler overdid Marlowe).
Macdonald’s reputation is certainly deserved, but I don’t think it has held as well against Hammett and Chandler as it was a couple of decades ago. He’s a more serious writer than most in the genre, but there are times I wish he had a bit more melodrama in him.
Chandler’s man walking in with a gun may have had its corny side, but once in a while reading Macdonald I wish he would make an appearance.
July 9th, 2024 at 5:57 am
David, thanks so much for the additional insight. I’ll make sure—whenever my lengthy reading list allows—to space them widely apart!