That was when he was most alive, and most likely to make a crucial discovery. Then too was when he was most vulnerable: to having a case snatched away by a recalcitrant client or an obstreperous cop. “It was a moral hardship for me to walk away from an unclosed case,” he admitted. When such a bitter turn occurred, Archer experienced something like coitus interruptus: “There was a roaring hollowness in my head, a tight sour ball at the bottom of my stomach.”
In extreme instances, not even the opposition of the law or the lack of a paying client deterred him. “You can’t pull me off the case—I guess you know that,” Lew once told an employer (who apparently didn’t know). “It’s my case and I’ll finish it on my own time if I have to.”
And no matter who got in the way. There was danger, to the guilty and to those who stood next to them. When one particular “beautiful terrible mess of a case” was breaking for Archer, he noted of a woman semi-bystander: “Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.”
The fact was, as Archer knew, he “sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.”
—
Less and less, in the 1960s, was Lew Archer involved in investigations having to do with organized crime. More and more was he caught up in sorting out the melodramatic and violent catastrophes of what would come to be called “dysfunctional” social units.
The man without a family of his own became counselor and adjudicator to other people’s families—a substitute parent, guiding and protecting the sons and daughters he himself never had.
It made his identification and involvement with cases even more intense. He felt responsible for the kids he sought, for the victims he championed; often he almost felt that he was those people. He took it all quite personally. He took it all to heart.
He wanted to rescue the endangered, to apprehend the guilty, to vindicate the unjustly accused. He wanted to understand the past. He wanted to help.
And many, many, many times—he did.
—
The whisky was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway.
—Black Money
Some time in the 1960s, Lew Archer moved out of his house (the one still haunted by the ghost of his marriage) and into an apartment in a two-story building in West L.A., between Wilshire and Pico, about three and a half miles from Westwood.
His was the second-floor back unit, reached by outside stairs leading to a long roofed gallery. The apartment was sparsely furnished. Living room with an old desk, a black telephone (and, in a locked drawer, a handgun); a light chair, a standing lamp, and a rather worn chesterfield that opened out into a sleeper. Bedroom. Bathroom, with a medicine-cabinet mirror in which Lew could look at “that same old trouble-prone face.”
Wherever he might be at work, whatever the hour, Archer always liked to get back to this apartment before going to sleep. “It’s just about the only continuity in my life,” he said.
There was a garage in the rear, but often he parked his now “not very new” Ford at the curb in front. If the closed apartment was warm and stale, he’d open a window, and maybe a bottle of beer, and sit down in the near darkness of the shabby front room and savor the cool air wafting halfheartedly east from the ocean.
“I lived in a quiet section,” he said, “away from the main freeways. Still I could hear them humming, remote yet intimate, like the humming of my own blood in my veins.”
—
For a time, after moving into the apartment, he had “forgotten how to sleep.” He got a prescription for Nembutal. When he relearned the knack of sleep, he stopped taking the pills.
In the mornings, at breakfast time, half a dozen scrub jays from a magnolia tree next door would swoop down into the grassy yard of Archer’s building or dive-bomb his bedroom windowsill. Lew thought of them as “his” jays, and threw peanuts for them into the yard.
Archer had a special awareness of birds, an attentiveness that went all the way back to the Martinez garden of his devout grandmother, who’d felt birds were among God’s special creatures. If His eye was always on the sparrow, Lew’s was fixed for a lifetime on the scrub jay, the red-winged blackbird, the towhee, the red-shafted flicker, the kinglet, the buzzard, the hawk, the blue heron, the owl.
So Archer would rise in the morning and feed the jays in the apartment-building courtyard. His neighbors thought him a lonely man.
—
“You seem to be a man engaged in an endless battle, an endless search. Has it ever occurred to you that the search may be for yourself? And that the way to find yourself is to be still and silent, silent and still?”
–The Blue Hammer
Some of his friends felt he’d never gotten over Sue.
She and Lew had tried a few times to reconcile, after their divorce; but that never got much past the first angry or melancholy hour. Sue stayed in Reno (“a city,” Lew once said, “where nothing good had ever happened to me”), remarried, had some kids, and “lived happily ever after”—or so Archer said. After a few years, he no longer bothered to stay in touch—at least not in person. Three-in-the-morning silent dialogues in his head were another matter.
Not that Lew’s life after Sue had been without women. Far from it.
There’d been Mona, for instance, circa 1955, as described by Archer in this ruminative passage from the book The Barbarous Coast:
Mona passed out at parties because she had lost a husband in Korea and a small son at Children’s Hospital. I began to remember that I had no son, either. A man got lonely in the stucco wilderness, pushing forty with no chick, no child. Mona was pretty enough, and bright enough, and all she wanted was another child. What was I waiting for? A well-heeled virgin with her name in the Blue Book?
I decided to call Mona.
But right at that instant, Lew got an incoming phone message: saved by the bell. He never mentioned Mona again.
A bit earlier, and a lot more seriously, Archer dated Susanna Drew, a script girl in the story department at Warner’s, whom he met at a Beverly Hills agent’s party. She was ten years his junior:
We had things to talk about. She picked my brains for what I knew about people, and I picked hers for what she knew about books. I was crazy about her insane sense of humor.
The physical thing came more slowly, as it often does when it promises to be real. I think we tried to force it. We’d both been drinking, and a lot of stuff boiled up from Susanna’s childhood…
We had a bad passage, and Susanna stopped going to parties, at least the ones I went to. I heard she had a marriage which didn’t take. Then she had a career, which took.
Archer ran into Susanna ten years later, around 1965, while on a case; and it seemed they might reunite on a permanent basis. But, as with so many of Archer’s liaisons, this one, too, apparently faded away.
Lew for the most part avoided overly available L.A. women: “The easy ones were nearly always trouble: frigid or nympho, schizy or commercial or alcoholic, sometimes all five at once. Their nicely wrapped gifts of themselves often turned out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it.”
There were several other women through the years with whom Archer had fleeting relationships; but for the most part, the females he was drawn to were unlikely candidates for a permanent alliance: women already married, women in emotional mourning, women living in a different city or country.
Was it somehow because of Sue that Archer tended to choose, if only unconsciously, such unpromising lovers?
But Ross Macdonald’s final Lew Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, offered at least the possibility that the private detective’s last years might not be spent alone.
At the start of his investigation into events at the heart of this book, Lew met a youngish newspaper reporter, Betty
Jo Siddon—“a level-eyed brunette of about thirty…well-shaped but rather awkward in her movements, as if she weren’t quite at home in the world”—and they became intimate. At book’s end, there was every indication Archer and Betty Jo might remain together, perhaps even marry.
Balance this, though, against Archer’s history of abandoned relationships, and the odds are fifty-fifty Archer let Betty Jo slip away as well…
So whatever happened to Lew Archer? How did he end his days?
Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels stopped in 1976 with The Blue Hammer, a premature conclusion caused by the onset of Macdonald’s eventually diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease. We can only guess at Lew Archer’s ultimate fate.
On the outer edge of possibility would be a violent end for the detective who had had so many weapons aimed at him through the years in Southern California, where handguns sometimes seemed as plentiful as new cars.
A more plausible and in a way more awful fate may be theorized: the private eye may have succumbed to the same disease that halted the author who’d written about him for a quarter-century.
—
…thinking about a story I read in high school. It was called “The Vision of Mirza” and it had been cropping up in my memory for years.
Mirza had a vision of a bridge which a lot of people were crossing on foot: all the living people in the world. From time to time one of them would step on a kind of trap door and drop out of sight. The other pedestrians hardly noticed.
Each of them went on walking across the bridge until he hit a trap door of his own, and fell through.
—The Wycherly Woman
Archer all his life had an excellent memory, the sort often called “photographic”: he could read a document twice quickly and fix names, times, and places firmly in his head. Memory was essential to his work, especially for the sort of cases in which he came to specialize: convoluted series of interlocking events, with overlapping personnel.
At some point, though, he felt the need to start jotting things down in a black notebook, keeping track of multiple characters and complicated deeds, much as a working novelist might.
By the end of his recorded exploits, in the late 1970s, it seemed Archer was struggling with facts and language, that it took longer for his mental computer to retrieve information: “I woke up clear-minded in strong daylight…And my mind released the memory I needed.”
He made mistakes in dates and facts. More and more he forgot to eat—or even whether he had eaten.
Thinking seemed to tire him more by the late 1970s, so that he sometimes craved rest from it. “I sat down on one of the padded chairs,” he reported in The Blue Hammer, “and let my mind fray out for a couple of minutes.” In the same work, he made this disconcerting statement: “I felt for a moment that some ancient story was being repeated, that we had all been here before. I couldn’t remember exactly what the story was or how it ended. But I felt that the ending somehow depended on me.”
And so, of a sudden, we lose sight of a sixty-something Lew Archer, resident of a city whose initials he shared, a city he saw in daylight with clarity and at night as metaphor: “a maze, put together by an inspired child,” “a luminous map…Its whorls and dots and rectangles of light…interpreted, like an abstract painting, in terms of everything that a man remembered.”
—
See Archer at night then, one last time, parked perhaps in his car above Mulholland: a single human cell in that luminous organism of an endless city, while a God’s-eye camera pulls up and back and back and back—and the internalized soundtrack of a benignly fraying mind yields pieces of stored-up memory:
The man was in the maze; the maze was in the man.
The problem was to love people, try to serve them…
—wish I knew who you were—
Got to take a sentimental journey…
You’ll have to learn a trade.
A man is only as good as his conscience…
Ora pro nobis
NOTES
“Possessed even when young”: Eudora Welty, review of Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, New York Times, February 14, 1971; reprinted in The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays & Reviews (Vintage, 1990)
“For all his goodwill and energy”: Ross Macdonald, introduction to Lew Archer, Private Investigator (The Mysterious Press, 1977); reprinted in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past (Capra Press, 1981). Macdonald was writing about another private detective, but his words seem to apply as well to Archer.
“ ‘I started out as a romantic’ ”: Ross Macdonald, Black Money (Knopf, 1966)
“on June 2”: Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (Knopf, 1949)
“One of his earliest memories”: Ross Macdonald, The Instant Enemy (Knopf, 1968)
“who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith”: Ross Macdonald, The Drowning Pool (Knopf, 1950)
“crisp black funeral silks”: Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die (Knopf, 1951)
“Lew had been named for Lew Wallace”: Chuck Thegze, “Behind Lew Archer: Interview with Ross Macdonald,” Village Voice, February 10, 1975
“had marked me for the priesthood”: Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer (Knopf, 1976)
“tall women behind desks”: Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters (Knopf, 1958)
“I never did work up enough nerve”: Ross Macdonald, The Chill (Knopf, 1964)
“the girls with oil or gold”: The Drowning Pool
“I was back in high school”: Ross Macdonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Knopf, 1962)
“ ‘The teens were my worst time’ ”: Ross Macdonald, The Far Side of the Dollar (Knopf, 1965)
“I took the strap away from my father”: The Doomsters
“the blended odors”: Ibid.
“joy-rides and street brawls”: Ross Macdonald, Find a Victim (Knopf, 1954)
“a street boy”: The Doomsters
“[A] whisky-smelling plain-clothes man”: Find a Victim
“When I was seventeen”: The Far Side of the Dollar
“hadn’t worked out”: The Chill
“ ‘I was one of the ones who turned out different’ ”: The Instant Enemy
“ ‘The police mind likes simple, obvious patterns’ ”: Find a Victim
“ ‘podex osculation’ ”: The Moving Target
“When he wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut”: The Way Some People Die (Knopf, 1951)
“ ‘I was fired’ ”: The Moving Target
“When the cops went sour”: Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast (Knopf, 1956)
“Inspector Fate of Limehouse”: Principal Pictures, 1924
“ ‘Most private detectives come out of police work’ ”: Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty (Knopf, 1973)
“where a goon had stamped me”: Ross Macdonald, “Heyday in the Blood” fragment
“A Finnish sailor on the San Pedro docks”: The Moving Target
“for not particularly good conduct”: Ross Macdonald, The Wycherly Woman (Knopf, 1961)
“through dirty glass”: The Drowning Pool
“The man was in the maze; the maze was in the man”: The Instant Enemy
“I turned on my back and floated”: The Drowning Pool
“ ‘I was an officer in the war’ ”: Ibid.
“Lew himself earned the rank of lieutenant colonel”: Ross Macdonald, “The Angry Man”
“Later he’d tell the story of a brigadier he met”: The Way Some People Die
“green and bloody springtime”: Find a Victim
“the odors of burning oil and alcohol”: Ibid.
“that goodbye look”: Ross Macdonald, The Goodbye Look (1969)
“the rising young man of mystery”: The Doomsters
“dumb blondes”: Black Money
“ ‘Don’t you dare touch me’ ”: The Goodbye Look
“an onion taste of grief”: The Barbarous Coast
“ ‘I don’t spend money on front’ ”: The Drowning Poo
l
“killers, embezzlers, bigamists and con men”: The Zebra-Striped Hearse
“a bright young crowd of guys and girls”: Ross Macdonald, The Ivory Grin (Knopf, 1952)
“ ‘You’re kind of cute’ ”: “The Angry Man”
“If I had been asked to guess”: The Way Some People Die
“hit the peg”: Find a Victim
“hung in [movie] studio air”: The Moving Target
“ ‘I used to have talent’ ”: The Barbarous Coast
“ ‘I have an office on Sunset Boulevard’ ”: Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case (Knopf, 1959)
“ ‘I run a small agency’ ”: The Chill
“ ‘I represent musicians’ ”: The Far Side of the Dollar
“ ‘I’m playing it as straight as I can’ ”: Find a Victim
“The wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes”: The Moving Target
“It was a big man’s face”: Ross Macdonald, The Ivory Grin (Knopf, 1952)
“I looked like a ghost”: The Chill
“I had a sudden evil image of myself”: The Far Side of the Dollar
“ ‘Jerkiness isn’t as respectable as it used to be’ ”: The Barbarous Coast
“ ‘Isn’t that quite a lot?’ ”: Black Money
“Money was never free”: The Galton Case
“ ‘Money usually has strings’ ”: The Chill
“It excited me in a way”: The Instant Enemy
“ ‘I want it very badly’ ”: The Barbarous Coast
The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Page 4