With private eye novels – and stories spun from any genre, really – I am especially interested in The Hook. How does the author glide (or throw or crash) the reader into the story, and how original is the premise? Are the introductory characters intriguing enough for us to commit to spending two hundred more pages in their company? Is the initial predicament straightforward or are there already twists to throw the reader off balance? And do these early pages convey the writer’s tone and skill, and are they appealing?
Since I’m interested in tracking those elements, it should be obvious that I hope to see these tools used effectively and memorably by the storyteller. The stronger The Hook and the more assured and effective the start of the story, the more I can relax as a reader because I know I’m in good hands. Ross MacDonald, the author of The Barbarous Coast (1956), provides a sublimely engaging first ten pages for his sixth novel featuring Lew Archer, and the pages and chapters that follow are similarly first-rate. The result is one of MacDonald’s most resonant and tragic tales yet, using a very human pathos to explore the familiar hard-boiled detective themes of betrayal, seduction, violence, and revenge.
Archer arrives at the gates of an exclusive club on the California coast looking for a man named Bassett. First he must deal with an angry fellow named George Wall, who is also trying to get his hands on Archer’s prospective client. The investigator learns that Wall is married to a beauty named Hester Campbell, and the woman has gone missing. Archer meets with the fussy, snooty Bassett – who is asking for bodyguard protection against Wall – and then chooses, with the flip of a coin, to take on the hot-tempered husband as his client instead of the unlikable club manager. The search for the missing wife unearths other mysteries, notably the unsolved killing of a teen girl on the beach. The victim happens to be the daughter of an ex-prize fighter named Torres, who is now working as the gate guard at Bassett’s Channel Club.
How’s that for a Hook, left, right or otherwise?
As with other titles in MacDonald’s excellent series, The Barbarous Coast anchors its story upon two slippery posts. There is the moneyed decadence and moral decay of rich families who can use their power and cash to make problems disappear; and the uneasy coexistence of the people trying to get through life by seeking truth in a way that’s personally honorable – Archer, George Wall, and the world-weary gate guard Tony Torres belong to this camp – and those willing to bend or break the truth to further their fortunes. It is not a surprise that most of Coast’s characters readily join this second group with nary a twinge of conscience, including an imperious movie producer named Simon Graff and a conceited boxer-turned-contract player named Lance Leonard, who happens to be Torres’s wayward, undisciplined nephew.
Indeed, the personalities of Coast’s characters are superbly drawn and explored, with perhaps only the rich set’s gun-toting hired heavies nearing cliché. We see the world through Lew Archer’s eyes, and that’s a good thing, since the perspective is often insightful, surprising, and quite amusing. When an offended Mr. Bassett demands to know why Archer won’t act as his bodyguard, the detective provides this unconventional, unvarnished answer:
Since I’m interested in tracking those elements, it should be obvious that I hope to see these tools used effectively and memorably by the storyteller. The stronger The Hook and the more assured and effective the start of the story, the more I can relax as a reader because I know I’m in good hands. Ross MacDonald, the author of The Barbarous Coast (1956), provides a sublimely engaging first ten pages for his sixth novel featuring Lew Archer, and the pages and chapters that follow are similarly first-rate. The result is one of MacDonald’s most resonant and tragic tales yet, using a very human pathos to explore the familiar hard-boiled detective themes of betrayal, seduction, violence, and revenge.
Archer arrives at the gates of an exclusive club on the California coast looking for a man named Bassett. First he must deal with an angry fellow named George Wall, who is also trying to get his hands on Archer’s prospective client. The investigator learns that Wall is married to a beauty named Hester Campbell, and the woman has gone missing. Archer meets with the fussy, snooty Bassett – who is asking for bodyguard protection against Wall – and then chooses, with the flip of a coin, to take on the hot-tempered husband as his client instead of the unlikable club manager. The search for the missing wife unearths other mysteries, notably the unsolved killing of a teen girl on the beach. The victim happens to be the daughter of an ex-prize fighter named Torres, who is now working as the gate guard at Bassett’s Channel Club.
How’s that for a Hook, left, right or otherwise?
As with other titles in MacDonald’s excellent series, The Barbarous Coast anchors its story upon two slippery posts. There is the moneyed decadence and moral decay of rich families who can use their power and cash to make problems disappear; and the uneasy coexistence of the people trying to get through life by seeking truth in a way that’s personally honorable – Archer, George Wall, and the world-weary gate guard Tony Torres belong to this camp – and those willing to bend or break the truth to further their fortunes. It is not a surprise that most of Coast’s characters readily join this second group with nary a twinge of conscience, including an imperious movie producer named Simon Graff and a conceited boxer-turned-contract player named Lance Leonard, who happens to be Torres’s wayward, undisciplined nephew.
Indeed, the personalities of Coast’s characters are superbly drawn and explored, with perhaps only the rich set’s gun-toting hired heavies nearing cliché. We see the world through Lew Archer’s eyes, and that’s a good thing, since the perspective is often insightful, surprising, and quite amusing. When an offended Mr. Bassett demands to know why Archer won’t act as his bodyguard, the detective provides this unconventional, unvarnished answer:
“It means living at close quarters with some of the damnedest jerks. They usually want a bodyguard because they can’t get anybody to talk to them. Or else they have delusions.”
And while some readers may not welcome Archer’s psychological assessments of his character and others – I find that they are brief, nuanced, and never intrude upon the pacing or plotting – these rare moments of reflection (presented as straightforward reportage) are valuable and compelling. An example from Chapter 24:
“I drove home on automatic pilot and went to bed. I dreamed about a man who lived by himself in a landscape of crumbling stones. He spent a great deal of his time, without much success, trying to reconstruct in his mind the monuments and the buildings of which the scattered stones were the only vestiges. He vaguely remembered some kind of oral tradition to the effect that a city had stood there once. And a still vaguer tradition: or perhaps it was a dream inside of the dream: that the people who had built the city, or their descendants, were coming back eventually to rebuild it. He wanted to be around when the work was done.”
I am also consistently impressed by the skill in which Ross MacDonald (a pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) layers the twists and complications of his plots without losing the attentive reader along for the ride. The story here is neither simple nor simplistic: the cast quickly expands to more than a dozen active characters, each with their own obscured or announced objectives. As it should happen in a P.I. mystery, each revelation – whether the uncovering of a hidden relationship or the discovery of a fresh corpse – takes Archer into new territory as the kaleidoscope turns and a new picture forms. The conclusion of this story has a mournful inevitability, as the picture clicks and clicks again until Nemesis tries to balance the board between the honorable and the corrupt.
Along with The Ivory Grin (and, if reputation is to be relied on, the upcoming title The Galton Case, which I shall read soon), The Barbarous Coast shows this ambitious author and his observant detective at their very best. It can also be sampled as a standalone story outside of the series and is highly recommended.
Along with The Ivory Grin (and, if reputation is to be relied on, the upcoming title The Galton Case, which I shall read soon), The Barbarous Coast shows this ambitious author and his observant detective at their very best. It can also be sampled as a standalone story outside of the series and is highly recommended.
RSS Feed