Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages rated 3.94 by 167,404 litizens.
Genre: Noir. Species: Sunshine.
DNA: SoCal.
Verdict: Who dun it?
Tagline: Where in the world is Sean Regan?
The immortal Philip Marlowe’s first big case, and today he is still on the job somewhere, in some media (paper book, film, play, poem, radio, audio book, ebook, and more) or another, doing something. Ergo, this is vintage Chandler, a man of his time and place and an ear for dialogue.
That 1930s context means he lacks contemporary sensitivities. Fortunately for us there are many Good Readers on the job to tell us that in the 1-Star reviews where they parade their virtues – many. Here is a sampling of their insights in bold with my reactions.
misogynist – It is true, and an apt reminder of those bad old days that so many people are trying to turn the clock back to now. It is a big word that is often misspelled in the tirades.
too many detailed descriptions – Yes, true and I also find it tedious, though sometimes it does deepen either plot or character. Editors get paid to convince writers to cut such verbiage. Too bad it wasn’t done for this one to make it even leaner and meaner. Try Honoré Balzac, Charles Dickens, or Herman Melville sometime. These writers were paid by the word.
actually 0-stars – ‘actually?’ The superfluous ‘actually’ is ‘actually’ unnecessary. Emphatically unnecessary!
convoluted – Yes, indeed there are twists and turns and I got lost a few times with all those comings and goings. That however intrigued me rather than defeated me. If you don’t like a mystery don’t read a mystery.
I don’t like this author – A valuable insight for others.
homophobic – indeed, true and grating, and another salutary reminder of the bad old days that we are now reinventing.
slightly sexist – Slightly! Hardly. Wake up! Far more than slightly.
racism – Huh? I must have missed this one, but no doubt true.
A lot of these comments sound like idiot’s revenge for having to read something assigned by others for classes, clubs, or sadism.
It is also true that it is replete with brittle dialogue, memorable characters like District Attorney Wilde, General Sherwood, Eddie Mars, Butler Norris, Bernie Ohls, Harry Jones, and Agnes Lozelle, Canino; some very well judged negotiating with Cronjager, Brody, and Mars. Then there is the ghostly presence of the Irishman. Vivian herself has no trouble holding her own despite the prevailing attitudes that outrage some readers. Carmen is addled, like it or not, such individuals exist. Finally, it did much to cement the krimi noir into the popular mind.
After finishing The Long Goodbye the algorithm suggested this well-worn title and with little better to read at the time I started…. Yes, I have read it before, yes I have seen the totemic representation on celluloid, and yet it seemed fresh and new on the Kindle pixels. So I went on, and on.
Some hack is missing a chance to bring the late Sean Regan to life.
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.
