Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated rated 4.0 by 367 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: One of his best!
Tagline: A lighthouse, a coffin, a naked man, and one new shoe. Oh, and a dog.
Once again Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland CID has been summoned from afar to investigate a difficult case, this time in Victoria at the fictional Split Point near Geelong. In a concealed cranny in the local automated lighthouse a maintenance worker accidentally found a naked dead man who had been shot dead. The first question is who is he? The second is why was he there? And third, and foremost, Who dun it? (And why?)
To find out, Bony, as he prefers to be called, takes up residence in Split Point rather as Jules Maigret would have done. He befriends locals, starting with Stug, the aging cattle dog, and a carpenter who can talk to and about wood all the day long. The dog finds the shoe where no shoe should be and Bony is on the job!
It is a superb rendering of place, and a meticulous police procedural as Bony connects the dots of both things done and said, and things not done and not said that seem odd omissions. He makes a mistake, and has to admit it, only to find it wasn’t the mistake he first thought it was.
Upfield was self-taught and a fast learner who pounded a manual typewriter in the back of a caravan that he customised himself, as he travelled around Australia, mostly in the hinterlands often in the remote outback to devise his stories.
This was number 15 in the 29 Bony mysteries that Upfield published from 1929 to 1966. He himself would have made a good character in one of his books. Inevitably, his oeuvre has been mangled — ‘theorised,’ as they say (and I cringe) — by PhDs looking for fodder. The result is unintelligible. Abandon reason all ye who enter groves academic. Oh, and he wrote another dozen books on a variety of subjects.
Good Reads meta-data is 379 pages, rated 4.19 by 46,317 litizens.
Genre: Noir; Species: Sunshine.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: And it’s goodbye from him.
Tagline: Portrait of Madison.
This is the last complete outing for Phillip Marlowe. It has many good moments which are outnumbered by bad ones. I found it hard to sympathises or relate to either Terry Lennox or Roger Wade, and the women in their lives seem to be clothes horses and little else.
All in all, I found Lennox and Wade, and Marlowe himself for that matter, poor little rich boys decrying how tough life was on them. Yet they all live comfortably just as they want in what seems to be an undemanding environment without health or wealth worries. Yet each rails against his lot in life. Much of it seemed like an old man grumbling about contemporary society which has had the audacity to pass him by.
Whoops! This just in! Boy, was I wrong…again! The dénouement at the end is superb and it makes use of most of what went before, some of which I had thought was useless padding. Though I have read it two or three times before I was still taken aback by the wrap. It explains a great deal about the broken characters of Terry Lennox, Eileen Wade, and Roger Wade (a stand-in for Chandler himself) that had irked me. It also gave the much put-upon Bernie Olhs a chance to shine. Chapeaux! Chandler’s master’s touch was, well, masterful.
Having vented that and eaten my order of crow, I enjoyed much of it. Though the policing early on was over-egged I did like the distinctions drawn among the police officers. I rather liked the effort Lennox always made to be polite and not to slur. I liked Dr Verringer’s affronted dignity. (On the other hand, Dr Loring seemed to be a cardboard popinjay.) I liked Earl’s showmanship and wished he had an act two. Today one might say Earl was neurodivergent. That is, nuts! Randy Starr’s aloof chill was perfect.
Most of all I like the importance of things not did and not said. Like the spaces between the stars in aboriginal astronomy, they are more important than the shiny distractions.
However, I did find the cynicism piled high for no reason other than to explain why Marlowe was such a jerk and who seemed hate everyone else who had the misfortune not to be the all-wise (to other people’s faults) Marlowe. Castigating everyone else is not social criticism; it is just ranting. I supposed some of Marlowe’s posturing was Chandler’s effort at a Code Hero, but it was inconsistent, as Marlowe himself says.
Notwithstanding all of that and more, I have a soft spot for this book because it was the first Chandler title I ever read; that was in 1973. He had been recommended to me by Don Andrews, and one wintry night on a break from typing a draft chapter of the PhD dissertation in the unheated basement of the rented Edmonton house, I took a break and went out to the neighbourhood convenience store on 82nd Avenue for a snack to keep me going: deadlines to meet. It was near to the 10 pm closing time for the store. Consequently I was not alone, there was a line of a few other last minute pallid nocturnals at the cashier which meant I stood for a few moments next to a wire spinner rack of paperback books, and the one directly in my eye-line was The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler. It seemed a message so, after checking my scant money, I added it to my boodle ( a packet of shelled and salted sunflower seeds and a bottle of coke, I suppose) and paid up.
Raymond Chandler
I returned to the cellar and revivified with the walk and the fuel I did complete the chapter and pushing aside the manual typewriter I took up the book, entering Chandler’s imagination. I kept reading until Earl came on the scene in Chapter 16, that means to page 129 well after the midnight hour. I was gripped; I was hooked. There was no turning back. It was my doorway to krimi noir where I have since spent many happy hours.
My soft spot does not extend to the egregious 1973 movie that mangled the story to fit the director’s avowed agenda, and had an atrociously miscast Marlowe, who has since monopolised the Audible recordings of Chandler stories. Aaargh!
For entertainment I read some of the one-star reviews on Good Reads. The prize one declared the book to be irrelevant to India. If that is the criterion let’s put it to the test. That means no comfortable well-off person in India is gnawed by self-doubts. Nor that any drunk is unsure about what he did when tanked. That no wife grew quietly to despise her husband. There is no Indian doctor was so full of self-importance that the rules did not apply to him. That no All India police officer manipulates suspects to get the result he wants. That no elected officials is too busy courting votes to do the job he was elected to do. That no soldier returns home broken in spirit by the experience of combat, capture, and torture. India must be quite a place if none of its billion people are like these.
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 15, rated 5.8 by 435 cinematizens.
Genre: SY Fy.
DNA: Faux.
Verdict: enjoyed it
Tagline: Formica. Formica? Formica!
A tribute to 1930s screwball comedies blended with a 1950s SciFi B-picture, it is presented as a rediscovered 1938 film that involves time travel to 2018. What we get is 2018 as it might have been imagined in 1938 (by writers in 2017).
This imaginary 2018 is a world of bright primary colours, instant messengers, television phones literally, battery-powered slide rules, self-sharpening pencils, the electro mesh that answers all questions, victual reality at restaurants, 24-hour news (bi)cycle, and so on. It is sophomoric fun though it wears thin.
In 2018 the 1938 man is a fish out of water who cannot open a car door, wants to smoke tobacco cigarettes, and doesn’t have a personal television phone! The plot, such as it is, shows his discovery of this new world, including its slang. (Confession today I have been mystified by design-for-the-sake-of-design car doors that I cannot fathom. Am I a man of 1938? [That’s a rhetorical question: Don’t answer it!]. But in an emergency how does one open the door, one might ask.)
It does try too hard and the result is overkill but the leads are winsome and can act better than the material with a poignant finale that was signalled for those with sharp hearing.
Good Reads meta-data is 189 pages, rated 3.73 by 33 litizensGenre: krimi.DNA: Brit.
Verdict: By the numbers.
Tagline: True crime made unreal.
Ingredients: wealthy Murray family with many sibs clashing over the dosh, live-in beautiful house-keeper, widowed scion, various grandchildren impatient for an inheritance, and others in the menagerie. Then House-Keepeer is found murdered in a locked room and the mystery begins. The frame seems to fit one of the other servants or a wanna be relative, but does it…. I cannot say because I didn’t finish it.
Slow, wordy, with remote characters.
I went looking for it because I read this author’s historical biography called Machiavelli and His Times (1936), which is more restrained than many other accounts of Machia. The author published many others of this ilk on Florence Nightingale, Oliver Cromwell, and the like. But she also tried her hand at this krimi.
Muir was Dorothy Muir (1889-1977) who used the initial ‘D’ to get through the sexist ceiling at publishers. She took up writing when her husband died young and she needed an income in Edwardian England. Writing was one of the few careers open to a woman and it allowed working at home with her children.
This is one of three krimis in which Muir used a true-crime as the starting point for her story. They might appeal to other readers.
Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, pages rated 3.97 by 730 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Brazil.
Verdict: What a setting.
Tagline: Man overboard! And good riddance.
It is 1933 and the prototype of that idiot has just become German Chancellor. The Graf Zeppelin is winding its way from Wilhemshaven to Rio de Janiero with its wealthy passengers. There is some intriguing description of such journeys and how Zeppelin’s navigated. The first airship had been patented in 1894. Commercial flights began in 1910 with what was the first private airline. Before the start of the Great War (1914-1918) more than 10,000 passengers had travelled on 1,500 flights. In that war they had been used to bomb England. Only in 1926 when the post-war restrictions relaxed were new German zeppelins built. These were bigger and better than their predecessors and plied the Atlantic route in competition with steamships. A ship voyage of weeks was reduced to days on a zeppelin. By 1937 they were well known enough to figure in Charlie Chan at the Olympics (of 1936).
Sidebar: in 1975 ground transportation magnet Peter Abeles predicted the return of the airship as a conveyance in Australia 2025 (in a library near you). Well, we do see blimps these days hanging over football stadia for meaningless aerial views to advertise sponsors. Maybe that is what Abeles had in mind….
In this story a passenger is found dead in the men’s WC much to the inconvenience of the other passengers. On board by some manner of means (how could he afford it?) is a Berlin police detective who takes over the investigation to determine if it was suicide, accident, or murder. Since the deceased joined the fight in northern Brazil, he was only briefly on board, but he did dine at a table with five others, so they become the focus of the interrogations. Among them is a Prussia aristocrat in love with the sound of her own voice and gin, a eugenist come to Brazil to advance the cause of racial genocide, an English scion of wealth and privilege, and some other stereotypes.
A trans-Atlantic zeppelin being readied for takeoff
The copper decides discretion is best – see cover art and remember Phil Sheridan on the good. Then there is a denouement in a Rio hotel room that caught me by surprise, and like a lot of these climaxes completely undermines all that went before it. Not very satisfying.
Moreover, it leaves many a loose end flapping in this reader’s mind: the coincidence of the deceased passenger even being there, the unspoken complicity between the ‘detective’ and the lord, why was the ‘detective’ playing detective from the start if the arrival of the soon to be deceased passenger was coincidental, why was the deceased so damn nervous (had he read the next chapter? And most of all, how was the deed done?
Whether there are any good Nazis, there are number of books with that title.
IMDb meta-data is 6 episodes of 45 minutes, rated 7.4 by 42 cinematizens
DNA: NZ
Verdict: Another droll delight from KiwiLand.
Tagline: Beware the garden shed!
The smaller the budget the bigger the imagination is corollary of the bigger the budget the less the imagination à la Luc Besson, Denis Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and there many imitators.
Assorted terrors strike via the vortex from smart refrigerators, reality game shows with a body count, robotic estate agents, Cluedo with casualties, and – worst for last – flair trousers redux.
The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to a creative and prolific author resident of Queensland. It was thanks to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that I became aware of him and his works, but I am glad I did. Here’s hoping some others might discover him by reading this brief.
Rather than comment separately on each of the titles in this remarkable series, it seemed best, and easiest for me, to present them as a whole accompanied by some general remarks to orient readers and remind me of what I have read. (Though I reserve the option of later reviewing an individual title or ten.) Impressive as the list is since 2011, for example, six full length novels appearing in 2025 alone, it is not the complete list of his publications. There are other genre novels apart from these. The total runs to at least forty (40)! It is best to read the list sitting down, least one grow faint. At this time there are thirty-three titles in the First Contact series, nearly all run to about 200 pages. Both this series and my reading are continuing.
The series is unified by its theme, namely First Contact between Earthlings and Aliens, a tried and true motif in science fiction since Murray Leinster’s eponymous story in 1945, though I suppose H G Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898) is an earlier example. Each story is self-contained and there are no continuing characters or other continuities. It is a one-man anthology on its theme. Consider a comparison to a version of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in which each episode concerns First Contact. Each episode is distinct but all are written by the same author, yet there is no overlap of character, milieu, or circumstances in any of stories. Whew! What a feat of imagination! I know I have said that twice but it needs to be emphasised.
There are period pieces, set in ancient Greece, Renaissance England, and 1950s American suburbia. (None, in my ken, is set on the Sunshine Coast near the author.) Others occur in low Earth orbit or the distant and largely theoretical Oort Cloud and beyond. Sometimes the initiative is human, and sometimes not. The contact is an invasion at times, initiated by aliens or by Earthlings. At other times the contact is one-sided, not mutual. Some contacts are inert, but most are dynamic.
In every case the level of verisimilitude is high. The most impressive aspect of that is the ease with which, and no doubt it was not easy, Cawdron animates an American Congressional intern in one book, and a high school girl working at a fast food outlet in the next, an aging archeologist in German occupied Greece, a motivated Soviet astronaut doing the Cold War, an Elon Musk clone raiding employee pension funds, an early Renaissance witch-hunter looking for another victim, a general of the People’s Liberation Army who follows the Tao of Sun Tzu, innumerable scientists and several flygirls, and more than a few innocent bystanders swept up by events. Each has a distinctive voice and persona even if the appearance is but a cameo.
The Aliens from his mental zoo also take a variety of forms. Some are unseen, others are ectoplasm, some are grotesqueries, others humanoid. Often they are silent observers. In other novels the Aliens are represented by technology. On the occasions when the Aliens communicate, they have a tendency to lecture about our faults, though they are not nearly as preachy as so many ostensible science fiction stories are these days. Often they do not communicate.
In each case Cawdron digs into the context with a mass of details that provide a rich context whether it is the technology of deep space exploration, surviving in the wild hinterlands of the Sudanese desert, or watching a take-no-prisoners Congressional hearings in D.C. He displays an impressive amount of research for each tale and integrates it smoothly into the stories. That said, it is also true, especially in the earlier titles one character explains to another all the details generated by that research. TMI.
On the other hand, there are many finely judged insights. Here is an example. It is a commonality in science fiction that we Earthlings want and would benefit from advanced alien technology. Would we? Could we? Imagine a Stone Age man getting an iPhone. It is advanced, alien technology to be sure, but what is this man to do with it. Throw it at prey? Ditto this same alien giving an Surface tablet to Cicero. What would he do with it? Sit on for warmth while the battery lasted?
A few of the book are homages . The most obvious are pastiches of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as mediated by the film The Forbidden Planet (1956) and its Krell. These are, you guessed it, The Tempest and Little Green Men. All in all it would seem Cawdron is a reader as well as a writer, and one well-steeped in the science fiction library.
The ones I read during our month on the Gold Coast are shown in blue below. I particularly liked the three shown in bold bluebelow, but overall I must have liked them all because, as with Oliver Twist, I wanted more. And there are more for the reading! My work is not yet done. The table below indicates the scale of Caldron’s project. The varied settings, as indicated above, show the scope.
On a forgotten island somewhere in Oceania handful of European ex-pats wile away the time among several thousand natives. By a quirk of history, a Brit owns the island, being the third in line of succession since the islet was granted to his grandfather. He reports annually to a consulate miles away.
While the natives go about their own business except for a select few who act as servants for them the ex-pats pass the time in hobbies like painting, drinking alcohol, and making witty conversation. There is too much of the latter for this reader.
nto this edenic life blunders an outsider, whose lugger pulls into the bay, causing curiosity, consternation, and irritation to the residents. Who is it that would intrude on their retreat? It turns out to be a blustery know-it-all who upsets one and all.
We hardened krimi readers know he is for the chop and he is, but it takes a long time in coming.
Now the question is who done it? And why dun it? And does it matter since the victim was a such scumbag?
Was it the Lord and Master of the islet himself who would do a great deal to seal the island off from the outside world?
The windy, self-professed one-time sea captain who never went to sea?
The quartermaster who works for the Lord and Master, and whose background may not bear inspection?
The retired Scotland Yard detersive who came there to forget his own troubled past?
The retiring spinister who never answers a question about herself?
The doctor who seems wasted in this wasteland, but may be there for want of a better bolthole?
There are two or three more with similar questions handing over them.
Until the death of blowhard, Lord and Master was content not to ask any of them questions, but the death opened all quesitons, the most so when it appears to have been murder. Murder!
what follows is a puzzle of who was where when, and what motive might have led to the murder. At first this quest is pursued almost like a board game of Clue, but then… Yes, inevitably there is a second murder, and with the European population diminishing activity is increased.
Those deans of krimi-lit, Jacques Barzun and Wendelll Taylor describe is as a ‘masterpiece,’ and in a their very brief comment say it is ‘atmospheric,’ ‘entertaining,’ and ‘brilliant.’ This is high praise from these two.
The ten Good Riders who scored it at 3.20 are closer to my take on it. Several of these souls were led to it, as was I, by Barzun and Taylor.
I found the witty conversation tedious and the epistolary exposition at the denouncement artificial. Nor could this savant distinguish among the ex-pat characters very well. They blurred together to me. I needed a scorecard to separate them.
Paul McGuire may have beeb an Australian diplomat who worked in Oceania. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography there was a Dominic Mary Paul McGuire (1903-1978) who has a long entry and several publications are mentioned but not this one. I am not sure it is the same man, but if someone knows, contact me.
The genre is SoCal Noir, a murder mystery in the sunshine of Los Angeles city and county. Before going further about the book, a preliminary remark is in order to quell the pedants. Kenneth Millar insisted that his pseudonym, Ross Macdonald be spelled as it is here, no interior capital on that letter ‘d.’ He did that to distinguish the name from another murder mystery genre writer, that is, the John D. MacDonald with a pair of extravagant capital ‘D’s.’ However, all too frequently the author’s name gets the unwanted interior capital ‘D’ on some of the books. Moreover, the auto-complete and spell-checker have to be tamed to respect his wishes. So be it. But then a writer as famed as George Orwell fought and lost a similar battle when he insisted in the publishing contract that the title Nineteen Eighty-Four be spelled out in letters and not put into the numbers 1984. You would never know that to see this book on shelves or web pages. After some comments on The Instant Enemy, there is a further discussion of the author and his alter ego.
Since at least 624 BC, according to one pundit, the older generation has complained about the declining standard of rising generation, but in the middle 1960s that plaint was reversed for it was the rising generation whose members criticised their elders about anything and everything. This reversal of fortune was dubbed The Generation Gap, which was much discussed by talking heads in the late 1960s to explain anything and everything from Vietnam War protests to hair styles, flared trousers, and the popularity of the Beatles. This gap spawned a song, a television show, a board game, and a lot more ephemera some of which has endured. The Instant Enemy offers Macdonald’s take on it. In that Archer’s age, over thirty, makes him an instant enemy to members of that rising generation.
In the novel the rising generation is embodied by Young Davy and even younger Sandy, his squeeze, who together seem bound for mutually assured destruction while taking a few others with them. Yet both come from comfortable homes in the green fields of the land of dreams that is Southern California. Keith Sebastian, Sandy’s father calls in Lew Archer to find them and return Sandy home. While Sebastian offers an impressive front, it does not take Archer long to realise there is no back to this Hollywood façade.
Sebastian has failed to make the transition from a promising young businessman to a successful one. Behind the trophy wife Bernice, the ranch-style model home, and the new luxury car Archer finds a loveless marriage, a cold house, and piles of unpaid and overdue bills on that car and all the other ever so tasteful chattels that adorn the wife, the house, and the car. Sebastian dances a desperate attendance on his wealthy boss, Stephen Hackett, in the hope of…something, anything to get through another week or month to keep up appearances. Then the bad gets worse when Hackett is kidnapped at gunpoint by none other than the two delinquents, Davy and Sandy. Unbelievable but true.
Why?
It is a tangled skein and by the end a Mormon genealogical tree combined with a Lombardi Chart is necessary because the kidnapping was brewed over three generations in Macdonald’s laboratory where the retorts bubble with the ingredients of tragedy, in this case an unloved child, illicit drugs, adultery, betrayal, a surly subordinate, a very nice woman who knows too much, a venal older woman with a toy-boy husband, and assorted police officers including one whom Uri Geller could not straighten. The body count reaches Midsomer Murders heights while Archer develops, applies, tests, and rejects alternative hypotheses until finding one that fits.
While the cast of characters seems to consist of people with no connection to one another and with nothing in common, in fact, on that dark family tree, they are entwined by marriage, adultery, illegitimacy, and murder, the latter being the strongest bond.
In addition to the two teenage rebels with a cause, Macdonald also adds some Cain and Abel. And as frequently the case in his novels, there is a black widow who has consumed two husbands. Without a doubt there be critics in the firmament who would label him a misogynist for this. Happy are the labellers. Happier still are the readers who suspend such swift and simple judgements.
Outside this terrarium of vipers and apart from the lost teenagers, Archer meets some very solid citizens: Alma in the nursing home who truly cares for her charges, a school guidance counsellor who goes beyond the call of duty, a security guard who keeps his word come what may, many others who lend a land, like the truck driver who finds a stunned Archer on the highway, Al at the sandwich bar, and a nameless gas pump jockey with a calliper on his leg, each of whom reminds both Archer and the reader of all the decent people out there. It is a distinguishing feature of Macdoanld’s fiction that these minor supporting characters, as many as twenty in each book, are endowed with personalities. None are plot cardboard. The contract could be the BBC’s Christopher Foyle (an avatar for this all-too-common stereotype) where virtually everyone but the sainted hero himself is a liar, cheat, murderer, traitor or all three in one. Archer is secure in his own identity and modest virtue, having no need to denigrate all others to be singular.
Macdonald’s imagery at times transcends the story. Savour these opening lines from The Galton Case(1959): The law offices were above a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa. A private elevator lifted you from a mean lobby into an atmosphere of elegant simplicity, creating the impression that you were rising effortlessly to the level you deserved, one of the chosen. Or the time when Archer admits to himself that he likes the work, late at night, driving from one place to another like an antigen connecting cells in the great body of Southern California. He is a healer; we may hope, one of many, assuaging some of the injuries we do to ourselves.
Trolls should be warned that these pages reflect the manners and mores of the time and place. These are guaranteed to offend some sensitive souls. These trumpeter swans can be found venting on Good Reads.
* * *
The Midsomer Murders mayhem occurs off the page and Archer himself seldom carries a gun. Indeed, having read all eighteen titles, several more than once, I am not sure he ever fired a bullet, though his own licensed gun is stolen and used in a murder in The Way Some People Die (1951). Still less does he come up smiling after beatings, druggings, pistol-whippings, or woundings as does Philip Marlowe in the novels of Raymond Chandler. On the rare occasions when he is assaulted, as occurs in these pages, it takes him some time to recover, because he is not the man of steel that Marlowe was.
If Raymond Chandler had a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue, Ross Macdonald had a jeweller’s eye for imagery. There is seldom a wasted word on his pages. If he pauses to describe the fittings and furnishings of the Sebastians’ home or the make and model of their car in The Instant Enemy, a reader can be sure those facts will be rebound in the pages that follow, so pay attention.
Sometimes Macdonald’s metaphors and images come so thick and fast that they create a traffic jam in the reader. Sometimes the psychologising slows the momentum of the story. And sometimes there are missteps. Fortunately, Macdonald follows the old coach’s wisdom: ‘Forget the mistakes and keep trying.’
The species into which cataloguers slot Macdonald’s novels is styled ‘Hard Boiled,’ but he offers neither the snappy dialogue of Chandler nor the bone-deep cynicism of Dassiell Hammet, the double litmus tests for Hard Boiled. Though it is true that Lew Archer is named for Sam Spade’s deceased partner, Miles Archer, who only believed in fifty-dollar bills, and was sired on Hammet’s typewriter.
While Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971) earned a rave review on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section by that distinguished southern American novelist Eudora Welty (though I confess that I could not finish the only book of hers I tried). Yet none of his novels was ever awarded the paramount prize of the Edgar. To be sure he garnered many other awards, but not that crown of crowns. Such is the way of the world.
In his books, unlike life, the world bends towards justice of a kind, but there are seldom happy endings. Perhaps Macdonald wrote one book eighteen times, as has been said, the same story of twisted love, divided loyalties, the effects of the sins of the past, wayward offspring, fractured families, irresponsible parents, each magnified by the glare of money in the prism of California sunshine that blinded the individuals to their own motives and deeds. It was all one case.
By number eighteen in the sequence the biggest mystery is Lewis Archer himself about whom the reader learns almost nothing, being a man without a past. There are only a few shards with information scratched on them scattered through the books. In The Goodbye Look (1969) we learn he had been a soldier who has seen that last look on faces of men who died. In The Drowning Pool (1950) there is mention of a wife named Sue who left him because of his irregular life. In The Doomsters (1958) he refers to his police work in Long Beach. In another he has a sexual dalliance with a witness that goes nowhere. In Black Money (1966) the names of the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Henri Bergson pass his lips. These gleanings are few and far between.
The reader is not manipulated into feeling sorry for him with a back sob story that reveals his feet of clay. Why should we? Archer does not feel sorry for himself! He is no Heathcliff forever lamenting his fate. Archer’s emphasis is on the other people in the story, not on himself. He remains in the shadows to observe and report not to take the limelight.
He has neither the finicky mien of Colin Dexter’s Endeavour Morse, nor the quirky car of Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Here, then, is a challenge for a Post Modernist to dissolve the twinned author Macdonald-Millar and write a biography of Lew Archer himself. The Wikipedia entry, and yes there is one, marks the starting line, not the finishing line in his life story.
This title was number fourteen of the eighteen, with a nineteenth incomplete at his death. Each stands alone but bound together they are Lew Archer’s life. Oh, and there are collections of short stores (some of which germinated into the novels) called The Name is Archer (1955) joined by Lew Archer Private Investigator (1977). When an apprentice Macdonald published stories featuring other characters, some of which have been reissued as though they were Archer stories, again despite his objections. Macdonald wrote at least two crime novels without Archer.
Connoisseurs may note that the doyens of detective fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor in their massive reference work describe this novel as ‘good,’ but offer greater praise for Macdonald’s The Ivory Grin (1952), The Galton Case (1959), and The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962). The one that resonated the most on first reading and which has stayed with me is the last one, The Blue Hammer (1976).
Equally, Barzun and Taylor also reprove other Macdonald’s titles for overcooked plots and broken metaphors. Indeed, some of the plots, like that of The Goodbye Look require a GPS, that is a Genre Plotting System, to follow through a forest of grafted family trees and generations of undergrowth.
There is a great deal of literature on Macdonald and Archer’s world. Impressive as it is, to read it is to lose sight of the novels themselves. Too often the dissection of scholars leaves behind only the odour of formaldehyde. But perhaps it is justice since Macdonald as Millar earned a PhD in English at the University of Michigan.
Only a few films have been made, despite the obvious appeal of the material and the setting. Some say Macdonald was reluctant to surrender control of the stories but, just maybe, it was a spectral Archer himself who objected, despite the money on offer, to preserve his own identity and integrity. He was right to do so because one film version changed Archer’s name to facilitate marketing, and another moved the locale from SoCal to NOLA, that is New Orleans. Both decomposed the interwoven psychological themes to mere dollars and cents and so reduce the characters’ motivations to the supermarket mundane. These movies are Harper(1966), based on The Moving Target (1949) and The Drowning Pool (1975), based on the 1950 novel of that name. Both were vehicles for Paul Newman’s blinding star power.
Seek and ye shall also find a made-for-television movie called The Underground Man (1974) mutated from that novel, but it is larded with the tropes of television cop shows at the expense of the psychological depth or the intensity of the original. It starred a miscast Peter Graves as Archer. Even more woefully miscast was Brian Keith as Archer in the eponymous short-lived six-episode television series of 1975. Neither actor had the anonymous, everyman quality of Archer nor the compensating gravitas of Paul Newman. In addition, Macdonald’s storylines, perhaps without royalties, have also found their way in Russian and French films according to the IMDb.
If it has not been clear in the foregoing verbiage, the purpose of these musings has been to alert readers to the corpus of Archer stories in the hope that some might a sample and find it to their liking. His novels are readily available in whatever form a reader might like from bytes to MP3 to hard and soft covers, new and used.
Sources:
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres, Rev. ed, (1989).
Mathew Bruccoli, Ross Macdonald (1984).
Michael Kreyling, The Novels of Ross Macdonald (2005).
Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels in publication order:
Paul Nelson and Kevin Averey, It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives (2016).
Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999).
Bernard Schopen, Ross Macdonald (1990).
Eudora Welty, ‘The Stuff that Nightmares are Made of,’ New York Times, Book Review (14 February 1971), page 1.
Michael Jackson has no memory of why, where, when, and which Archer novel he read first, but it must have been sometime in the mid-1970s, and one was not enough! Since then, he has read all of them, and the short stories, and Kenneth Millar’s other books, and some of the twenty-seven by his wife Margaret Millar. Imagine the clickety-clack of typewriters in that Santa Barbara household.
The Black Eyed Blonde (London: Mantle, 2014) by Benjamin Black
Chandler Redux
Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot have transcended their originators, Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Other writers have, within the limits of copyright laws, revived these two fictional detectives and put them back to work. And they are not alone; the one-named Spenser of Robert Parker, Jim Chee of Tony Hillerman, and Evariste Pel of Mark Hebden, all have had second and third reincarnations. Philip Marlowe, sprung from the brow of Raymond Chandler, joined these ranks in 2014 when The Black Eyed Blonde appeared from the keyboard of Benjamin Black. This is a Marlowe who is older but no wiser than he should be.
His rebirth begins with these lines:
‘It was one of those summer Tuesday afternoons when you start to wonder if the earth has stopped spinning. The telephone on my desk looks like it knows it’s being watched. Traffic trickles by below, and a few men in hats are going nowhere.’
So observes Philip Marlowe from the window of office 615 in the Cuenga Building.
Thus begins another day without another dollar for him. It is some months after the events described in The Long Goodbye of 1953.
Welcome to the mean streets of a sweltering Bay City (aka Santa Monica), a crime noir in the sunshine state of California, a few miles south are the mystic lands of Mexico. Marlowe wallows in an enervated ennui when the bell above the outer office door tinkles, announcing the femme fatale’s entrance. With the relaxed casualness of the entitled, Mrs. Clare Cavendish hires Marlowe to find a missing lover, one Mr. Nico Peterson. Asked about him, she seems to know little, as if to say, ‘So hard to keep track of them, my harem.’
Her insouciance about a lover is both deflating and alluring to Marlowe. This sublime siren, exuding a heady elixir of pheromones, needs no song to attract this man. The spy-beautiful Clare is never far from his thoughts (and dreams) hereafter while he tracks the elusive Mr. Peterson through beatings, pistol whippings, sappings, police interrogations, torture, gun shots, and Mickey Finns — the usual noir menu of mayhem and murder. This detective has the constitution of fiction. The body count reaches six or was it seven? So hard to keep track of them.
This Marlowe smokes and drinks a little less than Chandler’s and is less inclined to mouth the sexist, ageist, racist, homophobic, and other prejudices of the 1950s though some of the other characters do that. Even if Marlowe has been laundered, there is still plenty to offend those eager for offence. Mexicans are Wetbacks. Homosexual muscle men are weak at the core. The essence of a woman is sex. Laundered Marlowe is, but dry cleaned no. Set-in stains remain.
Plot, situation, characters have echoes in Chandler’s backlist. There is a stifling conservatory, a histrionic sibling, assorted alcoholics, an overbearing parent, and bushels of money which has not bought or brought happiness. His case files include a missing sister and a rare coin. As he mopes about this damsel sans distress, this Mrs Cavendish, when he gets to the bottom of a gimlet, his thoughts turn to the recently departed Terry Lennox. (Marlowe’s thoughts also turn to that absent woman in his life who is not named until late in the piece but we all know it is Linda Loring who has found him so irresistible that she had to fled to Paris.)
Bay City remains the sunny sin city of Chandler’s creation, where everything has a price and nothing has a value. Beneath the blinding sunlight of day bubbles a sewer.
The plot is a Möbius strip. As with Chandler, the savour lies in the journey, not the arrival: the snappy dialogue and evocative descriptions. Above all, the picture of Marlowe, in the words of the 1940 song, ‘bewitched, bothered, and bewildered’ by that Cavendish woman is worth the cover price. Moreover, the ending is a corker when the sixth and last dead man exits. With O’Henry irony, the one person who survives, scared but unscathed, is Mr Nico Peterson, a premature report of whose death had stymied Marlowe’s initial efforts.
The descriptions, the dialogue, the musings on the trek are savoury. Here are a few of lesbons motsto whet the appetite for the whole repast:
– ‘Using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-detective voice.’
– ‘Treading gracefully on her own shadow.’
– ‘Belief is not part of my program.’
– ‘The world is porous; things trickle through all by themselves, or so it always seems.’
–‘I would have gone to her if she’d been calling from the dark side of the moon.’
– ‘Once you think a thing, it stays thought.’
There are plenty more of such strokes to reward a reader.
Had I to make a criticism, it would be that the relentless over-description of the clothes everyone wears, including Marlowe himself; it is done so repeatedly and so mechanically — upwards to twenty times on my count — that it blunts any impact. Done a few times when the clothes tell the reader something of the person or situation, and it scores points. When it is done again and again, well, the edge dulls. The same can be said of the descriptions of fittings and furnishing of rooms. These, too, are piled high. Once or twice these descriptions add perspective but after that they become padding. Black must have done a lot of research in back issues of Vogue, Esquire, McCalls, and Interiors, magazines. TMI!
While in the pedant’s corner, note that Trans-Canada Air Lines did not brand itself Air Canada until 1965, and it did not fly non-stop from Los Angeles to Toronto in the middle 1950s, contrary to these pages. Moreover, all beaches in California are public up to the mean tide line. Ergo the Cavendishes did not have private sand. There is another false note that involves the plot, and it is best to say only that it involves Mrs. Cavendish and her younger brother in the finalé.
Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for the Irish novelist John Banville, who is the master of several genres, including this one with his own crime series featuring Dr. Quirke (who like Spenser is a man with only one name) of 1950s Dublin. When The Black Eyed Blonde appeared, it was heralded as Book One of Marlowe Lazarus, implying that there would be a Book Two. It is disappointing to say now, ten years later, though it was widely and warmly reviewed and went through many editions, printings, media, and translations, that the implicit promise has not been fulfilled. Alas! One can dream of what Banville might have done in a pastiche of Chandler’s short story ‘The Red Wind,’ a personal favourite.
On the marketplace of ideas of Good Reads the book at hand scores 3.5 / 5.0 from 4,515 scorers. There is the usual range, which I sampled by reviewing those who scored it ‘1.’ A few of these latter scorers offered explanatory comments: the major theme is the desecration of an icon. ‘How dare Banville offer a Marlowe who differs slightly from my image of him!’ Well, he dared. His Marlowe has grown, and with growth he has changed a little. Black’s Marlowe is more introspective and more vulnerable than he was decades earlier. Aren’t we all?
Other Good Readers’ pearls included the remark, surely something we all wanted to know, ‘I hate noir’ followed by ‘I hate the fifties.’ Then there were sensitive souls whose overflowing virtue required them to sniff at the residual sexism, racism, and smoking in the story. These ‘ism’s,’ evidently it needs to be said, were of the time and are to be found aplenty in the Chandler oeuvre. Be warned trolls of delicate virtue.
There are two cautionary notes. (1) In reviews, advertising, and catalogue listings, sometimes ‘Black-eyed’ is hyphenated and sometimes not. It is the same book with or without the hyphen. (2) However, this book is not to be confused with Erle Stanley Garner’s Perry Mason vehicle The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde(1944) in which the compound adjective is definitely hyphenated, as it should be. By the way, Garner’s connect-the-dots story scores higher, albeit with fewer raters, on Good Reads than Black’s. Chandlerholics will also note that Black’s title had an incarnation in Benjamin Schutz’s short story ‘The Black Eyed Blonde’ in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (1988) which has a different plot, and no hyphen.
Vigilant readers will know that Black’s Black Eyed Blonde is credited as the alleged origin of the screenplay for a feature-length film called ‘Marlowe’ in 2022, starring Liam Neeson as the titular Marlowe. He is the latest in a long line of Marlowe impersonators, per the table below. Marlowe has also been animated on radio, podcasts, CDs, and audiobooks galore by Ed Bishop, Van Heflin, Gerald Mohr, and others. Then there are the innumerable translations.
Note: in some renderings Phillip has a double ‘l’ which it did not have in Chandler’s spelling.
Year
Actor
Age
Title
IMDb
Rating
1944
Dick Powell
40
Murder, My Sweet
7.5
1946
Humphrey Bogart
47
The Big Sleep
7.9
1946
Robert Montgomery
43
The Lady in the Lake
6.5
1947
George Montgomery
31
The Brasher Doubloon
6.5
1959-1960
Phillip Carey
35
Philip Marlowe (TV series)
7.1
1969
James Garner
35
Marlowe
6.4
1973
Elliot Gould
35
The Long Goodbye
7.5
1978
Robert Mitchum
61
The Big Sleep
5.8
1975
Robert Mitchum
58
Farewell, My Lovely
7.0
1983-1986
Powers Boothe
38
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye (TV series)
7.7
1998
James Caan
58
Poodle Springs
6.0
2022
Liam Neeson
70
Marlow
5.4
Note: In 1942 both Lloyd Nolan at 40 and George Sanders at 36 used the plot of, respectively, The High Window and Farewell My Lovely, but not the Marlowe name for Time to Kill and The Falcon Takes Over.
To say the obvious, Robert Mitchum alone has impersonated Marlowe twice. The actors who have donned his persona have ranged from a boyish 31 to a decrepit 70. Marlowe has also been black, played by Danny Glover (1995) in The Red Wind an episode on the television anthology Fallen Angels, and – wait for it – he has travelled to the mean streets of Prague in Smart Philip (2005) and Tokyo in The Long Goodbye (2014) and a cameo in an episode of Bitter Blood (2014) as Tokyo Marlowe. Surely in an age when identity is subjective, it is time for a queer and female Marlowe or both in one.
Bibliography
Byron Preiss, ed., Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration (1988).
Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (2006). The first novel featuring Dr Quirke.
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953) and ‘The Red Wind’ (1938), a short story.
Erle Stanley Garner, The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde (1944).
Frank McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (1976).
Richard Rodgers, Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, a song from from Pal Joey (1940).
———
Michael Jackson read The Long Goodbye while a penurious grad student pecking out a dissertation on Aristotle and overnight became a Chandler addict. He bought a copy of the book at hand on Grafton Street in Dublin in 2014.
