I've been quite taken with what I've read so far of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series. Archer is named after Sam Spade's dead partner but probably has more in common with Philip Marlowe. He's more of a subtle operator than you expect from a hardboiled detective, but he's also quite honest.
The one I'm reading now, The Chill, seems very much like a high point to me. It takes place in a Southern California college town. Archer is approached by a man desperate to find his bride, who's run out on him. As you might expect, it opens out into a murder case, or two, or three.
Won't go into the plot, really. It just has to be read. But Macdonald builds an almost Medieval world of clans and coteries. There are "good" families and "bad" families, but members of the former can be trapped as well as the latter. And where all sorts of safety nets fail, Archer has to act on behalf of a suspect who is out there on her own.
2 comments:
I see your point that Lew Archer's character bears a close relationship to Chandler's Marlowe, with a few notable differences. For one he has more friends than Marlow does and he also tends to be more involved with his characters as real people whose motivations we can understand. Even though the main protagonists are often wealthy he's equally adept at biting social criticism, painting portraits not only of a special time and place, but of the basic human condition that remains accessible today.
The Chill has great plotting that holds your attention and leads you deeper into the developing puzzle with red herrings and double triple crosses galore. Evil done in the distant past eventually catches up with the villain (who I imagine you now know) in a surprising but very satisfactory way. Sometimes there's room for an epilogue and other times the writer simply has to stop. Since he often does the former I was surprised this time but there really wasn't anything more to say.
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Jer asked me to redo the link that broke in the comment he made to your 'Ninety-something in the shade' post a few days ago. It's called 98.6.
It's true that Archer is less isolated than Marlowe. Partly I think that's a function of longevity. Macdonald had time to think about what kind of confederates in the field you'd need to do this kind of work properly, and gradually set about giving them to his lead character. There are universal truths here about the human condition, while the sensory details really do evoke California at the time it was published.
Like I said to Jerry, the arrangement the two people at the center of the plot had made wasn't sustainable. Someone was going to wind up getting hurt. Sad to say some of them were relatively innocent. I did notice the lack of an epilogue, since I had seen them in other books of his. Wasn't really necessary in this case, though.
That is a nice song. Not sure if I've actually heard it before or not. I know I'm not familiar with Keith, so I was half expecting Keith Moon to have something with it.
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