Ross Macdonald

Paul Newman as Lew Harper in Harper(1966), the film version of Macdonald's The Moving Target - the change of name from Archer was allegedly to fit in with the run of the actor's films that began with the letter 'H' (Hud, The Hustler, Hombre).

A Passion for Mercy

Hailed as one of the 'holy trinity of American crime writers', Ross Macdonald surpassed his predecessors Chandler and Hammett, writing detective novels informed by sorrows and by Freud, argues Tobias Jones

The Guardian, Saturday 1 August 2009

Ross Macdonald's heyday was in the early 1950s and late 1970s, when he was constantly compared to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. These three were called "the holy trinity of American crime writers", and Paul Newman starred in film adaptations of Macdonald's novels. A New York Times book review suggested that Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar) had produced "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American".

Being a Macdonald fan a few decades ago wasn't unusual or eccentric. He was a big name all over the globe. When I was clearing out my late grandmother-in-law's flat in Salsomaggiore a few years ago I discovered that even she - not the most daring of cultural connoisseurs - had a handful of Italian Macdonalds. As the family chatted about what to do with the furniture, I slipped them into my wife's handbag, hoping I could convert her to my obsession.

Macdonald's inclusion in the "holy trinity" wasn't a coincidence. At the start of his career he had consciously imitated both Hammett and Chandler. Indeed, he made his literary inheritance explicit by calling his private investigator Lew Archer (the name was suggested by Sam Spade's murdered colleague, Miles Archer, in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon). Archer, like Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe, was a laconic tough nut, a man who could wisecrack with gangsters and their molls while bringing justice to the dark corners of sunny California. Even the cast of characters assembled by Macdonald was familiar: the idle rich and their feckless, wayward children; the lonely and the lazy fretting about inappropriate marriages or stolen property. Macdonald brought to those settings an often startling poetic imagery, writing lines that can remain with you for a lifetime. Michael Connolly wrote recently that Macdonald's description of a woman kept trim by tennis and anger still reverberates in his head. Other brief observations - like a woman's "Martini accent" or her smell of "chlorine and sex" - brilliantly skewer the characters and their lifestyles.

But gradually Macdonald outgrew his literary predecessors and surpassed them. Having written crime novels that were accomplished but conventional, he began to do something different: to plumb the metaphysical depths, writing not just about legal transgressions but also about, in his words, "sorrows". Lew Archer was still a daring hard man with an eye for women and a taste for liquor, but he was slowly becoming something more profound: underneath his gruff exterior he was compassionate. In 1969, in The Goodbye Look, Archer came out with a line that would have been unthinkable for Sam Spade. "I have a secret passion for mercy," he said. "But justice is what keeps happening to people." He was a contemplative. When he's offered a bribe in The Barbarous Coast, Archer at first comes out with a Marlowe-like wisecrack: "I couldn't afford to pay the tax on it", before, in the next breath, coming out with something deeper about the power of money to possess people - "It wouldn't belong to me, I would belong to it."

Over a series spanning 18 novels, Archer became something paradoxical: a memorable character about whom the reader knows next to nothing, the man with the punchy one-liners who is actually a good listener. Macdonald once wrote of his famous creation that he was "so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears". The thinness was deliberate because Macdonald wanted his detective to be like a therapist, a man whose actions "are largely directed to putting together the stories of other people's lives and discovering their significance. He is ... a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge." Macdonald was always insistent that Archer wasn't the centre of the story. "The detective," he once advised an aspiring writer, "isn't your main character, and neither is your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective's job is to seek justice for the corpse. It's the corpse's story, first and foremost." On another occasion, he wrote that it was the "other people" - those whose problems Archer is investigating - "that are for me the main thing".

It's because of Macdonald's depth that one critic wrote of him that he didn't merely write about crime; he wrote about sin. It would be a good line if it weren't slightly misleading. It makes Macdonald sound Calvinistic, as if he were wagging a finger at wrongdoers, when he often does the opposite. There are many occasions in his novels, most notably in The Doomsters, when Archer sits and listens to a confession and the reader is moved to sympathy for the murderer. Macdonald doesn't present a paper-thin baddie but a fragile human being who is reciprocating the injustices they've suffered. And most of the characters in his books have suffered: they're abandoned by partners or parents, they're forced to confront unexpected family secrets, they're often short of love or money, normally both. As the author himself said: "The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness."

The reason Macdonald wrote about those sorrows with such succinct subtlety was that he had been there. He was born in California, but his father abandoned the family home when he was a young boy and his mother took him to Canada. There he led an itinerant life, moving between various relatives and staying - as he once recalled - in 50 different places by the time he was 16. He became, briefly, a street fighter and petty thief. Even in later years - when he had resettled in California, had written a doctoral thesis on Coleridge and had married the mystery writer Margaret Sturm - his life was beset by sadness. His notebooks hint at a suicide attempt, his marriage was far from happy, and his only daughter was involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident. She became a drug-user and died in 1970. Parts of his life story read, as his biographer Tom Nolan once put it, "just like a Ross Macdonald book". That, clearly, is how he wrote so convincingly about dysfunctional families and marital melancholia.

During the late 1950s, when he was having well-publicised difficulties with his daughter, Macdonald underwent therapy. Too much Freud can be the kiss of death for many writers' imaginations, but the couch opened his eyes to new artistic possibilities. As he later told Newsweek, in 1971: "Freud was one of the ... greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again." Macdonald realised that he could take the tragedies of ordinary life and turn them into epics. He could take contemporary suffering and turn it into something mythical. Using Lew Archer as "a kind of welder's mask ... to handle dangerously hot material", he could forge a modern narrative about California that appeared timeless and classical.

That ambition came across most clearly in The Galton Case, a novel that many consider his most successful. As well as being a gripping whodunit, it's also a fairytale in which a fatherless boy is transported from the poorhouse to the castle. There are echoes both of Oedipus and of Macdonald's own life. As one critic has pointed out, when Archer opens a suitcase to get "a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat and the subtler indescribable odour of masculine loneliness", it's probable that Macdonald is describing the nostalgic scent of his own, sea-faring father.

One wouldn't think that the detective novel suits a revisiting of classical mythologies, but Macdonald had read enough to know that a tragedy has to be prefigured, in some ways pre-announced by fate, in the same way that a whodunit has to hint at "who" long before the actual conclusion. But he didn't want simply to play a parlour game with the reader, pulling a white rabbit out of the hat at the end. He wanted the reader to understand why a crime had taken place, he wanted to show how the past had come back to haunt the present.

Often the "whodunit" aspect of the books isn't just about who committed the murder; the real mystery is about who that person really is, what mask they're wearing in the narrative. In novels full of family secrets, you might know who committed a crime 10 years ago but not be able to recognise them any more. Because, as Macdonald wrote, a detective novel "keeps changing around you. Some of the people you knew there have changed their names. Some of them wear disguises." That's why the resolutions of his novels are so satisfying - you're surprised less by who did the crime than where they've been hiding in the narrative. One member of the cast is revealed to be wearing a mask, assuming an identity that isn't their own: a family constellation is shown to be a sham, a couple who had presented themselves as siblings are in fact lovers, people you thought were mother and son are actually married.

Macdonald enjoyed a rather spiky relationship with Chandler, who saw in the younger man a pretender to his throne and who was disparaging about some of Macdonald's easygoing lyricism. Macdonald's return criticism was cooler and more precise. Chandler, he said, lacked "tragic unity" and "described a good plot as one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole". I agree: Chandler's one-liners and scenes are still glittering, but once you've read a Macdonald there's something missing at the end of a Chandler. Macdonald, by contrast, saw plot as a vehicle of meaning: "It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure." Macdonald excelled at providing those "tragic vibrations". He was able to conclude every novel in a way that sent shockwaves back through the book.

Thirty years ago, Macdonald was that rare thing - a writer who appealed both to literary critics and to the man in the street. There are critics who argue that later in his career he was always rewriting and reworking the same novel, like a painter who keeps going back obsessively to his leitmotif. It's certainly fair to say that his characters were often similar - the lost, wayward child, the cold, manipulative medic and so on - and certain themes were ever present. But he believed that each time he went over old terrain he unearthed something new. "Every time you do it, you dig deeper," he once said. "It's like going to a shrink; you're telling the same story every time, but at the same time you're discovering different aspects of it, and of yourself."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/01/ross-macdonald-crime-novels

Paul Nelson on how Ross Macdonald 'saved' Warren Zevon: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/warrenzevon/articles/story/5935191/warren_zevons_resurrection