Category: Krimi

The Instant Enemy (1968) by Ross Macdonald

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: 

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/ross-macdonald/lew-archer

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 les bons 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. 

Michael Duffy, Interview with Raymond Chandler, Deceased (2023). https://readingproject.au/SpecialReadingProjects/GreatWriters/RaymondChandler/RaymondChandler

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.