Ross MacDonald’s Ethical Sleuth
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‘I don’t know what justice is… truth interests me, though.’
Making his first full novel appearance in 1949’s The Moving Target, Lew Archer perhaps best of all epitomised the old Raymond Chandler edict that detective stories feature the ‘plausible actions of plausible people in plausible situations’. Perhaps Chandler’s is not the most inspiring or lyrical of mantras, but it was a call to display characters warts and all that would have found plenty of credence in Ross MacDonald’s California-set crime novels. Over a series of 18 books, former police officer Archer often walks a thin line: beaten and imprisoned by crooks, barely tolerated by the police, maligned by the people he is seeking to help. But he has a commitment to truth, and will often see that truth out even if it’s to his detriment. Archer’s code is about discovering what is right, doing as much as he can to set it so, but ultimately allowing people to live their own way. Even in ensuring that benefit comes to those that are deserving but completely ill-equipped to use such advantages wisely. In that, he is a far more understanding and empathetic character than either Hammett’s Continental Operative or Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
Archer’s world encapsulates everything from the filthy rich to the destitute of street corner hustlers and trailer park trash. The corruption he sees is often based in the very foundations of how the rich acquired their wealth – inherited money and land or latterly oil often a key ingredient in MacDonald’s plots even from the environmentally unconscious 1950s. The difference between the rich and poor in Archer’s world is so often a case of luck, with invariably a tragic flaw in either the make-up of an individual or the family background contributing to what will be – without Archer’s assistance – an inevitable fall. By the time the case is over, while some balances may have been achieved, the reader will know as well as Archer himself that trouble is still just around the corner. The world has been righted as far as Archer can, and almost like Alan Ladd’s iconic Shane, he will walk away and allow those remaining to do what they can for themselves.
Throughout his books, MacDonald regularly made use of his literary background as only a graduate student who had immersed himself in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have. Lauded at the time by such luminaries as William Goldman and Eudora Welty, MacDonald continues to have a dedicated fan-base on both sides of the pond, influencing the works of James Ellroy, Jonathan Kellerman and Michael Connelly in the States while the Irish writer John Banville sees MacDonald as an artist capable of ‘ingenuity and subtlety’. The Archer novels also offer a telling glimpse of a California changing rapidly even as society becomes more stratified. The richer will remain so irrespective of their faults, the poor will continue to struggle whether in the presidency of Harry Truman or Gerald Ford. Archer will watch all this with as unjaundiced an eye as possible, a man who has a ‘private conscience; a poor thing but (his) own’.
Check out: The Drowning Pool, The Galton Case, The Ivory Grin, Sleeping Beauty.
