Ross Macdonald (1) (1915–1983)

This Lew Archer short story by Ross Macdonald — Kenneth Millar — is in every way a miniature version of his protagonist in the long form. The title is derived from the clothes a dead girl is wearing in this swiftly-moving story. There are echoes of the betrayal and emotional damage for which the author would later become known. In this tale, you can almost feel Macdonald slowly transitioning to his later work, while not quite yet ready to abandon some minor literary idiosyncrasies Chandler spoke about in The Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler.

Midnight Blue begins quickly, as a short story should, with Archer heading up to Trumbull Canyon for some target practice. A crotchety old man with a gun tries to run him off as soon as he arrives. Once Archer calms the zealot down and gets to the business of setting up for shooting, he sees something red sticking out from some bushes. There is a hand attached, and a pretty young blonde as well. One look at her throat, and Archer knows she’s been murdered.

The crotchety old man takes off, and the police peg him for the killing. But Archer isn’t buying it. His holiday over, he begins questioning those who knew the girl while the cops search for the old man. He soon discovers the young girl was at a wienie roast on the beach the night she went missing. As in any Archer story, there is some family disfunction here, and the high school girl had a reputation for sleeping around. But whom did she go see after she left the beach? Was it the school counsellor, or someone else? Does her best friend know who she was meeting that night?

Even in so brief a story as this, Macdonald’s trademark of emotional damage is on display here, and there is much more going on than meets the eye. All in all, a terrific Lew Archer short story. It’s a morsel which should satisfy anyone who enjoys the genre, and especially fans of Macdonald's Lew Archer.

Midnight Blue is overall a splendid early example of Macdonald’s approach to the detective form. His later novels would take on deeper and subtler shades as he used the form to explore betrayal and damage. Though not as exciting a read as Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald put meat on the bones of the detective novel, and at his best, his later novels approached literature. A terrific — if early — short Lew Archer story, and an entertaining glimpse at a writer coming into his own.… (mer)

“The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.”


Returning to this book after many years, the reader can clearly see Macdonald has become a novelist simply using the genre as a means to an end. He wrote about broken people in need of mending, and perhaps mercy. But as he once wrote:

“I have a secret passion for mercy…but justice is what keeps happening to people.”

That is certainly true of The Goodbye Look, a novel released a year before the tragic death of his daughter, whose troubled life is well documented. Young people were often troubled or in trouble in a Lew Archer novel, and that’s the case here. But it is the more mature adults who before all is said and done, appear to have lived their entire lives in interconnected lies and half-truths, with a kidnapping, and at least three murders connecting several families.

If it sounds complicated for a detective novel, it is. About a third of the way through, Macdonald has Archer sit down and write some case notes to help him get a bead on how what he knows ties together. It doesn’t help Archer, and it doesn’t help the reader. And then it becomes even more a labyrinth of old crimes somehow connected to a tiny Florentine box which has been stolen. The theft is simply a trigger, but unfortunately the trigger brings about more death, as Archer weaves his way through pain and regret to get at the truth. Archer has compassion for Betty, and the very damaged young man she loves, Nick, but in order to get to the bottom of the trouble, he’ll have to look at a crime which took place in 1945. What happened then may be the key to everything.

The case begins when lawyer John Truttwell hires Archer, in behalf of the Chalmers, to find a Florentine box which has been stolen. Archer learns that Truttwell is hiring him in behalf of Irene Chalmers only, but the reasons are as yet unclear. So is the reason why the letters inside the box are so important. Later in the case, Archer will get hold of them, and discover the reason. Perhaps this passage as Archer meets the very lovely Irene Chalmers for the first time, says it best:

“Her tone was both assertive and lacking in self-assurance. It was the tone of a handsome woman who had married money and social standing and never could forget that she might just as easily lose these things.”

But if the reader believes he understands things up to this early point in the mystery, they’d be wrong, because nothing is quite as it seems; not Larry and Irene Chalmers’ emotionally troubled and mentally unstable son, Nick; not an old kidnapping; not the murder of an old man decades before; not a missing fortune; not a doctor and his wife, with whom Archer will have an affair; not even the history of the people involved in the case, because it’s all a lie more complicated and far reaching than the reader, or Archer, can get a handle on. Some might wonder why Archer is even bothering, because few of these people are truly likable.

But then Archer meets John Truttwell’s young daughter, who loves the deeply troubled Nick. Already hurting because she’s been thrown over for an older woman, she might be the only innocent person here, and Archer likes her. Though Archer has compassion, and desires, as is proven by his affair with Moira, the wife of the doctor treating Nick, it is obvious that once Archer meets young Betty, his involvement in the case is assured. More murders, more secrets, and a bullet in the shoulder await Archer, and the story hasn’t yet come near to reaching a conclusion. The last third of the book makes the frustration of not understanding what’s going on any more than Archer does worth the literary ride.

This is a terrific novel, but Macdonald isn’t for every taste. He had his own literate approach to the form, using it as a platform to write about broken people, shattered dreams, and familial betrayal. Archer is at the center, yet Macdonald writes him almost as an observer, trying to help without letting the ugliness change him. Archer often feels a quiet, unspoken compassion for someone in the case, trying to facilitate some kind of emotional peace for them. The catalyst for Archer's interest is often a young person, as is the case here. It was a mirror to Kenneth Millar himself. A fixture in Santa Barbara in the ’70s, singer Warren Zevon made no distinctions between the fictional Archer and the flesh and blood Macdonald. He credited Macdonald for saving his life when he had a physical and emotional breakdown, and dedicated an album to him. To quote Zevon about his neighbor:

“At the lowest point in my life, the doorbell rang. And there, quite literally, was Lew Archer, on a compassionate mission, come to save my life.”

This certainly coincides with something Macdonald himself wrote about the craft:

“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.”

Yes, the clues to the man are all here, left by the writer of the stories. Macdonald was very much the detective in his stories, if we are to believe Zevon and others.

Macdonald’s early work when he was closer in style to Chandler is very entertaining, but it’s his later work that is his best, once he’d moved away from Chandler and Hammett. Macdonald's approach isn’t better than their approach, it is simply different. A marvelous, literate read in a genre too often substituting gore and violence and unpleasantness, for understanding and story. Macdonald isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who like the human equation in their detective fiction, he’s unbeatable. This one, The Chill, The Drowning Pool, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty are some of the best in the genre.

On a technical note, I read this on Kindle downloaded from Amazon Australia this time, and I was truly disappointed in Penguin. At the back, there is a whole section about the quality of the modern classics series of which Macdonald’s books are a part. Any yet, the text was unjustified, leaving a ragged, annoying right-hand margin. Shame on Penguin…… (mer)