Category: Ross MacDonald

The Last of 2018 - and Looking Ahead from Here

12/31/2018

Do I dare define 2018 in one word? If I were to be so bold, that word would probably be busy. Not chaotic, really, or exhausting – although it was a little of that – but just plain-and-simple busy would work best. It was this year that I moved from multiple adjunct teaching jobs to one full-time, office-hours academic advising job, which meant less grading but far more paperwork and student appointments. And I still teach an online class here and there, which further takes time away from personal projects.

Nevertheless, 2018 proved a very good year for writing, with three stories published (and/or e-published) and available to all. My new tale "The Last Ferry", which I wrote in February, appears in Landfall: The Best New England Crime Stories of 2018 from Level Best Books. And I was delighted to learn that "The Widow Cleans House", my first published short story in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, was chosen for reprint in the anthology Terror at the Crossroads, released in October by Penny Publications/Eris Press.

Also débuting this year was my first long-form effort, and my first LGBTQ romantic comedy to boot. Knights Erring, available from Less Than Three Press, follows three friends who bet each other that they can't uphold the tenets of chivalry (including poverty, chastity, and obedience) for two weeks. The story made it through multiple drafts and grew considerably, and I'm very happy with the current version.

My Reading List – an annual compulsion that I started in 2005 when I decided to note every book, script, or story collection I finished from that point forward – tells me that I read 64 titles this year, which is less than in previous years, but still surprising given the sheer busyness of 2018. (See Paragraph One.) I would note the following items as standouts:

Beartown (2016) – Fredrik Backman's unsentimental exploration of a small northern town that lives - and almost destroys itself - for its high school hockey team
The Moving Target (1949) – Ross MacDonald's first Lew Archer mystery
Exit, Pursued by a Bear (2012) – Lauren Gunderson's darkly comic play about a woman taking revenge on her abusive husband
The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House (2008) by Laton McCartney – why would this story of a corrupt president and a Republican congress trying to hide and bury illegal dealings seem familiar?

Honorable mentions go to Bodies from the Library (2018), a fun collection of lesser-known stories by famous classic mystery authors edited by Tony Medawar, and Gregory McDonald's buoyant sequel Confess, Fletch (1976), which is twistier and more satisfying than his solid earlier effort.

And it was great to return to a book by Gladys Mitchell. I haven't spent much time in her company lately, so I made the excuse to remedy that by launching the Mitchell Mystery Reading Group. I spent a wonderful (and busy) November discussing and dissecting the 1929 Mrs. Bradley whodunit farce The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop. I loved all of the topics and conversational roads that I likely would never have traveled if I had revisited the book on my own, and I am looking forward to the next group reading event, probably in March or April of 2019. I'll choose a 1930s title and announce it the month before; I already have some suggestions from fans, and there are a lot of solid tales to choose from in that decade!

Finally, I will end by offering a version of the familiar New Year's Resolutions. In addition to hosting another Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event (two if I can manage it), 2019 will be the year I finally submit an entry for the Black Orchid Novella writing contest, sponsored by the Rex Stout appreciation club The Wolfe Pack. Before that, I should deliver a completed Act Two (currently in progress) for a stage comedy that I'm writing for a regional theater company. I'd like to also push myself to complete two new crime-themed short stories next year. And I want to keep my eyes open for new writing and contest opportunities, something that I don't always look for as rigorously as I should.

I hope everyone has a 2019 that rivals, nay exceeds, the success and joy that 2018 (hopefully) provided. And if your 2018 was less than you wanted it to be, you have every reason to be optimistic as we flip the calendar and turn the page together!

Peace and best wishes,
Jason Half

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

7/22/2018

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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.

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.

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

7/7/2018

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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.

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.

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The Last of 2018 - and Looking Ahead from Here

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

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

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