COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

>> Colette on Tom Nolan's Macdonald Biography

I FELL IN LOVE WITH MYSTERIES the first time I read one, and it was all Ross Macdonald's fault.

Actually, I blame it on my brother Gerry. Gerry has done me a million or so favors over the years, but one of the best was handing me a copy of The Zebra-Striped Hearse when I was 14 and saying, "You have to read this."

He's two years younger, and I hated to admit he was right, but it didn't take more than a couple of pages for Macdonald to get a grip on my brain with that book. More than 30 years later, I can still recall his description of a raggedy bunch of surfers huddled on a cold California beach. Macdonald took the popular image of surfers as carefree kiddies and California as a golden paradise -- this was the heyday of the Beach Boys -- and turned it dark side up on his pages. Wrapped around the image of the surfers was a tale of secret lusts and terrible revenge, and at its heart a man strong and wise enough to unravel it. It was like nothing I'd ever encountered before. I read the book straight through.

Since then, I've read every one of Macdonald's books. He wrote some two dozen novels featuring melancholy, driven, quietly cool private eye Lew Archer over a period of about 30 years. When he died in 1983, he left behind one of the most influential bodies of work in the mystery genre. Countless other writers cite him as an inspiration; to name just two of the most successful, Sue Grafton put her Kinsey Milhone to work in Santa Teresa, the same fictional Southern California coastal town Archer lived and worked in, and Robert Parker wrote his doctoral dissertation on the three masters Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald.

One measure of the quality of Macdonald's work is how well it bears rereading. I can count on one hand the number of mystery authors whose books I'll reread over and over -- or for that matter, even once. Macdonald is one of them. I've read all his novels multiple times, yet each time I find something fresh. That's rare for any kind of writing. For mystery novels, couched in the details of popular culture, to still ring true 30 or 40 years after publication is remarkable.

One reason Macdonald's books hold up so well is their complex structure. The crimes Archer investigates always hinge upon the pasts of the victims and others involved. There's no such thing as random crime in Archer's territory, though things may start out looking that way. Violence is usually the result of some tragic family secret -- an affair, a secret child or disguised paternity -- that has been hidden for years and finally explodes. It's a story type at least as old as Oedipus Rex, but Macdonald finds something new in it each time.

In keeping with this structure based on family drama, Archer himself is as much a psychiatrist or confessor as an investigator. These books are the farthest thing from procedurals; Archer solves crimes based not on blood types and weapons trajectories and times of death but by asking the right human questions. He is intuitive and empathetic, not domineering and certainly not quick on the draw. Macdonald himself described him this way in a 1973 essay, "The Writer as Detective Hero":

"I don't have to celebrate Archer's physical or sexual prowess, or work at making him consistently funny and charming. He can be self-forgetful, almost transparent at times, and concentrate as good detectives (and good writers) do, on the people whose problems he is investigating."

Finally, Macdonald was a master of the language. His writing is lean and powerful, its characters and settings observed with a sharpshooter's focus. His images can be as memorable, as surprising as poetry. An example is the title of The Blue Hammer -- a phrase the mystery reader might expect to be a description of a gun or a murder weapon. But here is its context, as Archer describes a night with a woman he is half in love with and has recently rescued from a murderer:

"Betty yawned and went to sleep again. I lay awake and watched her face emerging in the slow dawn. After a while I could see the steady blue pulse in her temple, the beating of the silent hammer that meant that she was alive. I hoped the blue hammer would never stop."

If you haven't read Ross Macdonald, do. If you have, do it again. And thanks, Gerry.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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