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Lew Archer

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Ross Macdonald
Pseudonym.  of Kenneth Millar, aka John Ross Macdonald, John Macdonald
(1915-83)

“I hear voices crying in the night, and I go see what’s the matter.”
— Lew Archer

The greatest P.I. series ever written?

Probably.

LEW ARCHER stands with The Continental Op, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe as one of the few P.I’s who actually define the genre. What makes Archer unique among this group is not just the fact that the books are a sustained narrative spanning three decades, but that they also made the genre relevant to a changing society. Where Hammett revolutionised crime writing and Chandler romanticised it, Macdonald, by his own account, “…gradually siphoned off the aura of romance and made room for a complete social realism”. Lew Archer made possible all who followed.

Named after Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon, the early Archer books, beginning with the first, The Moving Target (1949), are set in a Chandleresque milieu of rich men, starlets, gamblers and gangsters. Both Archer and Marlowe are alike in that they cast a weary eye over the corruption and greed of Southern California. Both are men with a strong sense of what is right and wrong which, apart from anything else, has led them to leaving their previous law enforcement jobs on principle.

“The money wasn’t the main thing. I couldn’t stand podex osculation. And I didn’t like dirty politics. Anyway, I didn’t quit, I was fired,” Archer explains.

The Drowning Pool (1950) begins, like The Big Sleep, with Archer calling on a wealthy invalid. Like Marlowe, Archer has to make do on his own. Mind you, this is an occupational hazard: Archer admits that “Everybody hates detectives and dentists. We hate them back.”

The early books in the series — up to The Doomsters (1958) — are “classic” P.I texts in structure and content. They remind us that Macdonald was an accomplished crime writer (as Kenneth Millar) and had already written one great book, Blue City, in 1947 (the author’s first four books, all standalones, which precede The Moving Target are all well worth a look).

But Archer was something else.

His investigations take him to the Southern California that exposes the lie of the American Dream. Towns like Oasis in The Way Some People Die (1951) where the lights from the town are “… lost and little in the great nocturnal spaces”. Archer’s social commentary on these places is both critical and despairing; as in The Drowning Pool, where he observed that “There’s nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.”

The Ivory Grin (1952) takes as its starting point the arrival in Archer’s office of a woman who is not all she seems and who wants Archer to find a missing servant who has been indiscreet. What would nowadays be a cliché still reads as fresh and exciting today. Archer heads off to Bella City. What follows – murder, femme fatales, cops, sleazy motels – takes the book to its conclusion (incidentally one of the most bizarre and macabre conclusions to a missing person’s case you’re ever likely to read) and at times reads like a 40’s black and white noir movie.

Both The Doomsters and The Galton Case (1959) were pivotal to the series and marked a significant change of direction. The Doomsters had, Macdonald felt, “..marked a fairly clean break with the Chandler tradition”. With The Galton Case it became clear what this meant. Archer became “the mind of the novel…a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge”. In it a lost son surfaces out of a brutal, murderous past. The building of a new shopping centre uncovers a skull-less skeleton of the idealist and radical John Galton. In turn his son reappears and Archer exposes his true identity. In doing so he brings to consciousness the failings of past lives and their impact on the present.

From The Wycherly Woman (1961)  through to Black Money (1966), the focus of the books became increasingly ‘psychological’. The past is inescapable and Archer searches people’s lives to bring about a kind of resolution to their past failings which have returned to torment their children. The suppression of the truth leads inexorably to crisis. A missing person or object triggers the investigation and a multitude of repressed secrets surface. Murders pile up as the pretence of the past is protected. Archer exposes the illusions people have to maintain to continue with their lives. The conclusion to the narratives both ‘solve’ the crime and brings to realisation a ‘truth’ which reverberates back through the book.

Black Money, in fact, feels like something of a watershed in the series. It is modelled on (or a homage to) Macdonald’s favourite book, The Great Gatsby. It lampoons the American Dream and how it can go horribly wrong. Pedro Domingo – an outcast and servant at the affluent Tennis Club because he is black – returns from Panama with an invented past and a lot of money. Domingo’s dream is a dangerous one and involves mob money (the only one of the latter Archer books to involve the mob). Archer has no time for the society he has to investigate and is critical of it: “When you have money to live on, and a nice house, and good weather most of the time, and still your life goes wrong — well, who can you blame?” There is a pervading sense of alienation and even exhaustion towards the end of the book. For Archer the message is clear: “Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own”.

Archer’s pessimism in Black Money takes a different slant in other books such as The Goodbye Look (1969): “How can a man help breaking the law if he doesn’t have money to live on”. However, Archer tries to explain what he sees – and this, by extension, is what the reader has to understand – Archer always has compassion for those he investigates: “I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”

Both The Underground Man (1971) and Sleeping Beauty (1973) have a central ecological concern which is strongly symbolic in its sombre image of the death of nature. The Underground Man  prefigured the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, offering us a vision of things to come, while Sleeping Beauty opened with Archer glimpsing from mid-air a huge oil slick and an oil platform that protrudes “…like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill blood”.

If the endings to his investigations often leave Archer bewildered and confused – take for example the scary conclusion to The Chill — the series comes to some kind of end with The Blue Hammer (1976). It injects an unexpected note of optimism in Archer’s relationship with a young journalist Betty Jo: “After a while I could see the steady blue pulse in her temple, the beating of the silent hammer which meant that she was alive. I hoped that the blue hammer would never stop”. There are echoes here of how Chandler left Marlowe in Playback which, perhaps, brings the whole series full circle. In the end if we don’t have optimism about the future, what have we got?

Ross Macdonald achieved considerable literary acclaim in his own lifetime. He held a Ph.D. in English and his writing was studied at university. Whilst, perhaps, Archer personifies the P.I. as an outsider, Macdonald himself was not at ease with his surroundings. He was an American raised in Canada, but living in California. His father left him as, in later life, his own daughter did. Macdonald once admitted that The Galton Case was “..a story roughly shaped on my own life, transformed and simplified, into a kind of legend”. In trying to resolve some of these issues in his books, Macdonald hasn’t just given us one of the great P.I. series but also on of the most enduring.

The Lew Archer series should be regarded, at the very least, as central texts in the genre.

THE EVIDENCE

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THE DICK OF THE DAY

Respectfully submitted by Peter Walker, with some additional tinkering from Kevin Burton Smith. Pictured above is Paul Newman as “Harper,” in the film of the same name.

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