Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s (Loa #264): The Way Some People Die / The Barbarous Coast / The Doomsters / The Galton Case

Ross Macdonald In the Library Of America

The Library of America publishes the best of American writing in many genres. Many works in the series suggest how American writing combines popular and literary elements to produce unique, valuable styles. The combination of popular and literary elements is nowhere more apparent than in the crime novel. The LOA published works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, and followed it up with this collection "Four Noves of the 1950s" by the American writer Ross Macdonald. The volume collects four works that feature Macdonald's famous detective, Lew Archer, each of which is recounted in Archer's inimitable voice.

Ross Macdonald, (1915 -- 1983), the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, was born in California but spent most of his younger life in a wandering existence in Canada when his father abandoned the family. Ultimately Macdonald was able to attend college and to earn a PhD in English literature. He served in the U.S. Navy during WW II. It is easy to see in Macdonald's writings the combination of disparate elements: a wealthy life in California and poverty in Canada, the intellectual world of English literature and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the murky world of crime stories, the abandonment of a child at an early age and its consequences.

Macdonald became famous for his Lew Archer character and the LOA has collected eleven of his Archer novels in three volumes, beginning with this volume of four early novels. Tom Nolan, a biographer and scholar of Macdonald, edited and prepared the contents of each volume together with notes.

Each novel in this volume is set primarily in the suburbs of southern California and shows the tensions, greed, and violence underlying what appear to be prosperous, complacent lives. The volume offers the opportunity to read the novels in a series and to see how they develop. I came to see the novels both as individual works and as part of a developing series.

The first novel, "The way some people die" (1951) is the third in the Lew Archer series and the book in the LOA compilation that owes the most to its predecessors in crime fiction. It is a dark tale that begins simply enough when a mother seeks Archer's help in finding her 24 year old daughter who has disappeared. The book quickly blossoms into a tour of the southern California underworld with its violence, drugs, and sleaze. The book features descriptive, tight writing and outstanding characterizations together with its complex plot.

The second novel "The Barbarous Coast" (1956) is the sixth in the Archer series and features crime and corruption in the movie and gambling industries under the surface of an exclusive private club. A young sportswriter from Canada seeks Archer's help in finding his lost wife. Again, much lies below the surface as the story explodes into a series of killings. To my mind, this book was the least successful in the LOA volume.

The following two novels show a great deal of change as the elements of a crime novel are combined with reflections, influenced by both Freud and the ancient Greeks, on the nature of family life and on the struggle of children to find identities of their own. The books explore broad questions about appearance and reality and the nature of right and wrong.

"The Doomsters" (1958) the seventh of the Archer novels, shows the redoubtable detective drawn into the dark side of the affairs of a wealthy California family, the owner of an orange grove. Archer assists a young man who has just escaped from a mental institution in investigating the death of his father. Several people will meet violent deaths as the investigation runs its course. But the force of the novel lies in its growing reflections on family, on guilt, and on morality. The reflections involve both those involved in the doomed family and Archer himself. "The Doomsters" is the novel in the series that reveals the most about Archer's past and about his motivations for his detective work.

The final novel in this compilation and the eighth in the Archer series, "The Galton Case", may well be Macdonald's masterwork. It begins when Archer is hired by a wealthy California widow and her lawyer to search for her long-lost son who has disappeared 20 years earlier. Archer reluctantly undertakes this seemingly cold case. His work will take him from California to Nevada to Michigan and to a small dilapidated rooming house just over the border in Canada. The story involves two seemingly unrelated murders and, most importantly, the identity of a young man claiming to be the widow's grandson and thus the presumptive heir of her large estate. The book integrates masterfully the suspense features of crime fiction and the broader questions of personal identity, family, and independence. In "The Galton Case", Macdonald succeeds in transforming the formulaic elements of a crime novel to literature.

The volume also includes five essays and letter by Macdonald which cast light on his approach to writing and to the crime novel. Of these, I found his "Writing 'The Galton Case'" and "Down these streets a mean man must go" particularly good.

The novels had a cumulative effect on me as I continued to read. I enjoyed each novel individually as well with the partial exception of "The Barbarous Coast." I find it valuable to explore American literature in all its variety, breadth and depth in helping to understand and appreciate our country and different ways of understanding. Thus, I was glad to read Macdonald through this compilation in the Library of America.

Robin Friedman