ROSS MACDONALD – Blue City. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1947, published under the author’s real name, Kenneth Millar. A shortened version was serialized in the August and September 1950 issues of Esquire. Dell #363, paperback, 1949? Reprint paperback editions are plentiful, most often published by Bantam under the pen name Ross Macdonald. Film: Paramount Pictures, 1986, with Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy. (See comment #4.)

   Another tale of a son seeking revenge for his father’s death. Johnny Weather returns to an unnamed Midwestern city after the war to discover that his father, one of the town’s crooked bosses, had been shot and killed two years earlier.

   It is the idealism of war versus the realities of city life, with its political corruption sanctioned by anti-union big business, that drives Johnny against the powers that have covered up the murder. His activities soon stir up a great deal of reaction, including a couple of particularly bloody murders, before he finds how far ambition can drive a man to guilt.

   A mayor running on a campaign of reform has found that ends often are confused with means, and convinces himself that murder, or rather assassination, can be justified.

   Weather comes on strong, though he did not really acre for his father, and it is this over-aggressiveness that is a bit too much to absorb. In the background, life is described as it went on after the war, in one of MacDonald’s earlier stories.

Rating: ****½

ROSS MACDONALD – Sleeping Beauty. Lew Archer #17 (of 18). Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, March 1973. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing thus, May 1974. Reprinted many times since.

   One of the later books in the series, and to my mind, not one of the better ones. Archer meets a young woman against a backdrop of a huge oil slick off the southern California coast. She is married but distraught, not only because of the disaster, but the oil company responsible for the damage is owned by her parents and other members of her family.

   After he takes her home with him, she leaves with a massive amount of sleeping pills along with her. And then disappears completely. Archer is hired by her husband to help find her, but matters are complicated by a ransom note received by her family. Is it real, or is it a fake? A scheme designed for revenge. For the money? Is she part of her disappearance herself?

   This is something that has happened in the past, several years earlier. It is part of her makeup. Part of her history.

   The opening is fine. It’s the investigation Archer undertakes that follows this that struggles to match it. The woman has a large, complicated family, and there is a lot of baggage that has accumulated over the years. Archer’s job: to make his way through all the physical and mental debris that has piled up, including murder, questioning everyone as he goes, driving from family member to family member to near exhaustion.

   There is not much action. This is adult stuff. It is also a book I had not read until now, but I’m sure if I had read it earlier, a lot of what Archer brings out into the light of day would have been over my head, in terms of having experienced anything similar. I would have been too young. And then there’s this. The back story, as revealed, is not as interesting even now as it should have been. A list of characters and who they are would have helped.

   But, and I am still trying to work out how this is true, the story is compelling. There’s plenty of guilt to spread around, and that includes that caused directly by the killer. My greatest wish is that I’d rather have had the killer’s identity come out as something other than an anti-climax.

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:   *****

ROSS MACDONALD. “Guilt-Edged Blonde.” Lew Archer. Short story. First appeared in Manhunt, January 1954, as by John Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1974. Collected in The Name Is Archer (Bantam, paperback, 1955), also as by John Ross Macdonald. Two stories were added to the collection when it was reprinted by Mysterious Press as Lew Archer: Private Investigator in 1977 under the name Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988), and in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (Oxford Press, 1995). Film: Le loup de la côte ouest (The Wolf of the West Coast), France, 2002. [James Faulkner played protagonist “Lew Millar.”]

   PI Lew Archer is hired for a six day job as a bodyguard for a man who is afraid to leave his house after receiving a phone call that morning. He’s met at the airport by the man’s brother, but the job doesn’t last all that long. When they reach the house, they find his client shot and dying outside on the lawn and a blonde-haired girl driving away in a hurry.

   After Archer persuades the brother to pay him to stay on the case, he learns that the dead man had a past. He’d been a treasurer for the mob in his younger days, and it’s apparent that his past had finally caught up with him. The brother, though, is also clearly trying to cover up for the girl.

   After tracking down the girl and learning what she tells him, Archer finds himself unlucky with a client a second time. He’s also been shot, and Archer finds him dying outside his home. I won’t go into details, but this is an early version of the stories involving dysfunctional families and their secrets that Ross Macdonald became famous for, and even as short as it is, it’s one told well.

  ROSS MACDONALD – The Goodbye Look. Lew Archer #15. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, April 1969. Bantam, paperback; 1st printing, June 1970. Reprinted many times since, in both hardcover and soft.

   Published toward the end of the Lew Archer series, The Goodbye Look had a strong feeling of weariness to it when I read it this past week, that and a sense of déjà vu, as if Macdonald were repeating in it many of the same themes he’d already gone through several times before.

   It begins when Archer is hired by a lawyer to find an old gold box that has just been stolen from the family of one of his long time clients. His family and theirs are close — so close, in fact, that not only do they live across the street from each other, but the lawyer’s daughter is engaged to be married to the son of the couple for whom he’s been working for so long.

   One strong suspect is the son, a college student who is a very emotionally disturbed young man, and one possibly important factor is that he has recently been taking up with an older woman. A private detective has also been seen in town looking for someone, and when Archer finds his dead body in a car on the beach, the case begins in earnest.

   And as is always true in Lew Archer’s cases, the problems that exist in the present have long-standing roots in the past. Lost loves and lost lives, intricately interlaced with relationships known and unknown between (in this case) three if not four families.

   I always get a pervasive feeling of melancholy, of dark clouds above, whenever I read one of Macdonald’s books, no matter how sunny the Southern California sky may be. The Goodbye Look is no exception. Archer may make his way from San Diego to Pasadena and back several times in this book, but the case itself he always has with him. It is part of him, and he won’t let go.

ROSS MACDONALD – Black Money. Lew Archer #14. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1966. Reprinted many times, including: Bantam F3320, paperback, 1967. Warner, paperback, August 1990. Contained in Ross Macdonald: Four Late Novels (The Library of America, hardcover, 2017).

   It’s good to see Lew Archer back in print [as of 1990]. There were quite a few of his books that I never read when they first came out, although I think I have them all, mostly in book club editions. Given the opportunity to catch up on them now [that Warner has begun reprinting them], I realize I’d forgotten how little of Archer himself gets into these books, with no real information on his life at all, or even his personal thoughts.

   He’s hired here to investigate the new man in Ginny Fallon’s life, with his client the rich young man who always thought he’d marry her, but who now sees her being stolen away by a phony Frenchman (he thinks) with the savoir faire he never had, and never will. Ginny’s father was a suicide victim seven years before, and of course it’s connected.

   The other thing I’d also forgotten is Macdonald’s overwhelming reliance on similes, metaphors and other literary comparisons to describe almost everything. It’s not done here to the point of self-parody yet, but it seems awfully close at times. As for the mystery itself, it is (as always) chilling, deep and complex. Macdonald does not rely on coincidence as a plot device, and the roots of the crimes in this book are (as always) twisted and embedded far back into the past.

FOOTNOTE:   Some of Macdonald’s similes work really well, some don’t. One that didn’t, at least for me, comes from page 8: “The white and purple flowers on the brush gave out a smell like the slow breath of sunlight.” It sounds great, but what does it mean? On the other hand, here’s a quote from page 178 which might serve as Archer’s family motto: “Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.” (This one I like.)

ROSS MACDONALD – The Chill. Lew Archer # 11. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1963. Paperback reprints include: Bantam F2913, 1965; Warner, July 1990; Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1996.

   Ross Macdonald is considered one of the finest writers of private eye fiction of all time, and rightly so. The Chill is both tightly plotted and smoothly laid out for the reader, who sees the story through one set of eyes, those of private eye Lew Archer only. One might wish that he would convey everything he thinks to the reader, but for better or worse, he does not.

   This leaves it up to the reader to interpret people and events at the same time Archer does, or decide to wait until the end, when, at least in The Chill, there is a seismic shift at work, one that once it has clicked into place, will make sudden sense out of what till then had been a huge and unmanageable set of connected coincidences. This is definitely not the case. Macdonald knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this book, every inch of the way.

   Which begins with Archer being hired by a distraught young man to find his newlywed wife, who seems to have run out on him before their marriage has even been consummated. That’s the easy part. Before locating her, no more than a simple day’s work, Archer runs across several other people who had recently come in contact with her in one way or another, including several academics, one of whom briefly toys with hiring him herself; a man who may or may not be the girl’s father; plus a large group of other miscellaneous lovers, wives and mothers, some incidental, most not, all sharply described and delineated.

   One really does need a scorecard to read this densely written and populated book, as the story only escalates from there. Once found, the missing woman then comes very close to being booked for murder. Archer does not think she did it, and not wishing to give up on the case, he needs to find another client, and soon, which luckily he manages to do, and very quickly.

   The case takes him geographically from a small town on the California coast to Chicago and Reno and back to Pacific Point before it is done, and chronologically back 20 years or more, with several murders having occurred along the way, some of them “solved,” but perhaps not all.

   One of the themes of the book, to me, is one of Zeno’s ancient Grecian paradoxes, which as recounted by Aristotle, goes something like this:

   Which in everyday language, I take to mean: “No matter how fast you go, you’ll never get there.” Sounds like pure noir to me.

ROSS MACDONALD – The Instant Enemy. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1968. Reprinted many times.

   In many ways The Instant Enemy is typical of Macdonald’s entire output, in that the emphasis is on story and plot, and the personality of the detective, one Lew Archer, hardly ever enters into it.

   Archer, in other words, is an observer, and we never get much of an insight into what makes him tick. One exception I noted was on page 112 (in the Warner paperback edition I read), where the possibility of getting paid $100,000 jars Archer into the unexpected realization that maybe he might even retire.

   That’s probably a million dollars in today’s money, and he feels pretty good about the idea. The moments lasts for only a page, though, and then it’s back to the case on hand. It starts out simply enough — he’s hired to bring back a runaway daughter who’s gone off with a psycho boy friend with a sawed-off shotgun.

   Things are never that simple in a Ross Macdonald book, however, and soon all sorts of entanglements with the past begin to emerge, like pulling a root out of a sewer pipe and finding you’re dragging the whole tree out with it. If trees had Oedipus fixations, I think the analogy would be complete. (See page 146.)

   Although Instant Enemy is much like all of Macdonald’s other books, and the ending is absolutely terrific, I don’t think this is one of his better ones. (Those of you you’ve read them all recently, please feel free to contradict me on this.) I think it may be the pacing. It’s relentless; it doesn’t give up for a minute; and if you’re so minded, it could become downright monotonous.

   Archer is on the go from the beginning of the book to the end. When he’s tired for a moment, he pulls over to a motel and sleeps for a couple of hours, and then he’s on the road again. I think a good many readers are going to feel the need to pull over themselves, right about the three-quarters mark.

   If I’m right about this, and maybe I’m not, second-rate Macdonald is still number-one goods, but in this particular case, the really prime stiff is all at the end. People who prefer the light frothy sort of mystery simply aren’t going to get there.

ROSS MACDONALD – The Zebra-Striped Hearse. A. A. Knopf, hardcover, 1962. Bantam F2715, paperback reprint; 1st printing, January 1964. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including those seen below.

   If you somehow missed Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse in its hardcover edition or in one of the previous twelve (!) Bantam printings, you get another chance, for that publisher has reprinted it again, after a four-year hiatus.

   Because this is one of the best in an outstanding series of private-eye novels, it is a book you shouldn’t miss. You’ll find many elements taken from the author’s own life and placed into the investigation of his detective, Lew Archer, including the runaway father, the canyon forest fire, and California’s unique culture, accurately presented in a book that ranges the state from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

   We see the compassion for which Archer is justifiably known, but there is also ample evidence of his intelligence as his creator has him quote Dante in a conversation so well written that it fits in seamlessly.

      Covers:

    Shown above is the cover of the 12th printing that Marv was referring to. Others covers that have graced this book are shown below, but to my mind, none of them surpasses the Knopf hardcover First Edition:

   Here’s the hardcover UK first edition, from Collins Crime Club, 1963:

   And I believe this to be the first UK paperback edition, published by Fontana in 1965:

   To finish up this short display, a paperback edition from France, Éditions J’ai Lu #1662, 1984.

[UPDATE] 06-22-09.    Submitted by Juri Nummelin, a hardcover edition published in Finland:

   See the comments for a link to a short write-up about Juri about Macdonald, including this book.

ROSS MACDONALD – The Drowning Pool.

Bantam, paperback reprint; movie tie-in edition, 1970s. Hardcover first edition: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. Many reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   I wasn’t thinking very much about it, so when I picked this book up and started to read, I found myself caught up in a small time warp, which caught me by surprise, but it was one of my own making.

   I’ll explain.

   On both covers, front and back, there are a dozen or more color shots taken from the movie, released in 1975. Lots of photos of Paul Newman, in other words, in all kinds of situations, plus a handful more with Joanne Woodward in them — all rather tiny, but the immediate effect was to put me in a mellow 70s sort of mood, when both Paul and Joanne were much younger, and so was I.

   So when I hit page 9, where Lew Archer stops at one of those old-fashioned motor courts that consists of small cottages that the owner walks you down to and lets you inspect the accommodations before you register, it was jarring, and it immediately sent me back to the copyright page only to discover that — whoa! — the book came out in 1950.

   It wasn’t a 1970s book, at all. (And it took only a little more effort to look up the fact that The Drowning Pool was only the second novel that Archer appeared in; the first was The Moving Target, from 1949. Where does the time go?)

   We don’t learn a whole lot about Archer’s background in this book. Previously married and now separated, or perhaps more likely, divorced, that’s about all we learn about him — except for his strong standards of right and wrong. Beware to the client who hires him and changes her mind. Once hired to do a job — in this case, to discover who sent a woman with an already shaky marriage a letter that threatens to tell all — he’s in it to the end.

   Beginning with a marriage on the rocks, Archer’s slow but methodical investigation expands to include a daughter who at 15 is too young to attract the such serious intentions from the family chauffeur; her grandmother, the matriarch of the family; a police chief who is obviously smitten with Archer’s client; a weak-kneed husband who never had to work a day in his life; and oil — which means money, trouble, and murder.

   It’s a complex case, laid out by Macdonald in simple fashion. It would have been easy to make a tangled mess of the various threads of the plot darting here and there — Archer is on the road a lot, and in serious trouble more than once — but the telling is clean, straight-forward, and filled with enough picturesque similes and metaphors to fill a book.

   Here are just a few — I can’t resist:

   Page 77:   “For an instant I was the man in the [distorted] mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”

   Page 79:   [talking to a very young prostitute] “Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past.”

   Page 82:   “[Graham] Court was a row of decaying shacks bent around a strip of withering grass. A worn gravel drive brought the world to their broken-down doorsteps, if the world was interested. A few of the shacks leaked light through chinks in their warped frame sides. [The office] looked abandoned, as if the proprietor had given up for good.”

   Right now I don’t remember much of the movie, whether it followed the book very well or not, but either way, I think I’ll always have Paul Newman in mind when I read any of the Archer books. This one is a good one, and while all the clues point one way, except for one or two puzzling gaps, which — as it turns out — are nothing to be concerned about. Macdonald knew what he was doing, and any loose ends are firmly nailed down, solidly, to perfection, and with no seams showing.