Find a Victim
Find a Victim by Ross MacDonald 1954 Warner Books Mystery
This is a Lew Archer Novel. Lew is the classic private detective who looks for trouble. I lost count of how many times Lew had his face battered in this story. For $700 he was earning every bruise.
It’s written in first person so Lew has to talk to a lot of people as he tries to uncover the crime. He is drawn in by an act of kindness. He sees a man on the side of the road. He’s been shot. He takes him to the nearest building, a motel owned by a tough guy named Kerrigan. He knows the man, Tony, who dies in the hospital. He was driving a shipment of whiskey worth $7,000. The semi is missing. Kerrigan’s wife, Kate, wants him to find out what happened to their desk clerk, Anne. She thinks Kerrigan was going to run off with her.
Lew follows one lead to the next and the reader needs to make a list to keep the characters straight because the plot has plenty of twist and turns. Lew makes a few mistakes, too. Anne’s sister, Hilda, is married to Sheriff Brand Church. Sometimes Lew likes him and other times he thinks Church is dirty.
The truck full of whiskey was owned by Hilda and Anne’s father. He hires Lew to find it. He doesn’t know Anne is missing. He corrupted her. That’s code for incest, but the men are allowed their vices in this period and dark style. The women get punched, raped, and abandoned. It’s the 50s. The women aren’t innocent. They blackmail, sleep around, and know how to shoot a gun.
Kerrigan has a new girlfriend, Jo, who knew Tony and has a boyfriend on the side named Bozey. They all figure into a plot involving stolen money, hijacked whiskey, and a missing woman.
MacDonald uses setting to describe the darkness and bleakness of life where everyone is sleeping with someone else’s wife and looking to make a quick buck. It’s a seedy town but Lew’s motto is “he doesn’t want jerks and hustlers to take over.” He wants to put away the bad guy. He finds plenty in Las Cruces.
More book reviews are available at www.authorfreeman.wordpress.com
