JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

Book Review: THE DROWNING POOL (1950) by Ross MacDonald

7/22/2018

4 Comments

 
Picture
Just last month I tried Ross MacDonald's 1949 crime story The Moving Target, which marked the début of his series private detective Lew Archer. Everything about Target was solidly impressive: a twisty plotline, memorably hard-boiled narration and dialogue, characters both highborn and low, flawed to the point of contemporary tragedy. These same elements are found in the 1950 follow-up The Drowning Pool, which is still impressive and manages to deliver a moodier atmosphere and a story with even more shadows and skeletons.

Archer receives an office visit from a woman named Maude Slocum, and after some coaxing she reveals her problem: she has intercepted an anonymous note addressed to her husband accusing her of extramarital exercises. Fearing there may be more to come, Maude asks Archer to find the writer and deal with the matter. But she gives the detective a very short – practically strangling – leash: he is not to talk to any of her acquaintances as a detective and she won't answer whether the accusation in the letter is true.

Archer compromises, and introduces himself into Maude Slocum's moneyed world as a talent scout for a movie studio. Maude's socialite husband James is an amateur actor performing the lead in a new play by friend and director Francis Marvell at the Quinto Theatre. While eavesdropping on a rehearsal, Archer witnesses a behind-the-scenes struggle between handsome grifter Patrick Reavis and a teen girl who turns out to be Maude's daughter Cathy. Maude, James, and Cathy are all living on the estate of James's mother, Olivia Slocum, a wealthy woman who is not generous with allowances for anyone, personal or economic.

On the night of a house party, playwright Marvell pulls from a darkened swimming pool the lifeless body of matriarch Olivia, a woman who never went swimming and feared the water. Pat Reavis's cap is found in the bushes nearby, and Reavis himself had legged it off the property right at the crucial time, hitching a ride with Archer into town. The detective finds himself quickly enmeshed in an escalating series of events, as one death begets another and lives built on play-acting and lies bring brutal consequences.

Picture
For a story with water (and oil) at its heart, The Drowning Pool ironically develops through a calculated slow burn of plot and character. For the first third of the story, Lew Archer is less of an actor and more of a fly on the wall, observing his client's comfortable but unsatisfying lifestyle and the restlessness of those surrounding her. It is a quiet, introspective approach that I have heard MacDonald will continue to use throughout his series, with later entries emphasizing themes of social amorality and bankruptcy and minimizing traditional hard-boiled action. When the murder of Olivia Slocum kicks off events that bring Archer into conflict with Chief of Police Ralph Knudson and a corpulent oil magnate named Kilbourne (and his sadistic henchman Melliotes), the book's mood switches quickly from contemplative to grimly active. Before the story is finished, characters will be shot, burned, drugged, beaten, and tortured, all in the name of greed and vanity.

I think it is this shift in mood and plotting that makes me feel The Drowning Pool falls just a little short. MacDonald's writing here is excellent; he uses his main character's wary first-person loner detective viewpoint just as well (if not better) than Raymond Chandler does, and the fact that once more Archer takes a case that brings him face to face with petty people and moral decay immediately makes the reader simpatico with Archer's objectivity. It's the only way to escape getting poisoned yourself, by money or sex or power. But The Moving Target felt more balanced, maintaining its pace masterfully from start to finish. (I also enjoyed the concept of looking for an unloved and unworthy kidnapping victim more than looking into a family whose members assure mutual misery for each other.) Notably, it is Pool that most Internet readers agree is the superior of the two; there is an excellent review posted by Max Cairnduff on his site Pechorin's Journal.

One other detail: Ross MacDonald's writing is indeed so strong and enjoyable that I adopted a reading practice that I had never tried before. For this title, I found the audiobook online but gave myself a 50-page print book lead in the story. I would then listen to recent chapters, a couple at a time, as I read through the book, finishing the pages first and the audio account a close second. This was a really satisfying approach, as the audio let me revisit and appreciate those lines and plot twists as the story was still unfolding. And the lines and twists are worth the review, full of intelligence and cool observation. I end with this example – Max C. includes the same paragraph in his review – where Archer surveys Nopal Valley, a town that has "benefited" from a landscape-changing oil boom:

The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where the trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since 'thirty-nine or 'forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn't know what to do with itself at all.
I'm looking forward to the next Lew Archer crime story, The Way Some People Die.
4 Comments

Book Review: THE MOVING TARGET (1949) by Ross MacDonald

7/7/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
When it comes to hardboiled detective fiction, I have always been more of a tourist than a resident of those dark alleys and dangerous streets. There is much to admire in this largely American crime literature form, and its two most influential and innovative contributors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, deliver novels that work as both instantly accessible pulp fiction and a thoughtful exploration of nihilism and hope. The loner detective, navigating a world where everyone lies and danger and death are just part of the landscape, embodies the existential questions of Sartre and Camus even more than he does the puzzle-and-justice ethos of Conan Doyle and Christie.

As much as I enjoy Hammett's sober, this-side-of-cynical tales of men with personal codes of honor confronting a fully corrupt and selfish world (Red Harvest and the story "The Gutting of Couffignal" are personal favorites) and Chandler's elevation of pulp to tough guy poetry, I wasn't actively looking for another hardboiled writer to discover. Fortune and a little online searching brought me to The Moving Target, the first of eighteen mystery novels by Ross MacDonald to feature detective Lew Archer. I listened to the audiobook of Target, and as soon as it finished I tracked down a print copy from the library and read it immediately. That's never happened before.

What was so appealing that I immediately wanted to revisit this book? Simply put, it's MacDonald's writing that surprised me and stirred my admiration. I knew that, if a writer wanted to deliver a hardboiled crime story, he shouldn't try to reinvent the genre. All of the tropes, from solo detective to wealthy client to femme fatale, are effective to start and maintain the tale. At the same time, if he merely tries to imitate Chandler and Hammett, then the work will likely feel slight and uninspired. With Lew Archer, MacDonald strikes the perfect balance. His detective is independent, quick-witted, and appropriately pessimistic about the human race, but he also demonstrates an educated, distanced perspective through his first-person observations of people and situations that quickly wins over the reader.

Lew Archer is still a bit of a cipher – in this genre, it's nearly always the criminals who are described in detail, in part because they are seen through the lens of a detective narrator who wants the spotlight directed off the rock-turner and onto the wriggling creatures underneath – but MacDonald builds empathy for Archer because of the character's wit, his desire to bring order to a chaotic world, and his ability to analyze these desperate people and understand them (often better than they understand themselves).

MacDonald's own understanding of the genre is immediately apparent on the first page, as a taxi drives working-class Archer toward the seaside estates of the wealthy and the privileged: "The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money." Once there, Elaine Sampson engages the detective to find her missing husband, not out of concern but because he may be spending money on someone else that she had earmarked to inherit. The case quickly becomes complicated as the businessman's disappearance leads Archer to an alcoholic Hollywood starlet past her prime, an oily entrepreneur who employs a bodyguard with a vicious streak, and the missing man's restless daughter, Miranda. When a ransom note appears and a drop-off turns deadly, Archer needs to separate artifice from reality to reveal the true motive of each person he meets, despite the façade.

Ross MacDonald's writing here – especially the narration and point of view he gives his protagonist – is observant and perfectly pitched. It's a quality that looks easy to create but is not, as the wrong note or overdescription can easily tip into parody. And yet Archer is sympathetic, and the reader trusts that perspective. His complicated response to Sampson's daughter, a mix of physical attraction and avuncular protectiveness, is captured in a line like this one, as they drive along a windy and winding mountain road:

Once or twice on a curve Miranda leaned against me, trembling. I didn't ask her whether she was cold or afraid. I didn't want to force her to make a choice.
Picture
Honoring its title, The Moving Target's plot is constantly in motion, with one lead progressing naturally to the next. It manages not to strain under its own weight, which sometimes occurs with Chandler's stories, and although one final character twist is telegraphed just a little early, it's a very satisfying tale of double-crosses and crimes of opportunity. Most of all, it's a novel delivered by a writer who is smart enough to recognize that the hardboiled detective genre can be liberating and not limiting if used as a canvas to explore the weakness and vulnerability of humans, wealthy and working class alike.

I already have MacDonald's second Lew Archer novel, The Drowning Pool, waiting to be read.


0 Comments

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2023.