Lew Archer – The Thrilling Detective Web Site

created by the pseudonym ross macdonald. by kenneth millar aka john ross macdonald, john macdonald (1915-83)

“I hear voices crying at night and I’m going to see what happens”. — archer lew

The greatest P.I. series ever written?

You are reading: Lew archer books in order

probably.

lew archer meets the continental op, sam spade and philip marlowe as one of the few p .i is the one who really defines the genre. What makes Archer unique among this group is not only the fact that the books are a sustained narrative spanning three decades, but they also made the genre relevant to a changing society. Where Hammett revolutionized crime fiction and Chandler romanticized it, Macdonald, by his own account, “…gradually shed the aura of romance and made room for full social realism.” lew archer made all that followed possible.

Named after Spade’s slain companion in The Maltese Falcon, the first archery books, beginning with the first, The Moving Target (1949), are set in a Chandleresque setting. of rich men, aspiring stars, gamblers and mobsters. Both Archer and Marlowe are alike in that they look wearily at the corruption and greed of Southern California. both are men with a strong sense of right and wrong that, above all else, has led them to leave their previous police jobs on principle.

“money was not the main thing. could not stand podex osculation. and I didn’t like dirty politics. I didn’t quit anyway, I got fired,” Archer explains.

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the drowning pool (1950) begins, like the great dream, with an archer calling a rich invalid. Like Marlowe, the archer has to fend for himself. yes, this is an occupational hazard: archer admits that “everyone hates detectives and dentists. we hate them too.”

The first books in the series, up to the doomsters (1958), are “classic” p.i texts in structure and content. they remind us that macdonald was an accomplished crime writer (like kenneth millar) and that he had already written a great book, blue city, in 1947 (the author’s first four books, all independent, preceding the white mobile are worth checking out).

but archer was something else.

His investigations take him to Southern California which exposes the lie of the American dream. towns as oases in how some die (1951) where the lights of the town are “… lost and small in the great night spaces.” Archer’s social commentary on these places is both critical and exasperating; as in the drowning pool, where he observed that “there’s nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in ocean levels can’t cure.”

Ivory Smile (1952) takes as its starting point the arrival at Archer’s office of a woman who is not all that she seems and who wants Archer to find a missing servant who has been indiscreet. what would be a cliché today still reads as fresh and exciting today. Archer heads to Bella City. what follows (murders, femme fatales, cops, sleazy motels) brings the book to its conclusion (by the way, one of the strangest and most macabre missing person case conclusions you’re likely to read) and sometimes reads like a 1940s black book. and white film noir.

Both the doomsters and the galton case (1959) were central to the series and marked a major change in direction. the doomsters had, in macdonald’s opinion, “…marked a fairly clean break with sailing ship tradition”. with the galton case it became clear what this meant. Archer became “the mind of the novel…a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge.” in it, a lost son emerges from a brutal and murderous past. The construction of a new shopping center reveals a skullless skeleton of the idealistic and radical John Galton. In turn, his son reappears and Archer exposes his true identity. in doing so, he brings to consciousness past life failures and their impact on the present.

From the wycherly woman (1961) to black money (1966), the focus of the books became increasingly “psychological.” The past is inescapable, and Archer searches people’s lives for some kind of resolution to his past failures that have come back to haunt his children. the suppression of truth leads inexorably to crisis. a missing person or object triggers the investigation and many repressed secrets surface. the murders pile up while protecting the pretense of the past. Archer exposes the illusions that people have to maintain in order to get on with their lives. the conclusion of the narratives “solves” the crime and realizes a “truth” that reverberates throughout the book.

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black money, in fact, feels like a turning point in the series. It is inspired by (or is a tribute to) Macdonald’s favorite book, The Great Gatsby. lampoons the American dream and how it can go terribly wrong. Pedro Domingo – marginalized and servant of the tennis club of the rich because he is black – returns from Panama with an invented past and a lot of money. Sunday’s dream is dangerous and involves mob money (the only one of the later archer books to involve the mob). Archer has no time for the society he has to investigate and criticizes her: “when you have money to live on, a nice house and good weather most of the time, and still your life goes wrong, well, who can you blame? ? there is a pervasive sense of alienation and even exhaustion towards the end of the book. For Archer, the message is clear: “never sleep with someone whose problems are worse than yours.”

the pessimism of the archer in black money acquires a different slant in other books such as the parting glance (1969): “how can a man avoid breaking the law otherwise I have no money to live on”. however, archer tries to explain what he sees – and this, by extension, is what the reader has to understand – archer always has compassion for those he investigates: “i have a secret passion for mercy. but justice is what keeps happening to people.”

both underground man (1971) and sleeping beauty (1973) have a central ecological concern that is strongly symbolic in its grim image of the death of nature . sleeping beauty begins with the archer glimpsing from the air a huge oil slick and an oil rig jutting out “… like the metal handle of a dagger that stabbed the world and made it shed blood “.

If the endings to his investigations often leave Archer bewildered and confused (for example, the terrifying conclusion to the chill), the series comes to an end of sorts with the blue hammer. strong> (1976). injects an unexpected note of optimism into archer’s relationship with betty jo, a young journalist: “after a while i could see the steady blue pulse at her temple, the silent hammer beat that meant she was alive. she hoped the blue hammer would never stop.” There are echoes here of how Chandler left Marlowe on play which, perhaps, brings the series full circle. In the end, if we don’t have optimism about the future, what do we have?

ross macdonald achieved considerable literary acclaim in his own lifetime. he had a Ph.D. in English and his writing was studied at university. while, perhaps, the archer personifies the p.i. As an outsider, Macdonald himself was not comfortable with his surroundings. He was an American raised in Canada, but living in California. his father left him as, in his later life, his own daughter did. Macdonald once admitted that the Galton case was “…a story roughly molded from my own life, transformed and simplified, into a kind of legend.” In trying to solve some of these problems in his books, Macdonald has not only given us one of the great P.I. series but also one of the most enduring.

the lew archer series should be considered, at a minimum, as core texts of the genre.

the evidence

• “It was a Friday night. she was driving home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue frame of mind.” — “lost girl”
• “there are certain families whose members should live in different cities (different states, if possible) and write letters to each other once a year.”
• — the blue hammer
• “I lay awake and watched his face emerge in the slow dawn. after a while, I could see the steady blue pulse at her temple, the silent hammerbeat that meant she was still alive. she hoped the blue hammer would never stop.” — lew offers a silent prayer after intercourse, the blue hammer
• “when there are problems in a family, they tend to appear in the weakest member . and all the other members of the family know it. they make concessions for the one in trouble…because they know they themselves are implicated.” — Sleeping Beauty
• “As a man gets older, if he knows what’s good for him, the women he likes also get older. The problem is that most of them are married. — the zebra-striped hearse
• “I haven’t slept in the same room with a girl in a long time. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well lit, and the girl had other things on her mind besides me. — the blue hammer

from the peanut gallery

• “yes, the macdonald archer novels are surprisingly similar in terms of theme and plot…essentially he wrote a book over and over again, but, as others have pointed out, it was a good book…. In the end, you read Macdonald for the beauty and care that goes into the writing itself, and his understanding of human nature. I agree that the Galton case is the exemplary Macdonald novel, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a bad one in the bunch.” — george pelecanos in rara-avis (March 29, 2001)
• “there is definitely something dark, sad and fragile about macdonald’s best work …something that spoke to a lot of baby boomers of a certain age (and certainly spoke to me). Lew Archer was possibly the ultimate father figure and Ross Macdonald is probably still better read as a young man, preferably at a bus station at 1 AM. >— kevin burton smith
• “i never saw brian keith’s archer and that sounds like a bit of an intriguing casting (speaking of casting: i recently learned that, in 1954, blake edwards wrote and directed an unsold mike hammer pilot. playing hammer: brian keith. can you think of another actor who can play both hammer and archer?)” — ted fitzgerald
• “the chill… is one of the most perfectly plotted mysteries in the canon, the kind of book that makes the reader gasp in its final pages. Macdonald has always suffered a little (a lot) from the perception that he was somehow working in the shadow of [Raymond] Chandler. in fact, at the risk of heresy, macdonald was a much better novelist than chandler.” — john connolly, as part of a rap sheet book project
• “I’m not sure why I prefer the way you Some People Die at Moving Targets, the first book in the series, or the Galton Affair, in which Macdonald distances himself from Chandler’s influence. I just like the wickedness of the plot and the sharpness of the dialogue.” — dick lochte, the 14 best private detective novels of all time (2012)
• “there is something Canadian in his bruised decency, in his stubborn belief that his job is bear witness to suffering. archer sees crime not in terms of polarized good and evil, but as a complicated web of human pain and weakness.”
• “…a book that demonstrates a mastery of the whodunit and a genius for plotting that can be unmatched in the genre. it is also a book in which depth of psychological insight emerges from a lifetime of reflection on the damages the author suffered and created in his own family life.” — tyler sage from the times onthe chill literary supplement (October 2018)

novels

• as john macdonald
• the moving target (1949) | buy this book | turn it on!
• as john ross macdonald
• the drowning pool (1950) | buy this book
• the way some people die (1951) | buy this book
• the ivory smile (1952; aka “marked for murder”) | buy this book | turn it on!
• find a victim (1954) | buy this book | turn it up!
• as ross macdonald
• the barbarian coast (1956) | buy this book
• the doomsters (1958) | buy this book
• the galton case (1959) | buy this book
• the witch woman (1961) | buy this book | Turn it on!
• The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) | buy this book
• the chill (1964) | buy this book
• the other side of the dollar (1965) | buy this book
• black money (1966) | buy this book
• the instant enemy (1968) | buy this book
• the farewell look (1969 | buy this book | turn it on!
• the underground man (1971) | buy this book | turn it on!
• sleeping beauty (1973) | buy this book | turn it on!
• the blue hammer (1976) | buy this book | turn it on!

tales

• as kenneth millar
• “the bearded lady” (October 1948, american magazine; sam drake) | turn it up!
• “the imaginary blonde” (February 1953, manhunt; aka “missing girl”)
• as john ross macdonald
• “the guilty ones” (May 1953, persecution; also known as “the sinister habit”)
• “the beaten sister” (October 1953, persecution; also known like “the suicide”)
• “blond edged with guilt” (January 1954, chase)
• “wild goose chase” (July 1954, eqmm)
• as ross macdonald
• “midnight blue” (Oct 1960, ed mcbain mystery magazine)
• “the sleeping dog” (April 1965, argosy)

collections

• the name is archer (1955; as john ross macdonald) includes “find the woman”, “missing girl”, “the bearded lady”, “the suicide”, “guilt-edged blonde”, “The Sinister Habit” and “The Wild Goose Chase”
• Lew Archer, Private Investigator (1977) all stories of the name is Archer, plus “Midnight Blue” and “The Sleeping Dog”
• Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Stories (2001) | buy this book untold stories, edited by macdonald biographer tom nolan, one with joe rogers (who was also in the first macdonald’s short eqmm, which was later rewritten as star lew archer) and two with lew archer.
• the archer files (2007) | buy this book finally, all the stories of archers collected in one volume, plus excerpts from several unfinished archery novels and stories, collected by macdonald biographer tom nolan, as well as his amazing essay or biography on lew archer. It doesn’t get much better than this for Macdonald fans.
• Four Novels from the 1950s (2015) | buy this book fancy pancy library of america edition of the way some people die, the barbarian coast,the doomsters and the galton case, plus a handful of essays by macdonald that shed light on how he came to create lew archer.
• three novels from the early 1960s (2015, lew archer) | buy this book collects the zebra-striped hearse, the cold and the other side of the dollar. annotated by perennial macdonald man tom nolan. from the library of america.
• four later novels (2016, lew archer7) | buy this book collects black money, the instant enemy, the parting look and the underground man . from the library of america.
• the ross macdonald collection: eleven classic novels by lew archer (2017) | buy this book collects the three editions of the library of america (eleven novels), housed in a sleeve and annotated by tom nolan.

movies

• harper | buy the dvd | buy this blu-ray | watch it now! (1966, Warner Brothers) Based on the novel The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald Screenplay by William Goldman Directed by Jack Smight Starring Paul Newman as Lew Harper Also starring Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Robert Wagner, Janet Leigh, Arthur hill, pamela tiffin, robert webber, strother martin, harold gould is wacky and old-fashioned, and newman’s portrayal of macdonald’s brooding, brooding private eye is a little too hep cat for me, but this is one star-studded game that follows being very funny. by the way, “lew archer” became “lew harper”, because of ross macdonald’s reluctance to give up the franchise rights to his revenue-earning detective’s name, not because newman wanted to have another movie with an “h” title (after hustler and hud). even I fell in love with that long-running slice of hollywood lore.
• the drowning pool | buy the dvd | buy the blu-ray | watch it now! (1976, Warner Brothers) Based on the novel by Ross Macdonald Screenplay by Tracy Keean Wynn, Lorenzo Semple and Walter Hill Directed by Stuart Rosenberg Starring Paul Newman as Lew Harper Also starring Joanne Woodward, Anthony Francisca, Murray Hamilton, Melanie Griffith, richard jaekel, gail strickland, linda haynes harper gets all the praise and most of the attention, but i personally prefer the drowning pool to the locked room slam bang escape and the way newman stands tall in a verbal showdown nuanced against a powerful opponent, refusing to even turn his head. throw robert benton’s twilight, as loving as you can with a copy of macdonald without getting sued, if you want to make it a hat-trick. there newman plays socal p.i. harry ross, but I defy anyone to tell me he’s not just an archer/harpist by another name.

movies worth considering

• twilight (1998, supreme) original screenplay by robert benton what does it take for ross macdonald’s lew archer to hit the big screen with his own Name? in robert benton’s twilight, striving to outdo macdonald macdonald, the private eye (once again played by newman) was named harry ross, presumably a nod to ross macdonald .
• le loup de la cÔte ouest (also known as “the wolf of the west coast”) (2002) based on the story “the blonde with the edge of the guilt” by john ross macdonald. here we go again. This 2002 French film, based on the short story of a “guilt-edged blonde” archer, gives us lew millar, even more obvious recognition.

television

• the undercover man (1974, nbc) a major television production made-for-television movie based on the novel by ross macdonald screenplay by douglas heyes directed by paul wendkos producer: howard w . koch starring peter graves as lew archer also starring jack klugman, judith anderson, vera miles, kay lenz, jim hutton, sharon farrell, jo ann pflug
• archer (January- March 1975, NBC) a major television production series 6 60-minute episodes based on characters created by Ross Macdonald writers: David P. harmon, jim byrnes, leigh brackett, david karp, harold livingston, anthony lawrence & Wallace Ware Directors: Gary Nelson, Paul Stanley, Edward Abroms, John Llewellyn Moxey, Arnold Laven, Jack Arnold Music: Jerry Goldsmith Starring Brian Keith as Lew Archer Also starring John P. ryanas lt. barney brighton guest stars: kim darby, neva patterson, john calvin, anne francis, don porter, david brian, diana ewing
  • “the turkish connection” (jan 30, 1975)
  • “the arsonist” (February 6, 1975)
  • “the beautiful body” (February 13, 1975)
  • “shades of blue” (February 20, 1975)
  • “the missing man” (March 6, 1975)
  • “blood money” March 13, 1975)

  radio/sound

  • sleeping beauty (kcrw/npr) 7 hours based on the novel by ross macdonald directed by harry yulin starring harry yulin as lew archer also starring ed asner, stacy keach, mary kay place
  • the zebra-striped hearse (2000, kcrw/npr) original broadcast: july 3, 2000; kcrw based on the novel by ross macdonald directed by harry yulin score by steve croes starring harry yulin as lew archer also starring edward asner, kathryn harrold, jennifer tilly, richard dysart, bruce davison, tony flat, shirley knight, tyne daly, mary kay place

  related links

  • the ross macdonald files more on the life of ross macdonald and the career of his famous fictional detective.
  • the case of the father with the brokenheart david bowman’s intriguing look at the real-life tragedy that haunted ross macdonald and shaped his fiction. (living room)
  • “the wonderful and mysterious ross macdonald” alison gillmor muses on archer (and macdonald’s) canadaness (may 2015, the winnipeg free press )
  • 50 years with lew archer: an anniversary tribute to ross macdonald april 1999 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of ross macdonald’s first lew archer crime novel , the moving target. To celebrate, the online literary magazine January published a great tribute, an impressive series of essays and interviews related to the author and his work. They also invited dozens of modern crime novelists, from Lawrence Block and Sue Grafton to Michael Connelly, S.J. Rozan, Richard North Patterson, Laura Lippman and Richard Barre – to share their thoughts on the Macdonald legacy. Includes the case of the divided man, an interview with tom nolan, author of the then-new ross macdonald: a biography. and the crime editor of jan j. Kingston Pierce chimed in with a moving introduction, which in itself was worth the price of admission. (and i guess i should mention that i have a piece too, but i guess i’m there to cleanse the palate among real writers…)
  • in the tradition of hammett, chandler, macdonald and snoopy In August 1983, Peanuts creator Charles M. schulz paid tribute to another great writer (and also a resident of santa barbara): ross macdonald, who had passed away a month earlier.
  • ross macdonald: “chandler tried to kill me” the first from three mini-essays that tom nolan did for the library of america after his release of ross macdonald: four novels from the 1950s (2015)
  • ross macdonald: perpetual stranger in his native california in his second loa essay, nolan talks about how macdonald “canadianized” his vision of california.
  • ross macdonald, margaret millar, and the traumas surrounding literature and life in his final loa essay, nolan describes how millar’s marriage affected their work and the repercussions it had on their lives.
  • “the last testament of ross macdonald” an article from (November 2, 2003 issue of the boston globe by leonard cassuto that reveals and discusses ma cdonald for the final archer bo ok sadly never completed.
  • joe rogers before he was lew archer, he was joe rogers.

  respectfully submitted by peter walker, with a few additional touches by kevin burton smith. the photo above is paul newman as “harper”, in the movie of the same name.

  

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