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. ( )