The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  Archer had other professional contacts and colleagues of whom he was more or less fond, including Morris Cramm, legman for a nightlife-columnist; the art critic Manny Meyer; the screenwriter Sammy Swift; the switchboard women at his answering service (with whom he was on a first-name basis); and Hollywood agent Joey Sylvester.

  The more Archer moved in Hollywood circles, though—eating at Musso’s, frequenting clubs on the Strip—the less he liked a place and an industry and a state of mind based on meaningless dreams invented for money. He came to feel that evil “hung in [movie] studio air like an odorless gas.”

  Archer was a fan of reality, no matter how hard to take. The movie world was a fake from top to bottom; and the fakery, especially when it paid well, was corrupting. As Sammy Swift said, “I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag—seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And…you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”

  Lew Archer struggled to become and remain “himself” in this problematic Southern California milieu. It wasn’t always easy.

  Archer didn’t like actors, for instance—didn’t trust their easy way of shifting in and out of alternate realities. But Lew himself had a talent to dissemble, and often he would represent himself as something other than a private investigator. He might say he was an insurance claims adjuster, or a newspaperman, or a freelance reporter for true-crime magazines, or a Hollywood literary agent, or a counselor, or a security man, or a car salesman. If someone wanted to mistake Lew for a policeman, even an undercover cop, he often let them. Once, spooked by a visitor to his office, he denied he was Archer at all and claimed to be Archer’s bookkeeper.

  There were other ways to glide around the truth and avoid “the lie direct.” Asked what he did for a living, Archer might answer: “I have an office on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,” or, “I run a small agency in Hollywood,” or, “I represent musicians from time to time. I have an office on the Strip.”

  People who tried to guess Archer’s occupation most often thought him a cop. One woman was sure he was a professional athlete. Someone else took him for an undertaker.

  Sometimes he pretended to be worse things: a thug, a dope pusher, a potential hitman. He did what he needed to do to get a job done, but he wasn’t happy about some of his deeds: giving reefers to an addict in exchange for information, say.

  “I’m playing it as straight as I can,” he told someone who cross-questioned him in the 1950s on the morality of his profession. “…I don’t deny I’ve been tempted to use people, play on their feelings, push them around. Those are the occupational diseases of my job…This is a dirty business I’m in. All I can do is watch myself and keep it as clean as I can.”

  He was at especially low ebb regarding his self-image around 1949, after Sue left. One memorable day, he looked in the mirror and tried to give himself an encouraging smile: “The wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a coyote’s sneer…If I found the face on a stranger, I wouldn’t trust it.”

  Archer continued to scare himself, in one mirror or another, for the rest of his life. He had a disconcerting moment on a case in the early ’50s, when an angry face loomed at him as he entered a strange room: “It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw it was my own face reflected in murky glass…” Here’s another unsettling glimpse Lew got, in a clouded mirror in a dusty room: “I looked like a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.”

  Even worse were his mental glimpses of a private eye going about his sometimes seamy business: “I had a sudden evil image of myself: a heavy hunched figure seen from above in the act of tormenting a child who was already tormented. A sense went through me of the appalling ease with which the things you do in a good cause can slip over into bad.”

  Lew Archer wanted to stay good while doing good. That seemed hard to achieve, especially in the early years of his career, when most of the work that came his way involved gathering evidence for divorce cases; he sometimes felt like “a jackal,” a “rat behind the walls.”

  But as word spread of his discretion, his ethics, and his good results, Lew began to get more interesting assignments.

  —

  “I suspect everybody. It’s my occupational neurosis.”

  —The Wycherly Woman

  He did work for hotel associations and for insurance companies. He helped district attorney Bert Graves, up in Santa Teresa, put together a few cases. Sometimes he got assignments from Peter Colton, his old Army colonel, in the L.A. D.A.’s office. In the early ’50s, he was hired by the chairman of a legislative committee in Sacramento, to make a report on narcotics distribution in the southern counties, a job that involved taking a significant amount of drugs away from a pusher in South Gate. More than occasionally, Archer’s work brought him into contact with mobsters—“jerks,” he sometimes called them—in California and in Nevada. (“Jerkiness isn’t as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A.,” he told someone in the 1950s. “Which is why they had to build Vegas.”)

  For such specialized, difficult, often dangerous work, he charged very little—absurdly little, right at the start. Just after V-J Day, Archer was asking a mere twenty dollars a day compensation. A couple years later, he was up to fifty a day plus expenses (or seventy-five, for those who could afford it). Lew continued to earn about three hundred a week (when working) throughout the 1950s.

  By 1960, he’d raised his daily rate to a hundred dollars, where it stayed throughout the decade. “Isn’t that quite a lot?” one prospective client asked. “I don’t think so,” Archer said. “Actually it’s just enough to get by on. I don’t work all the time, and I have to maintain an office.”

  Archer often asked for a sizable advance—three hundred, five hundred, even a thousand dollars—if a client was well-to-do and Lew would have to lay out money for travel or other expenses. He’d learned from experience that very rich people were the hardest to collect from after the fact.

  But he really didn’t want big money. Or rather, he wanted it well enough but wasn’t willing to take what came with it. “Money was never free,” he once noted. “Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.” Another time, he observed: “Money usually has strings attached to it.”

  More than once in his career, Archer was offered a fee sizable enough to amount to a bribe: ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million dollars. He could be tempted by such an overly generous payment, but he knew better than to accept: “It excited me in a way I didn’t quite like,” he explained on one occasion. “Underlying the excitement was a vague depression, as if I belonged to the check in a way, instead of having it belong to me.” To another “benefactor” bearing a questionable gift, Archer admitted: “I want it very badly…But I can’t take this money…It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them.”

  One of Archer’s finest ethical moments came in the late 1960s: after stashing a six-figure check from a compromised client in his office safe, Lew tore up the offending payment and tossed its bits like confetti out the window and onto the heads of the Sunset Strip of fools below.

  “We’ll get along better if you stop assuming I can be bought,” the p.i. was able to tell another would-be employer. “It’s been tried by experts.”

  Not that Lew didn’t feel a twinge of envy at the sight of an honest private eye making a better-than-average income—like his friend Glenn Scott, a not-for-sale type nonetheless able to support a wife and child in good fashion before retiring to an avocado ranch beyond Malibu. Archer couldn’t begrudge Scott his success, though: “He was one of the few survivors of the Hollywood rat race who knew how to enjoy a little money without hitting other people over the head with it.
” (Still, it couldn’t have been much fun for Lew to hear “the old master” tell him, once Scott was out of the game: “You were never a very serious competitor. They went to you when they couldn’t afford me.”)

  Archer had enough money, he insisted: “Enough to live on.” Anyway: “I don’t do it for the money…I do it because I want to.” Late in life, he pointed out to someone: “I chose this job, or it chose me. There’s a lot of human pain involved in it, but I’m not looking for another job.” And while he would never get rich at it, at least he could set his own standards.

  He had great discretion—“A client once told me he could drop a secret into me and never hear it hit bottom”—and he showed his clients much loyalty. “I’ll do what you want me to do,” he promised one, “so long as it’s not illegal and makes some kind of sense.” At the same time, he expected his clients to pay attention to what he said.

  “Nobody asked for your advice,” a client once rebuked him; to which he replied: “You did, though, in a way, when you brought me into this case. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

  And he made it clear his integrity was not for sale: “I’m not going to cook up evidence,” he told a client, “or select it to confirm you in your prejudices. I’m willing to investigate…on the understanding that the chips fall where they fall.”

  Asked once whose side he was on, Archer replied: “The side of justice when I can find it. When I can’t find it, I’m for the underdog.”

  —

  “You’re a peculiar detective.”

  —The Blue Hammer

  It was clear from the start, even when Archer felt most ambivalent about his trade and his own behavior, that he was no ordinary private investigator. He cared deeply about what he did, a job that he saw (at its best) as adding to the sum total of goodness in the world.

  “The problem was to love people, try to serve them,” he said, around 1956, “without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.” What other Hollywood private eye would even consider it? Archer’s statement might more predictably have been uttered by a ’50s theological figure such as Thomas Merton or Reinhold Niebuhr (whose works, given his eclectic reading habits, Lew may well have read). Clearly the religious instinct nurtured in Lew Archer by his Catholic mother and grandmother had taken firm root, despite Archer’s decidedly non-priestly profession.

  What grieved Archer most was the loss of human life. Lew often wept, in sorrow and in rage, at the sight of a murder victim. “It was anger I felt,” he revealed of one such occurrence, “against the helplessness of the deed, and my own helplessness.”

  In the early 1950s, he vented that anger face-to-face in a confrontation with a pathetic sort of killer: “It’s not just the people you’ve killed,” Archer railed at this sad little murderer. “It’s the human idea you’ve been butchering…You can’t stand the human idea…You know it makes you look lousy…”

  The human idea was precious to Lew. That was one reason he made other people’s lives his business, he said: “And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I’ve never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.”

  But which people should he care about?

  Archer, trained as a cop, had a tendency to see the world as divided into good folks and bad ones—“and everything would be hunky-dory,” as he mockingly put it, “if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.” As he grew older, though, Lew could no longer make do with this simplistic and unrealistic black-and-white picture. Life forced him to acknowledge that the world didn’t work that way. All his experience, intelligence, and emotions moved him toward a more complex awareness: a sort of moral epiphany, which he experienced in the year 1958.

  It was triggered by a combination of events surrounding a murder investigation Archer was caught up in (recounted in detail in the Ross Macdonald novel The Doomsters). His case brought Archer into contact with a troubled young man he’d tried a few years earlier to help straighten out, perhaps as a sort of payback for Lew himself having once been put on the straight-and-narrow. This youngster wasn’t as quick a study as young Lew had been, though; and when the juvenile delinquent let him down, grown-up Archer brushed him off.

  But, as Lew realized when the fellow reentered his life: “It isn’t possible to brush people off, let alone yourself. They wait for you in time, which is also a closed circuit.” Shamed by his past failure to help, and its awful consequences, Archer said: “I felt like a dog in his vomit.”

  Interstitched with this was the culmination of Archer’s current case, which moved Lew to compassion (without denial of culpability) for the events’ ultimate villain. Yes, this murderer was to blame—but so was everyone else in sight of these deadly happenings, including himself: “We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”

  This was a startling ethical realization. Once Archer accepted it, he seemed able to view himself, too, in a more forgiving light. And as he grew older, he’d find “the hot breath of vengeance…growing cold in my nostrils.” He’d be less hell-bent on punishing, more concerned “for a kind of economy in life that would help to preserve the things that were worth preserving…[A]ny man, or any woman, was…”

  Lew Archer, private detective and never-was seminarian, became (as he would describe another unusual character he’d encounter) “a sort of twisted saint”: as a man called Ruehlmann put it, “a saint with a gun.”

  —

  “So you’re just a lousy gumshoe!”

  “A pretty good one,” I said.

  —The Wycherly Woman

  He was temperate in his personal vices.

  Like many Americans, he smoked cigarettes throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s; then, also like many Americans, he quit, after release of the Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking tobacco smoking to fatal disease.

  He drank alcohol, more or less in moderation, all his life. “I like to drink,” he admitted, circa 1968. Brews and potions Lew imbibed over the years included bourbon, Scotch, Scotch and soda, whiskey (Bushmills, Jack Daniel’s), whiskey and water, gin on the rocks, gin and tonic, Benedictine, martinis (at dinner), Gibsons (with an onion, “for lunch”), pink champagne (to celebrate), Black Horse Ale, Guinness Stout, Löwenbräu dark, and plain old beer.

  Except for the occasional Palm Springs weekend, he kept his drinking largely in check. But he did seem to use alcohol as a lubricant in social situations—during an evening with friends such as Phyllis and Arnie Walters—and as a way to release his own spirit from the bottle in which he normally kept it stoppered. He knew the price you paid, though, for the use and abuse of alcohol as a sedative or stimulant: “It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.”

  Archer drank a good deal of coffee. Once in a great while, he’d have a cup of tea.

  He scanned the L.A. Times (where his own name turned up on occasion, if he’d testified in court), with particular attention to the classifieds, “which sometimes tell you more about Los Angeles than the news.”

  He kept up his book-reading, and he went to museums. If he got a two- or three-hundred-dollar fee, he might blow it on a weekend fishing trip to La Paz or Mazatlán.

  He spent much less on clothes as he got older, and his automobile became just a vehicle.

  Around 1965, he toted up his assets: “I had about three hundred dollars in the bank, about two hundred in cash. I owned an equity in the car and some clothes and furniture. My total net worth, after nearly twenty years in the detective business, was in the neighborhood of thirty-five hundred dollars.” Not much to show for all that trouble. On the other hand: “I was doing what I wanted to be doing.”

  More and more, he lived to work. That was how he related to people best; that was where he could most be of service.

  Once involved with a case, he gave it his all: it consumed his energies and intellect; it virtually became his identity. A
nd he kept with it to the end: “I’m in this case to stay.”

  Something Archer excelled at was the seeing and tracing of connections between criminal events in the present and in the past—between a current murder, say, and a similar deed fifteen years earlier.

  A large coincidence was often a signal to Lew of such a link between past and present. After having been bitten on the neck a time or two by “the bitch goddess coincidence,” Archer learned to trust his instincts in this regard, and to follow the skein of an unraveling spool of fact all the way back to its distant source.

  So often was he vindicated in such efforts that he came to say in the mid-1960s: “I’ve lost my faith in pure coincidence. Everything in life tends to hang together in a pattern.” In his final published account of an investigation, The Blue Hammer (1976), Lew said: “The deeper you go into a series of crimes, or any set of circumstances involving people who know each other, the more connectedness you find.” Time and again, Lew Archer would insist, regarding two or more widely separated mysteries: “It’s all one case.”

  And cases, he found, broke in all sorts of different ways. Some opened gradually, along old moral fault lines: “like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past.” Some came together in a sudden rush, constructing themselves “in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.” Some opened with a sort of decayed eroticism: “not like a door or even a grave, certainly not like a rose or any flower, but…like an old sad blonde with darkness at her core.”

  That’s when Archer’s possessive streak kicked into higher gear. “A breaking case to a man in my trade,” he revealed, “is like a love affair you can’t stay away from, even if it tears your heart out daily.” His pulse raced, his breath came more quickly; he could feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears at the prospect of an imminent denouement. He had the physical sensations of a man living through an earthquake, and his senses were sharpened to such a pitch that he was open to all sorts of intuitions; he’d have “the sleepless feeling…that you can see around corners, if you want to, and down into the darkness in human beings.” He was like an artist in the final throes of a painting, a mathematician scrawling the final symbols of a long-sought proof, a priest finishing mass. This was his art, his religion, his reason for being.