For anyone searching for a representative Lew Archer mystery from Ross MacDonald, for a title that showcases the author’s considerable literary merits and shows just how masterfully he could plot and write, one need look no further than 1952’s The Ivory Grin. Speaking personally, I find it a stronger and more intriguing book than the three novels preceding Grin, although they each have much to recommend. This one starts as so many do, with a woman who can’t (or shouldn’t) be trusted visiting Archer’s office and commissioning him to find somebody. In this case, the petitioner is a brassy nouveau riche who wants the private investigator to find a black maid who, she alleges, absconded with some jewelry. Archer sets out to tail Lucy Champion, an attractive young African-American with a nursing certification, and soon discovers that there is more to the story than missing bracelets. The detective finds Lucy in a motel room, dead on the floor, and the case soon takes on more suspects as Archer works to link the recent murder with the prior disappearance of Charles Singleton, a war veteran and heir to a considerable fortune.
MacDonald is known for his complicated narratives and wry humor, and both are to be found in abundance here. What I find admirable is that this tale’s plot is indeed complex, but just labyrinthine enough to keep the reader always attentive but never actually lost along the way. One scene propels the P.I. into his next encounter, which allows the story to unfold at a steady and carefully crafted clip. With Grin especially, the author achieves a highly satisfying symmetry by the plotline’s conclusion, with character actions and reactions creating a tragic inevitability. There’s also a triangle with a fourth character at its apex that gives the outcome a geometric neatness; to say more, or to identify who occupies which corner, would spoil the surprises in store.
But what elevates The Ivory Grin from its pulp origins into a more literary arena is MacDonald’s no-nonsense observations and descriptions that provide a very believable snapshot of American race relations in the early 1950s. There’s no preaching here, and no didactic moral, just dozens of details: the casually dismissive sheriff of a young black woman’s murder; Archer’s belief (via evidence and logic) that Lucy’s boyfriend Alex did not kill her, even though he fled from the scene; client Una's initial accusation of theft, meant to be taken without question by the upper-class accuser; and the cold truth that Lucy’s death is ultimately insignificant to the cast of wealthy white people who have larger, class-rooted secrets to conceal. The story may have been written by a white man and might feature a white protagonist (and ultimately tell a white story), but Ross MacDonald is intensely interested in exploring this culture of double standards. If he wasn’t, he would not have bothered to deliver consistently illuminating descriptions in his prose. Take this sketch of a "beautiful" city divided by race and class:
But what elevates The Ivory Grin from its pulp origins into a more literary arena is MacDonald’s no-nonsense observations and descriptions that provide a very believable snapshot of American race relations in the early 1950s. There’s no preaching here, and no didactic moral, just dozens of details: the casually dismissive sheriff of a young black woman’s murder; Archer’s belief (via evidence and logic) that Lucy’s boyfriend Alex did not kill her, even though he fled from the scene; client Una's initial accusation of theft, meant to be taken without question by the upper-class accuser; and the cold truth that Lucy’s death is ultimately insignificant to the cast of wealthy white people who have larger, class-rooted secrets to conceal. The story may have been written by a white man and might feature a white protagonist (and ultimately tell a white story), but Ross MacDonald is intensely interested in exploring this culture of double standards. If he wasn’t, he would not have bothered to deliver consistently illuminating descriptions in his prose. Take this sketch of a "beautiful" city divided by race and class:
The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland.
And in the next paragraph, the author describes the denizens of East Hidalgo Street:
Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage.
That last line is a sweet, poetic turn of phrase, made nicer because it allows a moment of happiness to visit a few souls from a population otherwise defined by toil and troubled living. Understand that The Ivory Grin isn’t a racial or sociocultural polemic; it is first and foremost an absorbing mystery, well worth finding and experiencing seventy years later. It shows a hard-boiled crime writer at the top of his game, and gives the always introspective but never opinionated Lew Archer a reason to be an anthropologist just as much as a gumshoe. It is Archer’s, and MacDonald’s, keen understanding of people and their often contrary, petty, and pitiable ways that allows him to solve the mystery while recognizing enough of humanity (in Lucy, in Alex) to not give up on the human race for good. Highly recommended.
Tracy K. has reviewed this title over at her great blog, Bitter Tea and Mystery.
RSS Feed