Category: Hardboiled Detectives

Book Review: FIND A VICTIM (1954) by Ross MacDonald

11/3/2021

Find a Victim, the fifth Lew Archer mystery, showcases many of the strengths that make Ross MacDonald’s stories so rewarding, including a carefully calibrated (and complex) plot that maneuvers the California private investigator through a relentless series of twists and turns. Characterization and psychology are always important elements for the author, and the way MacDonald – the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar – sketches each actor in his cast through an economy of dialogue, action, and incident is impressive and entertaining. Victim begins quickly and irresistibly, with Archer picking up a bloodied Latino truck driver who has been shot and left for dead in a ditch. Soon, the P.I. is enmeshed in a case where the theft of a truckload of stolen whiskey is only a preamble.

Suspicion for the murderous heist quickly lands on a bar and motel owner named Kerrigan, whose unusually large and insured order of liquor could give him the payday he needs to leave his wife and disappear with Anne Meyer, a girlfriend he employed at the motel. But Anne has been missing for a week prior to the theft, and a small-time hood named Bosey knocks Archer out to dissuade him from further investigation. Undeterred, the detective collects two additional suspects who may have roles in a potential conspiracy: Las Cruces’ Sheriff Church, who might be bending (or breaking) the rules of law and order, and Anne Meyer’s father, who owns the trucking company and is rumored to have sexually attacked his daughter when she was a teenager. The tragic solution pays neat tribute to the Stephen Crane quote MacDonald has chosen to preface the story:

“A man feared that he might find an assassin. Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other.”

A couple barriers prevented me from becoming fully engaged in this story the way I had with the author’s previous title, 1952’s masterly noir novel The Ivory Grin. First, the tone is both familiar and estranged. The ingredients for a great Lew Archer story seem to be here, especially in the author’s talent for moving his gumshoe effortlessly from incident to interview, from altercation to confession. There are no wasted (or uninteresting) scenes, and Archer is propelled throughout, accumulating clues and making connections with each chapter to lead him into the next one.

And yet the story proves a little elusive even as it is mostly logical, and there are not many characters sympathetic enough to justify Archer hanging around and being routinely threatened and roughed up. Tony Aquista, the dying truck driver, makes a dramatic entrance but leaves a fleeting impression. Kerrigan, Bosey, and an on-the-run druggie named Jo Summer all appear slippery, corrupt, and not worth redemption. Only one person seems worth defending: Hilda Church, the sheriff’s vulnerable wife and sister to the missing Anne.

But the real reason for the off-kilter feel may be due to pressure from the publisher. According to information from Tom Nolan’s biography of Millar/MacDonald (1999), the author was tasked to rewrite Find a Victim substantially for Alfred A. Knopf, as the publishing house wanted more Mickey Spillane-styled violence and gunplay. MacDonald capitulated, and the result is a rather forced mix of astute characterization and plotting interrupted by two gratuitous shoot-outs.

Narratively, Lew Archer does not need to ambush and kill in cold blood a quartet of criminals who have double-crossed Bosey, but he does just that. Mike Hammer would approve, and apparently the editors at Knopf did too. (Two notes: the fated bandits are characterless, only appearing in the ambush scene so MacDonald can meet his Spillane quota; and this is the first time in the series where Archer shoots to kill in a situation other than one of self-defense.)

At the plot’s conclusion, MacDonald is firmly back to writing what he intended and what he knows best. There is a melancholy, almost a pity generated for the characters left standing, people who made poor but understandable choices and are now paying the price for it. Find a Victim isn’t a bad Lew Archer book, it’s just not the cohesive, contemplative one that Ross MacDonald would have delivered if he had been left alone and allowed to craft another independent, high-quality story without editorial interference.

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Book Review: THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald

1/27/2021

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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:

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.

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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1933) by Erle Stanley Gardner

3/20/2020

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I wonder if, after sampling my third Perry Mason book in the series by prolific writer Erle Stanley Gardner, these might not fall under the heading of "guilty pleasures". I suspect that they also operate for me as something one "loves to hate", although I fall far from either extreme on the Perry Mason Gratification Scale. The following critique may step on long-standing fans' toes, but after exposure to Gardner's first Mason caper, 1933's The Case of the Velvet Claws, I am still trying to assess just what my final (admittedly subjective) verdict should be.

Typically, a reading experience isn't this complicated. I read a book, I react to the book, I determine if the book gave satisfaction and how or why it did or did not. But analysis of a Gardner story, at least of the few I have read, doesn't seem that simple. This is because some very enjoyable and inventive strengths – including morally specious but highly clever defense attorney tactics like witness manipulation and sleight-of-hand evidence reveals – share space with a story weakened by unconvincing, superficial characterization and dialogue. Of course the Mason novels are meant to entertain and never pretend to be more than they are, which is in itself a point in their favor. But that odd combination of impressively good and amateurishly bad is something I haven't encountered often in mystery fiction, and it brings me back to the "guilty pleasure" label.

This mix of strengths and weaknesses is already fully formed and on display in The Case of the Velvet Claws, Mason's début case. What's singular about this story is that it doesn't end in a dramatic and contentious court trial like the great majority do: Mason keeps his client, an attractive femme fatale accused of shooting her husband, out of a courtroom despite the fact that Eva Belter has lied to the lawyer (and has even tried to frame him for murder!) every step of the way. George Belter is/was the publisher of Spicy Bits, a gossip tabloid largely existing as a vehicle to squeeze the rich and famous out of some money through business-legitimized blackmail. Because of this, there is a surplus of suspects who might want to see Belter dead, but Mason focuses on one in particular: Congressman Harrison Burke, last seen at a night club with a woman who was not his wife, a woman who happens to be Eva Belter herself.

So we arrive at one of Gardner's strongest qualities as an author, and the greatest personal argument for my continuing with the series. The man is quite brilliant at establishing the plotline (the hook, essentially) and guiding it along through multiple turns and reversals, escalating to a breathless climax. Such literary planning and plotting is not easy or effortless to pull off, and the three titles I have read to date – the others are The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) and The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) – show no slack in their pacing or ingenuity.

Closely connected with pacing is the quality of the twists and tactics themselves. In these early adventures, Perry Mason's maneuvering would be risky in the extreme if it wasn't safely confined to Gardner's artificially created world. Gambits like altering evidence to fluster prosecution witnesses, manufacturing a fake confession to muddy the waters, and manipulating police investigation would result in disbarment many times over. Yet the cleverness of these actions and Mason's ostensibly justified motivations keep the reader flipping pages while suspending judgment. It's an impressive tightrope to walk: Mason is bending the rules, but he argues that he is just trying to even up the odds which are already stacked against his accused client.

For example, in Velvet Claws Gardner has his hero conspire with a friendly pawnbroker to force an admission from a suspect. All Mason needs from Sol Steinburg (a benign but still stereotypical Jewish figure typical of pulp stories of the time) is to "recognize" whichever man Mason brings into the shop with a "That's him, that's the one" declaration. (In other words, lie.) He explains that he will never need Sol to testify in court, but rather he's trying to make the man think he can tie him to a gun purchase. It's a clever ruse, and Gardner gets extra points for the suspect smelling the set-up and pushing back just as hard as Mason is pushing him.

While the plotting and legal legerdemain in Gardner's books are highly enjoyable, characterization, description, and dialogue are (for me) another story. Some reviewers have connected the toughness of the tales with roots from hardboiled detective fiction, and I think that's accurate. But Erle Stanley Gardner is no Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and the Perry Mason books substitute pedestrian prose for the moody metaphors and flawed figures populating the Hammett and Chandler worlds. In particular, Gardner's overuse/abuse of countless "Mason said" and "asked Paul Drake"-type dialogue tags really slow down the rhythm, especially as they are so often unnecessary in two-person exchanges. Yet they are peppered throughout every single conversation, and these books are filled with two-person dialogue runs.

There's also a stilted quality to the scenes, which is due in part to the rather flat characterization (this cop is combative; that cop is friendly; Mason is always gruff and in command) and in part due to the sensationalist, hard-to-believe plotlines that Gardner favors. In Howling Dog, for example, I was wearying of a bellicose police chief who seemed to have little depth when he surprised me by saying in response, "I'm commencing to think so." I grabbed onto that word choice and thought it was a nicely observant touch to have a character use a word outside of his presumed vocabulary; I thought it revealed something of the chief's personality, that he was the type of person who prided himself on showing an education even though he had little. But then a few chapters later private investigator Paul Drake also says "I'm commencing to think so," and after that the author lets Mason use the phrase. Perry Mason's fictional world is one where characters speak on the surface (whether lying or telling the truth) rather than engaging in subtlety or subtext, and that's due to the preferences and literary limitations of his creator.

In spite of these traits, Gardner's books are still great fun and easy to digest, and I expect to sample many more of Mason's cases, especially when I'm looking for a fast and light mystery book in between more literary fare. And one can't help but admire an author concerned with providing both flashy entertainment and calculated promotion: at the end pages of Velvet Claws, the loyal Della Street reminds Mason that a new client is waiting in the outer office for him. Says Della:

"It's a girl expensively dressed, good looking. Seems well bred. She's in trouble, but she won't open up."
"Sulky, eh?"
"Sulky? Well, perhaps I'd call her sort of trapped."
"That's because you like her looks," Mason grinned. "If you didn't, you'd call her sulky."
…"Well, maybe she is just sulky."

It may be no surprise to note that the next book in the series happens to be The Case of the Sulky Girl.

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Book Review: THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR (1932) ed. Carolyn Wells

11/3/2018

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One of the great benefits of having access to a far-reaching academic interlibrary loan system is that there are many hidden and long out-of-print treasures to be found if you know where to look. Or even if you don't: I stumbled upon the rare 1932 anthology The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year through a keyword search for mystery and was immediately intrigued. (The initial Best American collection had débuted from New York's Tudor Publishing Company the previous year.) I have a fair understanding of the British Golden Age mystery scene in the early 1930s – the most luminous puzzle plotters were active and often brilliant during these years – but beyond the pulps and the hardboiled detective scene, I wasn't sure what American crime fiction looked like at that transformative time.

If this group of stories is representative, I can make a couple simple observations. Yes, the loner detective searching for truth in a corrupt and dangerous world is one genre component, and indeed the anthology kicks off its oversize (at 542 pages) collection with a compact kidnapping tale by hardboiled master Dashiell Hammett, "Death and Company." But the following 19 stories selected by editor Carolyn Wells largely feature protagonists forced to face an outside menace: the two villainous types that recur again and again include the pair or trio of tough-guy hoods primed for violence and the treacherous woman (and in one case, a man) out to seduce and steal from an unwitting mark.

Every story here resolves with a "happy" ending, i.e., the criminals are caught and justice is served. The locale can be metropolitan, but more often the authors set their crime stories in America's underpopulated heartland, and some dramas play out in secluded cabins in the woods while others take to the prairie, exploring cowboy culture and frontier codes of ethics.

Because the book is a relative rarity, I share the list of stories and authors here. One item worth noting is the length of these stories; many average about 30 pages, which feels a little long in several cases. Only a few merit their extra word count, and a couple, like "A Murder at the Monde" by Gelett Burgess, let the reader get well ahead of the story, and one is left waiting for a resolution.

Editor Carolyn Wells, in her introduction, provides some comments that address the shift from omniscient, eccentric British detective to the plodding, nondescript American one.

"The Sherlock Holmes type grew so popular as to become trite, and has been rather obscured by the clear-thinking, slow-moving sort of investigator, whose common sense and general information stand him in good stead when brilliant imagination fails."

Wells' perspective sounds at times fairly dismissive of the value of mystery fiction:

"What is the mystery story? To entertain and to interest, to amuse. It has no deeper intent, no more subtle raison d'être than to give pleasure to readers."

Still, she admits to a practical mental use:

"Many of us are very apt to suffer from mental cobwebs, and there is nothing equal to the solving of puzzles and problems for sweeping them away."

In order for our brains to be dusted off, let's proceed to the stories. They have been curated, with rare exceptions, from the popular U.S. newsstand magazines and journals of the day, including The Saturday Evening Post, The American Magazine, Collier's, and even Cosmopolitan and The Ladies' Home Journal. They arrive here with the same ratio of mostly good-to-occasionally poor that multiple author anthologies provide. I will single out a few of the most effective stories and examine a couple themes or plot points that seem to connect various ones.

For example, no less than four stories incorporate the scenario of a captive or compromised protagonist sending a coded message to the outside world, and one which needs to be interpreted correctly by outsiders in order for help to arrive.

Will Payne's "One Chance in a Million", Faraday Keene's "Diffycult Hill", and Ben Ames Williams' novella-length (at 73 pages) "The Crutile" all present the coded message plotline, but the best of the group is arguably "Dirty Work at the Crossroads" by Elinore Cowan Stone, one of two women author contributors. This last story concerns a distressed doctor's curious prescription to a drugstore proprietor, complete with a Latinate message. "One Chance in a Million" is notable for the genuine menace that the author creates: a lawyer, the only living witness with knowledge of a will-altering codicil having been signed, will be tossed from a balcony onto the cement below unless he can figure out a secret way to summon help.

Females seducing males in an attempt to steal jewels or obtain money is another favorite storyline here. "An Expert—In Gems" by Everett Rhodes Castle follows a predictable pattern of attempted theft and tables turned, while Rita Weiman's "Tragic Eyes" takes a more interesting path, as a femme fatale tries to put a sympathetic U.S. Senator (are there any of those left?) into a position of blackmail, only to be foiled by the congressman's acumen and intelligence (I ask the same question again). "The Stubborn Heiress" by R.T.M. Scott offers a male golddigger – here, an ersatz nobleman – and the (male) detective must convince a smitten woman that the imposter's intentions are less than honorable.

Every author has a unique writing style and storytelling manner, and in a couple tales that authorial voice manages to get in the way. "The Man in Seat Twelve" by James Warner Bellah is one such example, as the story is both overlong and filled with hasty sketches for scenes and characters with no definition. I still don't know what to make of "Manner" by Thomas Beer, an odd story of a businessman who is either proud of or ashamed of his son, who seems to be autistic. I think the son, Lion, solves a crime by accident, but I'm not certain.

More entertainingly, Samuel Hopkins Adams takes the overstuffed approach to tell the fevered story of "The Seven Curses": a car accident victim drags himself to the bushes of a haunted house, and then watches a trio of robbers try to break in only for two of them to die an agonizing death. Fortunately, the wounded man shares a hospital room with the third robber, and the strange truth comes out. "The Seven Curses" has a Grand Guignol energy that's appealing, and Adams shows a penchant for clever clueing, but it's all a bit breathless and hard to believe.

The most interestingly unconventional mystery story may be "The Body of the Crime" by novelist Wilbur Daniel Steele. The author's 1925 short story "Blue Murder" was included in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000) and I feel that story has the same challenge as "Body": Steele is one of the most ornate and opaque prose writers I have come across in the mystery genre. His writing is the opposite of a practitioner's like Dashiell Hammett; whereas Hammett wants his prose to be spare and to never intrude upon the tempo or tone of the story, Steele clogs every sentence with a stilted, affected combination of word choice and attitude. Here’s an example, describing a mother, father, and son enjoying each other's company on a pleasant day:

What a sight it was for the evening sun to see, level and bloody rose beneath the eaves of the chestnuts! Dan Kinsman, bemused, commencing words and swallowing their ends on half-choked chuckles, even as his eyes, quick for once, kept slant track of Vivian's every oddly exuberant gesture. Daniel, beatified, accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust. And Vivian Kinsman, unbelievable, a princess freed from some evil enchantment in exile, returned to her kingdom, leading them.

Swallowing words with half-choked chuckles? Accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust? Even if Steele were influenced by an earlier generation of descriptive-leaning writers, there's an arduous translation that this reader must make to even imagine what the scene is to be. I mention all this because "The Body of the Crime" is an extremely good story, and it could have been a minor masterpiece if overwriting and strange word choices weren't consistently getting in the way.

"Body" involves a boy, Daniel of the newfound omnivorous trust, who views his father differently after his mother dies. Daniel can remember a traumatic experience that occurred involving his father when he was three years old, but he cannot recall the details. So he returns to his childhood home and begins a sort of vision quest, depriving himself of food and water and sleep until his mind will unlock the closed door guarding that memory. It's a gripping story with a satisfying dénouement, and it also speaks to the precarious relationship of fathers and sons, and of lies told out of love that inevitably harm. But the writer's baroque tone makes the story much less accessible than it should be.

I'll conclude by mentioning two of the strongest stories in this collection, and coincidentally they are both grounded in American Western culture. I am not especially a fan of the Western genre, but like any genre there is always the opportunity to use its elements to tell a successful and engaging story. "McQuestion Rides" by Ernest Haycox finds a sheriff visiting a ranch house as he tries to find a killer whose identity is unknown. The storytelling here is swift and sharp, and there's a very satisfying human observational component.

And "An Ounce of Curiosity" is one of several stories that constant journal contributor Clarence Budington Kelland would write featuring the sardonic frontiersman Scattergood Baines. While the psychology of the tale is rather simplistic – along the lines of a sadist to animals must be the killer – Kelland's wry American humor shines through on every page. Here's a sampling, where the elderly detective deflates an excited vigilante who has likely been chasing the wrong suspect in a robbery:

"How d'ye know this feller you're chasin' done the deed?"
"Sanford said it was him."
"Recognize him plain, eh?"
"The feller was wearin' a red handkerchief over his face."
"Knew him by a strawberry mark, mebbe?"
"No, but he said it was him. And folks seen him a-comin' down Sanford's lane."
"With the pliers [the assault weapon] into his hand?" suggested Scattergood.
"Didn't have no pliers, but he was a-runnin'."
"With thutty-eight hundred dollars in his hand?" said Scattergood.

The one true outlier in this collection belongs to Edmund Pearson. His analysis of a true crime involving a girl murdered outside the wall of a monastery in 19th century France is unlike anything else presented here. I enjoy and appreciate Pearson's contributions to historical crime recording, but "The Petal of the Red Geranium" is a minor effort compared with his many other stories, and the murder's unsolved status leaves the reader on a rather restless note.

For me, many of the stories here were worth reading, and the anthology provides some insight into the themes and values of popular mystery fiction in 1930s America. I'm always grateful to read work from forgotten authors, and in some instances – such as with Clarence Budington Kelland and even with the frustrating Wilbur Daniel Steele –the cobwebby stories encourage some rigorous dusting and a call for further investigation.

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Book Review: FIND A VICTIM (1954) by Ross MacDonald

Book Review: THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald

Book Review: THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1933) by Erle Stanley Gardner

Book Review: THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR (1932) ed. Carolyn Wells

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