The Way Some People Die

Let us now praise Ross Macdonald. In the course of eighteen novels featuring private investigator Lew Archer – pious ex-GI whose idea of health food is a breakfast of crisp bacon, four fried eggs and black coffee – Macdonald showcases southern California as a cesspool of wasted days and lives. His clients are either super rich or brokedown nobodies. Someone, usually a girl, is missing. A parent makes a plea or a pitch, and Archer agrees to check it out. ‘Check it out’ needs to be clarified; ‘check’ alludes to getting way up in the noses of people who’d rather not be bothered, ‘it’ implies a drug connection, a ransom scam, or a dead of night kidnapping, and ‘out’ refers to a lot of blood being spilled, some of it Archer’s, most of it the previous fuel of the scum of the earth.

Macdonald’s scenarios are sometimes forced, but the action isn’t, nor are the payoffs. Archer cracks wise with dimwits, and unlike Chandler’s Marlowe, there’s little in the way of back and forth. Archer works in a hard post WWII world, and the people he’s after are on the outs with the 1950’s boom time. The hoods are small time mixing it up with big, and they’re making moves only idiots would try. Sometimes the idiots are in the mix with muscle, and Archer gets his share in a throwdown. Red harvest indeed.

Most of the victims are young, most would like to blame their parents for their mixups, but that wasn’t the fashion back then. Kids just cut out and tried to make a go. No wonder Kerouac became a god.

The best Archer and the one I started rereading again as I make my way down the list is The Way Some People Die (1951). A woman wants to find her daughter, and Archer obliges even though she frowns when he lights a cigarette in her house. Galatea Lawrence is on the lam, and tied in with some major league heroin operations. Archer trips north to San Francisco where the herion junky is a damsel in dis-dress, and the dealer stooges and operators are sensitive fags. Dead and broken bodies pile up, but along the way, between Archer driving to this place and that in SoCal, we get gems like this, which comes after he questions a pug:

I thanked him. The drumming of the bag began again before I was out of earshot. After a while he’d be a fighting machine hired out for twenty or twenty-five dollars to take it and dish it out. If he was really good, he might be airborne for ten years, sleeping with yellower flesh than Violet, eating thick steaks for breakfast, dishing it out. Then drop back onto a ghetto street-corner with the brains scrambled in his skull.

Violet is a fat nosy neighbor listening in on the interrogation, and ‘yellower’ is not a word, but I can’t think of much from 1950’s narrative that matches that paragraph for a complete picture of the universe pre-JFK and pre-Watts.

There are many lines like that in the Archer books, and some, especially in the later novels, come off poorly. Macdonald was an environmentalist and events like the Santa Barbara oil spill crept into his books, but all Archer really cares about is a steak with mushrooms and a good beer.

One needs a small shelf to store quality hard boiled. Hammet’s Red Harvest and The Glass Key, Chandler’s The Long Goodye, a couple of mid period Jim Thompson novels (he might be better than Macdonald, but that’s for another review) and the first pair of Highsmith's Ripley books - you could get Highsmith’s bio and her The Price of Salt too, but those go on the dyke shelf. Macdonald’s first four or five Archer books are must haves, but even a later book like The Blue Hammer (1976) resonates.