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Lew Archer #16
The Underground Man
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder—and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline. The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California's version of the American dream.
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Ross Macdonald
170 books826 followersRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 277 reviews
August 9, 2020
Another fine Lew Archer novel--perhaps the finest. Once again, troubled young people haunted by the past are implicated in a murder, and solving that murder will involve bringing the past to light.
Although I don't think the resolution of the plot is quite as effective as some of the others (The Galton Case, The Chill, The Goodbye Look, for example) the imagery that structures the narrative is profound, resonant and organic. Toxic pollution is a powerful metaphor here (DDT and the birds, psychedelics and the '60's generation), but the basic metaphor of the book is a California wildfire: a canyon filled with fifteen years of desiccation ignites from the fall of a murdered man's cigar, and, as we follow the progress of the fire, we learn how the lives of two generations of Californians have been scarred by a fifteen-year-old crime.
There are other images of nature too--the breaking up of a yacht against the rocks, a relentless chilling storm, the threat of mudslides after fire and rain--that suggest that a chaos, haphazard and arbitrary, dominates even the merciless Furies that customarily rule Archer's world.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the denouement lacks Macdonald's usual elegance: the lack of Sophoclean clarity here is intentional. At the end of the novel, Archer finds himself thinking that "quite often nowadays the low-life subplots were taking over the tragedies." When Chaos is unleashed, tragedy can never be the same.
There's an even more effective metaphor alluded to in the title--but I'd be giving away the plot if I talked about it. This metaphor is a little over the top, but I love it; Lew Archer is definitely the archeologist of crime!
April 11, 2026
Lew Archer en plena forma, aunque la novela me resultó liosa. No es lo mejor que he leído de Ross Macdonald, pero, como siempre, es efectiva.
Lew Archer on fire, although the novel was messy to me. It's not the best thing I've read of Ross MacDonald, but, as always, it's effective.
Lew Archer on fire, although the novel was messy to me. It's not the best thing I've read of Ross MacDonald, but, as always, it's effective.
April 13, 2021
"[I] started downstairs again. Halfway down I paused and leaned on the handrail and told myself that I was descending into trouble: a pretty young woman with a likable [son] and a wandering husband . . . " -- the prescient thoughts of L.A. private investigator Lew Archer, on page 7
Although I liked but was a little underwhelmed by the previous two Macdonald-penned novels that I read (Black Money last summer, and The Goodbye Look just last month), it seemed that everything fell back into a satisfying place with The Underground Man. Let's start at the unique beginning - Lew Archer walks out of his apartment early one morning, and his unforeseen new investigation pretty much falls in his lap as he meets his new neighbors: a pleasant young wife who separated from her husband (who comes from a local 'old money' family), and their son. Soon enough the woman is asking Archer to help find said son after he disappears, and the body of the now-murdered husband is found hastily buried (see that title!) on his parents' large estate. Yes, good guy Archer gonna be doing some digging in this case, both figuratively and literally, as the situation unfolds into a multi-family / multi-generational drama that involves a mix of affluent and working-class folks with many secrets, lies, and double-crossings in their various relationships over the last three decades . . . all of this as a wild fire threatens to grow out of control on the hillsides of Los Angeles County! Author Macdonald does some fine work here with balancing all of the characters and having the various puzzle pieces fit without it seeming all too neat. I tell ya, he makes it look almost too easy at times.
Although I liked but was a little underwhelmed by the previous two Macdonald-penned novels that I read (Black Money last summer, and The Goodbye Look just last month), it seemed that everything fell back into a satisfying place with The Underground Man. Let's start at the unique beginning - Lew Archer walks out of his apartment early one morning, and his unforeseen new investigation pretty much falls in his lap as he meets his new neighbors: a pleasant young wife who separated from her husband (who comes from a local 'old money' family), and their son. Soon enough the woman is asking Archer to help find said son after he disappears, and the body of the now-murdered husband is found hastily buried (see that title!) on his parents' large estate. Yes, good guy Archer gonna be doing some digging in this case, both figuratively and literally, as the situation unfolds into a multi-family / multi-generational drama that involves a mix of affluent and working-class folks with many secrets, lies, and double-crossings in their various relationships over the last three decades . . . all of this as a wild fire threatens to grow out of control on the hillsides of Los Angeles County! Author Macdonald does some fine work here with balancing all of the characters and having the various puzzle pieces fit without it seeming all too neat. I tell ya, he makes it look almost too easy at times.
May 23, 2025
I read this in a couple of days. There is a lot to appreciate in the novel - Macdonald's short but sharp social commentary. Hilarious tongue in cheek dialogs. Lecherous descriptions of women. Liberal use of similes. The opulent but empty lives of the old rich - all of them are drunk most of the time and live in huge houses (eg.The Crandalls lived on a palm-lined street in a kind of Tudor manor with a peaked roof and brown protruding half-timbers). The plot is well ..... deliberately preposterous and complicated.
I read in an article that Macdonald had just one story throughout his career - about abandoned and confused children who find it very hard to recover from the trauma suffered from neglect by their parents. The Underground Man has not one but three such confused youngsters. Macdonald was a neglected child due to his parents separation and characters who are desperately seeking their lost parents are at the center of both The Galton Case and The Underground Man, the two Macdonald novels I have read so far.
Some of the less important characters in the book deserve novels of their own. Like the hopeless prostitute Elegant (This is how she introduces herself - "I picked up the name one day when I was feeling that way. I haven't felt that way for quite some time now.").
Or Joy Rawlins, the receptionist at the Yuca Tree Inn who is described as follows - "The woman behind the desk was dressed like a synthetic cowgirl in a brightly striped blouse and a western hat with an imitation rawhide band. She had a big friendly body which looked as if it didn't quite know what to do with itself, even after years of practice."
The book which begins as a hunt for a kidnapped child branches out into a really complicated plot involving many families whose names I had a tough time keeping track of. What I wrote in my review for The Galton Case is also true for The Underground Man - The whole novel is like one big con job. On the reader. Ross Macdonald is a great con artist.
I read in an article that Macdonald had just one story throughout his career - about abandoned and confused children who find it very hard to recover from the trauma suffered from neglect by their parents. The Underground Man has not one but three such confused youngsters. Macdonald was a neglected child due to his parents separation and characters who are desperately seeking their lost parents are at the center of both The Galton Case and The Underground Man, the two Macdonald novels I have read so far.
Some of the less important characters in the book deserve novels of their own. Like the hopeless prostitute Elegant (This is how she introduces herself - "I picked up the name one day when I was feeling that way. I haven't felt that way for quite some time now.").
Or Joy Rawlins, the receptionist at the Yuca Tree Inn who is described as follows - "The woman behind the desk was dressed like a synthetic cowgirl in a brightly striped blouse and a western hat with an imitation rawhide band. She had a big friendly body which looked as if it didn't quite know what to do with itself, even after years of practice."
The book which begins as a hunt for a kidnapped child branches out into a really complicated plot involving many families whose names I had a tough time keeping track of. What I wrote in my review for The Galton Case is also true for The Underground Man - The whole novel is like one big con job. On the reader. Ross Macdonald is a great con artist.
October 13, 2021
The ending comes barrelling at you like a freight train in the Mississippi Delta at an unlit, unmarked railroad crossing in a late Winter downpour, t-boning you into another reality as if reality was a thing.
You don't expect the Big Reveal. You might make a blind guess as to the villain(s) but you'd be doing just that: making a wild guess.
Macdonald never tips his hand to the reader. There are at least a dozen plausible suspects but... solve it yourself, Sherlock.
We do get another revelation on Archer's long blown to hell marriage:
...looked at me levelly. A kind of angry brotherhood had been growing between us. It was partly based on the fact, which he didn't know, that my wife had walked out on me and sent me divorce papers through a lawyer. And partly that we were two middle-aging men, and three young people had slipped away over the curve of the world.
As I've said earlier, this is almost an imposition into Macdonald/Millar's real life. His daughter was a troubled individual who left behind a deep wound in the Millar family starting when she began her rebelliousness in her teen years, took copious amounts of psychedelics, downs and speed and drinking excessively. Eventually -in real life- she stole the family sedan, driving blind drunk until she plowed into a crowed group of innocent young men whom she ruined for life.
At points in this novel you want to look away ...it's just too personal and obviously too painful for Macdonald/Millar to redevelop into a fictional tale of a child gone wild way too soon or way too late for the parent to recognize the familial separation.
The plot? Oh that.
Kid gets snatched by his young father and a younger woman the dad's picked up somewhere for some reason other than sex.
Mother is beside herself and seeks Archer's help.
It's a multi-layered plot. Overpopulated -as mentioned above- with suspects.
Drugs, booze, mental illness ...all contribute to a terrible poison.
Once again, everyone's guilty of something.
Highest Recommendation but then I've become a Ross Macdonald fiend.
May 12, 2023
10/2018
The books of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series are always somehow very pleasant to read, and solid, satisfying mysteries as well. This one has a background of fire and rain, with a big forest fire (Southern California).
The books of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series are always somehow very pleasant to read, and solid, satisfying mysteries as well. This one has a background of fire and rain, with a big forest fire (Southern California).
April 20, 2014
"What the hell?" This kept going through my mind from the beginning to the end of this book.
Reading along merrily (well, perhaps merrily isn't the best word) and zap, I didn't see that one coming.
Then getting confused with the characters, who's who, and in the next sentence or two Macdonald drops a short line reminding the me, the reader, exactly who that guy is. Macdonald reads my mind. Well, maybe not but he certainly seems to write for the reader, me anyway.
I love hard-boiled because they're mostly succinct and to the point; clear, clean writing with every word having a purpose.
Leave it to Lew Archer, one of the top P.I.'s in the phone book, to solve a complicated mystery.
I must admit though that I like the earlier 1950 Archers than the later ones but I'll take Ross Macdonald's writing over ________ (fill in the blank) any day.
(My fill in the blank is Stuart Woods.)
Reading along merrily (well, perhaps merrily isn't the best word) and zap, I didn't see that one coming.
Then getting confused with the characters, who's who, and in the next sentence or two Macdonald drops a short line reminding the me, the reader, exactly who that guy is. Macdonald reads my mind. Well, maybe not but he certainly seems to write for the reader, me anyway.
I love hard-boiled because they're mostly succinct and to the point; clear, clean writing with every word having a purpose.
Leave it to Lew Archer, one of the top P.I.'s in the phone book, to solve a complicated mystery.
I must admit though that I like the earlier 1950 Archers than the later ones but I'll take Ross Macdonald's writing over ________ (fill in the blank) any day.
(My fill in the blank is Stuart Woods.)
August 4, 2024
Lew Archer in fine form as he tracks down a missing child, amongst the essential mix of rich families with murky pasts, murders piling up, ex-convicts on the run, violence, sharp, dry humour and the topical addition of a forest fire threatening LA's suburbs. As always, the challenge for the reader is keeping up with the convoluted twists and turns, or accepting that it doesn't matter and just enjoying the ride.
March 23, 2016
Most detective novels take place in rooms. They are about people talking in various room with clues being teased out, lies and dissembling revealed, alibis smashed, emotional breakdowns occurring, all leading up to the nervous and tense confrontation between pursued and pursuer. Okay sometimes these rooms are on the Orient Express, or they’re on an ocean liner. And sometimes a murder occurs outdoors so the investigators get to chat about what’s taking place in the open air, but mostly the pounding away of the investigation and the high drama of the denouement takes place in a varying selection of rooms.
Written a couple of years after ‘The Moving Target’ was adapted into a so-so movie, here we have Ross MacDonald doing his damndest to open the detective story out. This isn’t just a murder case, but a murder case taking place to the background of a huge forest fire; so that the murder mystery intermingles with epic descriptions of fiery destruction, displaced communities and desperate evacuations in the face of the flames. This is an investigation proceeding in front of a ravaged and charred landscape, where the police are too busy with the chaos in their valley to really focus on a possible kidnapping, and where the investigators have soot on their faces. This is a crime writer not being content with rooms, but one offering something big and grand and visual. Here we have not just a crime story, but a spectacle, flaming hillsides for a future movie camera to devour. Clearly visual sweeps were on his mind as he did the same with an oil spill in his next book, ‘Sleeping Beauty’. He seemed to be saying to Hollywood if they want something to film, here it is! And it really is a weeping shame no enterprising producer, coupled with a special effects house, has ever taken him up on the offer.
All the normal tricks of a Lew Archer tale are here. There’s the long-ago crime now echoing in the present, old psychological scars bursting forward into the narrative, fresh murders piling onto each other in a way which might look like melodrama but feels truly grounded. And at the forefront is our slightly unknowable, but laconic and decent detective – as weary and righteous as ever. No fan of Ross MacDonald is going to be disappointed here. Connoisseurs though (of which I now consider myself one) will be a tad disappointed with one aspect. MacDonald is too interested in the psychology of the individual to fail too badly with characterisation, but he was when writing this as a man nearing his sixties, and he fails to really get hold of the two Vietnam era kids in the book – making them simply angry and fractured. Undoubtedly he is trying hard to be fair to all the characters, but even with Lew Archer’s empathy, this is a book implicitly siding with the parents and even though it doesn’t want to admit it, not really understanding what long-haired youth is up to anymore. And even though it doesn’t want to be, it does feel a far more reactionary book than one would imagine from the pen of the great Ross MacDonald.
Written a couple of years after ‘The Moving Target’ was adapted into a so-so movie, here we have Ross MacDonald doing his damndest to open the detective story out. This isn’t just a murder case, but a murder case taking place to the background of a huge forest fire; so that the murder mystery intermingles with epic descriptions of fiery destruction, displaced communities and desperate evacuations in the face of the flames. This is an investigation proceeding in front of a ravaged and charred landscape, where the police are too busy with the chaos in their valley to really focus on a possible kidnapping, and where the investigators have soot on their faces. This is a crime writer not being content with rooms, but one offering something big and grand and visual. Here we have not just a crime story, but a spectacle, flaming hillsides for a future movie camera to devour. Clearly visual sweeps were on his mind as he did the same with an oil spill in his next book, ‘Sleeping Beauty’. He seemed to be saying to Hollywood if they want something to film, here it is! And it really is a weeping shame no enterprising producer, coupled with a special effects house, has ever taken him up on the offer.
All the normal tricks of a Lew Archer tale are here. There’s the long-ago crime now echoing in the present, old psychological scars bursting forward into the narrative, fresh murders piling onto each other in a way which might look like melodrama but feels truly grounded. And at the forefront is our slightly unknowable, but laconic and decent detective – as weary and righteous as ever. No fan of Ross MacDonald is going to be disappointed here. Connoisseurs though (of which I now consider myself one) will be a tad disappointed with one aspect. MacDonald is too interested in the psychology of the individual to fail too badly with characterisation, but he was when writing this as a man nearing his sixties, and he fails to really get hold of the two Vietnam era kids in the book – making them simply angry and fractured. Undoubtedly he is trying hard to be fair to all the characters, but even with Lew Archer’s empathy, this is a book implicitly siding with the parents and even though it doesn’t want to admit it, not really understanding what long-haired youth is up to anymore. And even though it doesn’t want to be, it does feel a far more reactionary book than one would imagine from the pen of the great Ross MacDonald.
May 2, 2022
This is my first book by this author, but I've heard a lot of good things about him. And I was not disappointed.
I loved how complex and twisted this story was. The crimes went back to the events of years ago, which motivated the actions of the characters in present storyline. The whole story is really complicated and full of good twists. I predicted a few things, but it was still a lot of fun.
Typically, in classic noire novels, a private detective is drawn into a case by a beautiful woman. It is true that this is also partly the case here. But Archer cares just as much if not more about the little boy. His affair with his mother does not appear in the pages of this book. I liked such a motivation for the actions of the main character. It gave him a bit of depth and human character.
Overall, I really like Archer as the main character. I think I like him more than the typical heroes from classic noire novels, like Chandler ones. It is true that he has more psychological depth. He is also, in my opinion, a generally more likeable character.
I think I will read this author's other books some day.
I loved how complex and twisted this story was. The crimes went back to the events of years ago, which motivated the actions of the characters in present storyline. The whole story is really complicated and full of good twists. I predicted a few things, but it was still a lot of fun.
Typically, in classic noire novels, a private detective is drawn into a case by a beautiful woman. It is true that this is also partly the case here. But Archer cares just as much if not more about the little boy. His affair with his mother does not appear in the pages of this book. I liked such a motivation for the actions of the main character. It gave him a bit of depth and human character.
Overall, I really like Archer as the main character. I think I like him more than the typical heroes from classic noire novels, like Chandler ones. It is true that he has more psychological depth. He is also, in my opinion, a generally more likeable character.
I think I will read this author's other books some day.
Read
November 18, 2024The Underground Man was published late in MacDonald’s Lew Archer series. It is set in September in Southern California and, as anybody who has lived there knows, September is wildfire season. A vicious wildfire threatens to take over and burn to a crisp all the developments up the canyons above Santa Teresa, which is sort of MacDonald’s stand-in for Santa Barbara. Many of the scenes take place as Archer attempts to ferret out clues or find missing persons before all evidence of them is burned away in this massive conflagration. There are fire helicopters overhead and the local authorities are so busy with this giant disaster that they can’t be bothered with assisting Archer in his investigations, not even when a six-year-old is kidnapped by a drug-addled teen on a yacht. The title though most likely is in reference to one of the people Archer is trying to find and where Archer ultimately found this person.
The Underground Man opens a bit differently than the typical detective story. Here, Archer is not hanging around his office when an evasive client sits down and attempts to secure his services. Archer is living in a new West Los Angeles apartment and his neighbors include a young five or six year old boy (Ronny) who Archer befriends while feeding the squirrels. Archer then becomes a bit uncomfortable because the boy is in the middle of a marital squabble with the mother Jean Broadhurst staying in the apartment below with some friends and the father Stanley Broadhurst showing up to take the boy seemingly for the day to visit Grandma in Santa Teresa. Archer does not want to be involved, but is uneasy because they sounded like a couple who never expected to see each other again. Archer unexplainedly fears for the boy and wants to stop Broadhurst, but did not.
The uneasiness grows as Jean explains that she called with the fires on the news raging about Santa Teresa and Stanley’s mother had not been home and was not expecting her son and grandson. Jean is now concerned and asks Archer to take her up to Santa Teresa and help her get Ronny back. Their first stop is the couple’s home in Northridge, an unremarkable bedroom community in the San Fernando Valley, where Jean explains that Stanley keeps files on his missing father and has suggested quitting work so he can look for his father who has been gone for fifteen years full-time. Things get more suspicious when a man shows up and demands to know where Stanley Broadhurst is because this man, who had he prison pallor of an ex-con, wanted him money now.
As the fires rage in Santa Teresa and neighborhoods are being evacuated, Archer chases down slim leads to find the missing boy Ronny, who somehow disappeared onto a yacht with a naive blonde (Susan Crandall) teenager missing from her home in Los Angeles and a local college dropout (Jerry Kilpatrick). But, as Archer marches on, he finds that there are more bodies to report to the authorities and more strange connections between the people he runs into, although they are not always pleasant connections.
As if to emphasize the attitude, a motel manager tells Archer that her name is Joy Rawlins but she is thinking of changing it to Sorrow. Ellen, a painter, says each day and night feels like eternity. And, Susan Crandall says that there is no safe place in this world. She says she has already fallen and there is no place to go. It is a world of broken lost people that Archer has to contend with and the trouble they get in is often of their own making.
But don’t think at any point until the very end that you have it all figured out ahead of Archer. Believe me, you don’t. The ultimate solution to what happened goes back fifteen years and seems to involve quite a few people. In the Archer books, there are always so many dirty secrets buried in the past that won’t stay buried and that sap all the life and energy out of the present.
The Underground Man opens a bit differently than the typical detective story. Here, Archer is not hanging around his office when an evasive client sits down and attempts to secure his services. Archer is living in a new West Los Angeles apartment and his neighbors include a young five or six year old boy (Ronny) who Archer befriends while feeding the squirrels. Archer then becomes a bit uncomfortable because the boy is in the middle of a marital squabble with the mother Jean Broadhurst staying in the apartment below with some friends and the father Stanley Broadhurst showing up to take the boy seemingly for the day to visit Grandma in Santa Teresa. Archer does not want to be involved, but is uneasy because they sounded like a couple who never expected to see each other again. Archer unexplainedly fears for the boy and wants to stop Broadhurst, but did not.
The uneasiness grows as Jean explains that she called with the fires on the news raging about Santa Teresa and Stanley’s mother had not been home and was not expecting her son and grandson. Jean is now concerned and asks Archer to take her up to Santa Teresa and help her get Ronny back. Their first stop is the couple’s home in Northridge, an unremarkable bedroom community in the San Fernando Valley, where Jean explains that Stanley keeps files on his missing father and has suggested quitting work so he can look for his father who has been gone for fifteen years full-time. Things get more suspicious when a man shows up and demands to know where Stanley Broadhurst is because this man, who had he prison pallor of an ex-con, wanted him money now.
As the fires rage in Santa Teresa and neighborhoods are being evacuated, Archer chases down slim leads to find the missing boy Ronny, who somehow disappeared onto a yacht with a naive blonde (Susan Crandall) teenager missing from her home in Los Angeles and a local college dropout (Jerry Kilpatrick). But, as Archer marches on, he finds that there are more bodies to report to the authorities and more strange connections between the people he runs into, although they are not always pleasant connections.
As if to emphasize the attitude, a motel manager tells Archer that her name is Joy Rawlins but she is thinking of changing it to Sorrow. Ellen, a painter, says each day and night feels like eternity. And, Susan Crandall says that there is no safe place in this world. She says she has already fallen and there is no place to go. It is a world of broken lost people that Archer has to contend with and the trouble they get in is often of their own making.
But don’t think at any point until the very end that you have it all figured out ahead of Archer. Believe me, you don’t. The ultimate solution to what happened goes back fifteen years and seems to involve quite a few people. In the Archer books, there are always so many dirty secrets buried in the past that won’t stay buried and that sap all the life and energy out of the present.
December 17, 2021
Classic, late period Lew Archer mystery; a less hardboiled, more psychological noir
Ross MacDonald was the youngest of the three greatest novelists of the hard-boiled mystery-thriller golden era, the other two being Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hammett and Chandler died in 1959 and 1961 respectively and thus missed the tumultuous social revolution of the late 60s/early 70s that would have rendered their anti-heroes cool but hopelessly Neanderthal and out of touch. MacDonld's creation, Lew Archer, always more level-headed and pragmatic than the creations of Hammett and Chandler, must have learned to roll with the societal punches. In every outing he became less hard-boiled and more psychological in his approach to crime-solving. Yet the seamy San Teresa (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara, California) world in which he existed had a dark enough underbelly to retain the noir atmosphere of MacDonald's earliest post-pulp Archer stories.
In The Underground Man, published in 1971, we get the sense of what it must have been like for a pre-drug culture private eye to have to adjust to the hippies, beatniks, and runaways that littered Southern California in 1970. MacDonald's stories often featured the spoiled children of the West Coast upper classes, and convoluted plots in which the most unexpected connections are made between characters, all of which have a co-mingled backstory filled with secret sins.
Stanley Broadhurst is a man who has lost the plumb-line of life as he became increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened to his father, a dashing war veteran who abandoned the family and skipped town with another man's wife. When Broadhurst himself takes his son and disappears with a young woman, Lew Archer is hired by the wife, Jean Broadhurst to find them. It's a search that will uncover numerous family and community secrets among the upper class elites of Santa Teresa's real estate, yacht club, and vapid youth doper sets. Meanwhile, a mysterious fire rages across the Santa Teresa hillside communities lending a tense, heart-racing pace to what is otherwise a slow moving and complicated investigation.
MacDonald's strength as a writer is his descriptive, semi-literary prose. He is sometimes guilty of mixing metaphors and developing so many overlapping plot lines that the reader spends the middle part of his books trying to wire diagram all of the players. But with this novel, somehow or other, I manage to forgive the metaphor abuse and accept the way the threads finally come together in the end... even if I suspect he's camouflaged a few plot holes along the way.
I liked The Underground Man... even if the novel's sometimes adolescent psychoanalysis seems quaintly dated to me. This was, after all, a product of its time. We've become more jaded and cynical now in the post-modern age. Maybe it's time to go back a few decades and re-read some Dashiell Hammett. That'll machine gun the psychoanalytical sentiment out of my head! Anyway...
The Underground Man is very much recommended.
Ross MacDonald was the youngest of the three greatest novelists of the hard-boiled mystery-thriller golden era, the other two being Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hammett and Chandler died in 1959 and 1961 respectively and thus missed the tumultuous social revolution of the late 60s/early 70s that would have rendered their anti-heroes cool but hopelessly Neanderthal and out of touch. MacDonld's creation, Lew Archer, always more level-headed and pragmatic than the creations of Hammett and Chandler, must have learned to roll with the societal punches. In every outing he became less hard-boiled and more psychological in his approach to crime-solving. Yet the seamy San Teresa (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara, California) world in which he existed had a dark enough underbelly to retain the noir atmosphere of MacDonald's earliest post-pulp Archer stories.
In The Underground Man, published in 1971, we get the sense of what it must have been like for a pre-drug culture private eye to have to adjust to the hippies, beatniks, and runaways that littered Southern California in 1970. MacDonald's stories often featured the spoiled children of the West Coast upper classes, and convoluted plots in which the most unexpected connections are made between characters, all of which have a co-mingled backstory filled with secret sins.
Stanley Broadhurst is a man who has lost the plumb-line of life as he became increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened to his father, a dashing war veteran who abandoned the family and skipped town with another man's wife. When Broadhurst himself takes his son and disappears with a young woman, Lew Archer is hired by the wife, Jean Broadhurst to find them. It's a search that will uncover numerous family and community secrets among the upper class elites of Santa Teresa's real estate, yacht club, and vapid youth doper sets. Meanwhile, a mysterious fire rages across the Santa Teresa hillside communities lending a tense, heart-racing pace to what is otherwise a slow moving and complicated investigation.
MacDonald's strength as a writer is his descriptive, semi-literary prose. He is sometimes guilty of mixing metaphors and developing so many overlapping plot lines that the reader spends the middle part of his books trying to wire diagram all of the players. But with this novel, somehow or other, I manage to forgive the metaphor abuse and accept the way the threads finally come together in the end... even if I suspect he's camouflaged a few plot holes along the way.
I liked The Underground Man... even if the novel's sometimes adolescent psychoanalysis seems quaintly dated to me. This was, after all, a product of its time. We've become more jaded and cynical now in the post-modern age. Maybe it's time to go back a few decades and re-read some Dashiell Hammett. That'll machine gun the psychoanalytical sentiment out of my head! Anyway...
The Underground Man is very much recommended.
March 10, 2026
You can keep all your “cozy” slice of life books about well-adjusted people living their best lives. Give me a fucked up walking disaster any day of the week.
If I had to pick a single quote to encapsulate the themes of this book it would be this one:
This was my first Ross Macdonald novel, back in 2011, and after reading it I went out and bought as many of his other books as I could afford, paying list price (which I rarely do) for most of the Archer novels in ebook form and buying used copies of the out of print works. I didn’t binge them, stretching out the reading of his Archer novels until 2018, and not reading the second of the “Chet Gordon” books until 2024. (The Chet Gordon books are not very good, and strangely named since Chet is not the main character in either.)
Reading this the second time, after everything else, and after Nolan’s fantastic biography of him, some of the direct parallels between certain events here and in Macdonald’s own life are stunning, and I imagine must have been quite painful to write about.
Macdonald had no shortage of first hand experience with family drama, both in his own childhood and with his daughter, who killed a boy and injured another driving drunk when she was sixteen, and later disappeared for a week when she was in college, forcing Macdonald to appeal for information on TV and radio and in the papers, as well as run all over the southwest chasing down sightings. Neither Macdonald, his wife, or his daughter were the picture of mental or physical health, and his daughter died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage right after he finished this book.
Fifteen years later, this was just as amazing as the first time. (I’d forgotten whodunit! yay?) Even the title is layered. Macdonald absolutely deserves the place he’s often given as the third in the trinity of American crime writers, and at his best he’s better than Hammett or Chandler. He’s my favorite crime writer, though if you tried to force me to pick between the Lew Archer books and M.G. Lewis’s Bergeron novels I would stab you.
Since all I seem to be doing is gushing about Macdonald and not talking specifically about the book, I’ll just say I endorse this one as a place to start. His books don’t need to be read in order. Just whatever you do, don’t judge him based on #1, 2, or 17 in the Archer series, or his first four standalones. He is one of those authors who you can see growing over the course of his career. I’m considering rereading more of him, perhaps after rereading Nolan’s bio.
If I had to pick a single quote to encapsulate the themes of this book it would be this one:
He had to live out his time of trouble, as she had. And there was no assurance that he would. He belonged to a generation whose elders had been poisoned, like the pelicans, with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.
This was my first Ross Macdonald novel, back in 2011, and after reading it I went out and bought as many of his other books as I could afford, paying list price (which I rarely do) for most of the Archer novels in ebook form and buying used copies of the out of print works. I didn’t binge them, stretching out the reading of his Archer novels until 2018, and not reading the second of the “Chet Gordon” books until 2024. (The Chet Gordon books are not very good, and strangely named since Chet is not the main character in either.)
Reading this the second time, after everything else, and after Nolan’s fantastic biography of him, some of the direct parallels between certain events here and in Macdonald’s own life are stunning, and I imagine must have been quite painful to write about.
Macdonald had no shortage of first hand experience with family drama, both in his own childhood and with his daughter, who killed a boy and injured another driving drunk when she was sixteen, and later disappeared for a week when she was in college, forcing Macdonald to appeal for information on TV and radio and in the papers, as well as run all over the southwest chasing down sightings. Neither Macdonald, his wife, or his daughter were the picture of mental or physical health, and his daughter died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage right after he finished this book.
Fifteen years later, this was just as amazing as the first time. (I’d forgotten whodunit! yay?) Even the title is layered. Macdonald absolutely deserves the place he’s often given as the third in the trinity of American crime writers, and at his best he’s better than Hammett or Chandler. He’s my favorite crime writer, though if you tried to force me to pick between the Lew Archer books and M.G. Lewis’s Bergeron novels I would stab you.
Since all I seem to be doing is gushing about Macdonald and not talking specifically about the book, I’ll just say I endorse this one as a place to start. His books don’t need to be read in order. Just whatever you do, don’t judge him based on #1, 2, or 17 in the Archer series, or his first four standalones. He is one of those authors who you can see growing over the course of his career. I’m considering rereading more of him, perhaps after rereading Nolan’s bio.
November 22, 2017
Eudora Welty praised this novel highly in a NYT review, which kicked off a long correspondence with RM recently published in Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. The letters are quite good. I wish Macdonald's novels were as good as his letters. That would be something. At the risk of contradicting Miss Eudora, whose work I worship, I always feel slightly disappointed in RM's novels. They're good, just not as good as I expect them to be. Still, this is one of the better ones. Great atmosphere, lots of wonderful writing, but with a guy who never met a simile he didn't like, you're bound to get some clunkers, if not outright nonsensical ones. Here's an example of the Good and the Bad, in same paragraph:
"When I turned away from the bright counter, it was almost fully dark. I glanced up at the mountains, and was shocked by what I saw. The fire had grown and spread as if it fed on darkness. It hung around the city like the bivouacs of a besieging army."
The first simile is quite evocative, menacing in tone. The second one is such a weird head-scratcher that it detracts from power of first one.
Another example of RM's yin-yang qualities: He's very good at describing characters, portraying physical and emotional states, but my lord, you need a score card or flow chart to keep track of all of them. I understand that part of RM's larger vision here is the inexorable creep of "moral DDT," as he describes one character, within and across families. But I was constantly having to stop and ask myself, "No who's screwing who here -- literally and figuratively?" And the Misery Index with all these folks makes the House of Atreus look like petty squabblers. Now I like emotional depth in mystery-crime characters (Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, in his Quirke series, does a fine job of creating layers of psych depth without turning the narrative into a dreary slog), but RM lays it on pretty thickly. If that's a valued convention of noir, I guess it's just not one that I appreciate. Ok, so that's on me, not RM. The balance between creating emotional complexity and maintaining narrative suspense in a mystery is a tough one, I admit. RM is just not as good as others, I think.
Despite some well-executed suspense that should've tied together all the threads, in the end, I still wasn't sure exactly who killed who and why?
And despite all this carping, I did like the book well enough to finish it. And it did inspire me to check out the Welty-RM letters, so that's a plus. I look forward to reading more of the letters. Whether the letters will lead me to read more Archer novels -- to be determined.
"When I turned away from the bright counter, it was almost fully dark. I glanced up at the mountains, and was shocked by what I saw. The fire had grown and spread as if it fed on darkness. It hung around the city like the bivouacs of a besieging army."
The first simile is quite evocative, menacing in tone. The second one is such a weird head-scratcher that it detracts from power of first one.
Another example of RM's yin-yang qualities: He's very good at describing characters, portraying physical and emotional states, but my lord, you need a score card or flow chart to keep track of all of them. I understand that part of RM's larger vision here is the inexorable creep of "moral DDT," as he describes one character, within and across families. But I was constantly having to stop and ask myself, "No who's screwing who here -- literally and figuratively?" And the Misery Index with all these folks makes the House of Atreus look like petty squabblers. Now I like emotional depth in mystery-crime characters (Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, in his Quirke series, does a fine job of creating layers of psych depth without turning the narrative into a dreary slog), but RM lays it on pretty thickly. If that's a valued convention of noir, I guess it's just not one that I appreciate. Ok, so that's on me, not RM. The balance between creating emotional complexity and maintaining narrative suspense in a mystery is a tough one, I admit. RM is just not as good as others, I think.
Despite some well-executed suspense that should've tied together all the threads, in the end, I still wasn't sure exactly who killed who and why?
And despite all this carping, I did like the book well enough to finish it. And it did inspire me to check out the Welty-RM letters, so that's a plus. I look forward to reading more of the letters. Whether the letters will lead me to read more Archer novels -- to be determined.
September 19, 2010
This is vintage Ross Macdonald: rich society, double crosses, disturbed youth, dirty secrets all set in the Southern California "ghetto" (his word, not mine). The enigmatic, faceless PI Lew Archer reveals in this book he was once married. But that's it. But Lew is a good guy to have around in a tight jam. Sometimes I felt this one read like the author's autobiography. Quick read. Lots of characters to keep track of in the fast moving plot. Sometimes on this re-read the similes get in the way of the writing, but they are a standard ploy in the older traditional private eye books since Marlowe cracked a million of them.
July 2, 2023
The story opens when Lew Archer is awakened by his bedroom window being attacked by blue jays. He got himself up, opened a can of peanuts and threw them out for the jays. I had to smile at this. "My" blue jays don't attack the window, but they are most certainly vocal and insistent that I present them with their morning peanuts.
Anyway, while Archer is out in the yard making sure his blue jays have their proper breakfast, a 6-year old boy comes to see what he's doing. And Archer learns what the boy is doing, because he's never seen him before and he doesn't live in the downstairs apartment. He's there because his mother walked out on his father the night before and friends loaned her their vacant apartment. Soon enough Ronny Broadhurst's father Stanley comes around the corner. He and Ronny are headed to Grandma Nell's house for the day.
It has been said that Ross Macdonald is the literary heir to hard-boiled writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Certainly Macdonald writes of the same southern California as Chandler. For myself, I'll just say that no one writes like Chandler - at least no one I've read. For me, Chandler's style epitomizes Noir and Macdonald's writing style is his own. Also, I think Philip Marlowe has a certain cynicism that I feel Lew Archer does not possess.
I've rationed myself in reading Chandler. He didn't complete enough novels for me to read him too often. Macdonald has written more and I'll be happy to get to him a bit more often. That is, if only there weren't so many others to read as well. I'll try to do better. I don't think this quite makes 4-stars and I can't put my finger on what is holding me back. But a very very good 3-stars it is.
Anyway, while Archer is out in the yard making sure his blue jays have their proper breakfast, a 6-year old boy comes to see what he's doing. And Archer learns what the boy is doing, because he's never seen him before and he doesn't live in the downstairs apartment. He's there because his mother walked out on his father the night before and friends loaned her their vacant apartment. Soon enough Ronny Broadhurst's father Stanley comes around the corner. He and Ronny are headed to Grandma Nell's house for the day.
It has been said that Ross Macdonald is the literary heir to hard-boiled writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Certainly Macdonald writes of the same southern California as Chandler. For myself, I'll just say that no one writes like Chandler - at least no one I've read. For me, Chandler's style epitomizes Noir and Macdonald's writing style is his own. Also, I think Philip Marlowe has a certain cynicism that I feel Lew Archer does not possess.
I've rationed myself in reading Chandler. He didn't complete enough novels for me to read him too often. Macdonald has written more and I'll be happy to get to him a bit more often. That is, if only there weren't so many others to read as well. I'll try to do better. I don't think this quite makes 4-stars and I can't put my finger on what is holding me back. But a very very good 3-stars it is.
November 23, 2019
I try to be very sparing when it comes to five-star ratings, but "The Underground Man" is Ross Macdonald at his finest -- and that's saying something.
I have been reading the Lew Archer series more or less from start to finish, and "The Underground Man," written in 1971, is the best so far, with Macdonald's combination of Southern California noir, complex plotting and carefully controlled craft in full effect. Consider this paragraph, from the first page of the book:
"It was a bright September morning. The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge like cheap paper darkening in the sunlight. There was no wind at all now, but I could smell the inland desert and feel its heat."
The shift from the bright morning in the first sentence to the cheap paper and the heat of the desert echoes Macdonald's exploration of the seamy underside of Southern California, which still thrives in the shadows cast by the bright sun and hides from a past full of corruption and greed.
Archer himself is a half-broken hero, the detective who can see through everything but his own illusions, the man who tries to save everyone but can't save himself.
All these themes mingle in "The Underground Man," along with the inescapable traces of human weakness that echo down through the generations. The mystery is tangled but neatly resolved, the writing superb and the moral vision perfect for a 21st century that seems to have left its soul somewhere in a distant, better past.
As with the best of any genre, there's more here than meets the eye -- and even those who don't particularly care for mysteries will find much to admire, and enjoy, in "The Underground Man."
I have been reading the Lew Archer series more or less from start to finish, and "The Underground Man," written in 1971, is the best so far, with Macdonald's combination of Southern California noir, complex plotting and carefully controlled craft in full effect. Consider this paragraph, from the first page of the book:
"It was a bright September morning. The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge like cheap paper darkening in the sunlight. There was no wind at all now, but I could smell the inland desert and feel its heat."
The shift from the bright morning in the first sentence to the cheap paper and the heat of the desert echoes Macdonald's exploration of the seamy underside of Southern California, which still thrives in the shadows cast by the bright sun and hides from a past full of corruption and greed.
Archer himself is a half-broken hero, the detective who can see through everything but his own illusions, the man who tries to save everyone but can't save himself.
All these themes mingle in "The Underground Man," along with the inescapable traces of human weakness that echo down through the generations. The mystery is tangled but neatly resolved, the writing superb and the moral vision perfect for a 21st century that seems to have left its soul somewhere in a distant, better past.
As with the best of any genre, there's more here than meets the eye -- and even those who don't particularly care for mysteries will find much to admire, and enjoy, in "The Underground Man."
December 19, 2008
I love Ross MacDonald. This book had all of the standard MacDonald elements--a complicated web of familial and sexual relationships, extramarital affairs, multiple murders, horribly corrupt rich folk--both old money and nouveau riche--all magnified by the mentally disturbed adolescents who inherit the sins of their fathers and mothers. I know it sounds depressing but it's great fun. Fun like opening the paper to a new Blagojevich or Monica Lewinski type scandal every morning for a week or two. Plus, you get to enjoy trying to figure out who slept with whom and who killed whom. And you get the indominable, tough but nice guy Lew Archer as your guide through this mucky, hard-boiled world (otherwise known as L.A.).
March 31, 2017
An eerily sentient wildfire coiling its way through southern California, the angry son of a long-missing ship captain found in an open grave with a pickaxe in his brain, the emotionally distraught wife and now missing son he left behind, the story told to this possibly kidnapped child of a parent-eating monster, a pair of young people with a stolen boat and a lot of emotional baggage, an escaped con with a toupee as bad as the ideas he has for an easy buck, a slow-witted gardener and his domineering mother, a schoolmarm turned high-end adulteress turned reclusive painter, a sleazy suburb planner with his hooks deep into a wealthy family—all in a day’s work for Lew Archer, the roving moral consciousness who navigates each of Ross Macdonald’s superior private eye mysteries.
July 15, 2024
If more families in Southern California had used the services of a good psychiatrist Lew Archer would've been out of business.
June 25, 2020
3.5 - Too convoluted - too many names, too many twists and turns - to my taste.
(I listened to this story: don't - that is if you want to enjoy this as a puzzle of detection rather than a crime adventure show. Read - unless you don't mind continually halting the audio to (mentally or actually) jot down names and dates and data or brood over the story for a while.)
But Macdonald delivers, as is his wont, an original plot that makes sense, with his hallmark nifty twist in the tail and no loose ends or other irritants that make one frown and scratch the pate. Not one of his finest, but I can picture a fine detective movie from the good old '70s such as "The Drowning Pool" or "Harper" - both portrayals of Macdonald novels - made out of this stuff.
(I listened to this story: don't - that is if you want to enjoy this as a puzzle of detection rather than a crime adventure show. Read - unless you don't mind continually halting the audio to (mentally or actually) jot down names and dates and data or brood over the story for a while.)
But Macdonald delivers, as is his wont, an original plot that makes sense, with his hallmark nifty twist in the tail and no loose ends or other irritants that make one frown and scratch the pate. Not one of his finest, but I can picture a fine detective movie from the good old '70s such as "The Drowning Pool" or "Harper" - both portrayals of Macdonald novels - made out of this stuff.
August 28, 2021
I really enjoyed listening to this as an audio book. Tom Parker does a great job. Perversely though, I couldn’t explain the plot to you because I found it almost impossible to follow. I do know who did it. Just have no clear understanding of why. But this just underscores how brilliant Lew Archer is: he can make sense of the complicated threads between suspects where the rest of us are simply left bewildered.
August 15, 2019
Marvellous story! I really like the way all parts of the puzzle fit together, and one is kept in suspense till the end to find out who the murderer is.
February 16, 2009
You know that famous Faulkner quote about how the past isn't dead, in fact it isn't even past? Ross Macdonald took that idea to heart more than just about any other novelist. His detective novels are stunningly intricate webs of murder, deceit, and corruption in which all the above sins are passed on from generation to generation among cruel rich families. Call it tragedy-noir, or just call it brilliant and moving. Ross Macdonald is the man. This one is a good place to start if you're looking for an entry point.
July 11, 2018
A smart and well-written mystery set in southern California at the beginning of the '70s, with a good flavour of the era.
April 16, 2022
3.5/5
Lew Archer is asked by his beautiful neighbor Jean Broadhurst to find her son – Ronny, who might have been kidnapped by her husband Stanley. Stanley is obsessed with the death of his father who left years ago for a different woman. The setup allows Macdonald to dabble in his favorite theme – the screwed up past gunning for the present. Ron is discovered stolen by two tortured teenagers – Jerry Kilpatrick and Susan Crandall. Kilpatrick’s father has given him too much leeway; Crandall’s parents gave her too little. The parents range from bossy to bored, domineering to defeatist. The children are left picking up the pieces as Macdonald explores dysfunctional families. There are a lot more characters, most of them are drawn too large and function as plot pawns. It is tough keeping track of everyone at the beginning. All of them are also hiding secrets from the past.
I did not enjoy the investigation process. It felt like I was just waiting for the whodunit reveal rather than enjoy the journey. Maybe it was the presence of too many throwaway characters, the quality of prose was also better in a few of his other books. The solution to the mystery is complex and a second reading is needed to understand how Macdonald had planted the seeds for his reveal through the course of the book. It leaves minor inconsistencies but I went with the flow.
Like most classic noirs The Underground Man oscillate between existential tragedy and crime melodrama. Lew Archer remains a distant observer who overuses metaphors that do not always fit. It is about fifty pages longer than the first few books in the series. The extra word count slows down the plot. The mystery plays out against the backdrop of a raging fire which is swallowing everything in its path, Macdonald is not exactly subtle with the symbolism.
I had previously credited Macdonald for adding psychology to noir. But this is the sixteenth book in the series and his pocket sized psychological insights are exposed as shallow. If Macdonald had wanted the narrative to be richer he should have written stronger characters. Instead it is all armchair psychology. The girl with promiscuous mother is afraid of sex. The doormat’s mother is controlling and a covert narcissist. Stanley Broadhurst’s mother is cold so he has devoted his life to his absent father. It is Freud painted in the broadest strokes possible. It is still an enjoyable little mystery just not one with a lot of depth.
Quotes:
I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like the animals in the ark.
She was one of those paranoid souls who kept her conscience clear by blaming everything on other people.
Lew Archer is asked by his beautiful neighbor Jean Broadhurst to find her son – Ronny, who might have been kidnapped by her husband Stanley. Stanley is obsessed with the death of his father who left years ago for a different woman. The setup allows Macdonald to dabble in his favorite theme – the screwed up past gunning for the present. Ron is discovered stolen by two tortured teenagers – Jerry Kilpatrick and Susan Crandall. Kilpatrick’s father has given him too much leeway; Crandall’s parents gave her too little. The parents range from bossy to bored, domineering to defeatist. The children are left picking up the pieces as Macdonald explores dysfunctional families. There are a lot more characters, most of them are drawn too large and function as plot pawns. It is tough keeping track of everyone at the beginning. All of them are also hiding secrets from the past.
I did not enjoy the investigation process. It felt like I was just waiting for the whodunit reveal rather than enjoy the journey. Maybe it was the presence of too many throwaway characters, the quality of prose was also better in a few of his other books. The solution to the mystery is complex and a second reading is needed to understand how Macdonald had planted the seeds for his reveal through the course of the book. It leaves minor inconsistencies but I went with the flow.
Like most classic noirs The Underground Man oscillate between existential tragedy and crime melodrama. Lew Archer remains a distant observer who overuses metaphors that do not always fit. It is about fifty pages longer than the first few books in the series. The extra word count slows down the plot. The mystery plays out against the backdrop of a raging fire which is swallowing everything in its path, Macdonald is not exactly subtle with the symbolism.
I had previously credited Macdonald for adding psychology to noir. But this is the sixteenth book in the series and his pocket sized psychological insights are exposed as shallow. If Macdonald had wanted the narrative to be richer he should have written stronger characters. Instead it is all armchair psychology. The girl with promiscuous mother is afraid of sex. The doormat’s mother is controlling and a covert narcissist. Stanley Broadhurst’s mother is cold so he has devoted his life to his absent father. It is Freud painted in the broadest strokes possible. It is still an enjoyable little mystery just not one with a lot of depth.
Quotes:
I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like the animals in the ark.
She was one of those paranoid souls who kept her conscience clear by blaming everything on other people.
May 13, 2022
MacDonald writes with an earthy Chandler-like style. His main character Lew Archer is a tough but decent private eye in Los Angeles. The book is written in the first person. It's my first MacDonald novel. I enjoyed the writing style, despite some quirks. He never met a simile he doesn't like and has no compunction about creating more, sensible or not. There's a lot of dialog, so in that sense it's an easy read, but there are many characters who have, or in the past, had, relationships both open and hidden. This makes it hard to follow. There are multiple murders but Lew Archer is on the job. The detective work is rather simple but also pretty realistic, speaking as an ex-FBI agent. That makes it more enjoyable for me. It reminds me of the Sue Grafton alphabet series in that respect. In fact, it also reminds me of that same series because it takes place largely in Santa Teresa, the fictional city representing Santa Barbara that Grafton also uses. The ending was a bit too neat and tidy for my taste, but I enjoyed how the author worked in the investigation of Archer with the local murders and the ongoing wildfire that served as a backdrop. It was unrealistic the way everybody seemed to tell Archer whatever he wanted to know, whether officials revealing official info, or involved persons who repeatedly told him to get lost and clammed up, only to start blabbing again and answering all his questions. If only it were that easy.
January 6, 2018
I have been reading the Archer novels chronologically but haven't enjoyed the last two as much as the earlier novels. Archer is growing older and has become, in my opinion, less interesting. The novels are becoming much less "hardboiled". I've read that Macdonald has been adding "more literary themes and psychological depth" to his stories as the series progresses. I guess I fell that these additions are just slowing things down and making them more convoluted. None of the characters, including Archer, were very interesting. The ever changing knowledge about the murky interrelationships between the characters never became impactful to the complex plot. By the time all the pieces came together in a wimpy ending I no longer cared very much. And it didn't seem that Archer cared very much either. We both hung around to the end but I'm not sure it was worth it to either of us.
October 21, 2014
Another compelling and extremely well-written entry in Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer series of detective novels. This one, in concert with Macdonald's ongoing theme, revolves around an old family secret that comes back to haunt those lucky enough to have survived the events of the secret. Macdonald is simply one of the best writers of this sort of fiction, a writer with poetry and heartbreak and melancholy in his soul who conveys those attributes without undue cynicism and with an unobtrusive but magical way with words. This is one of his best.
October 22, 2018
The 16th(!) Lew Archer book by Ross Macdonald and it may be my favorite. I really liked the sense of urgency and tension. Short version: Lew befriends a small child who is his neighbor one morning. That evening the child goes missing while a wildfire slowly consumes the California countryside. The clock was really ticking on this one and the strain of it pushes Archer to the tipping point. This is one case that he can't mess up. The mystery is excellent and the writing top notch. I literally couldn't put this book down until I finished it.
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