Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“Could be. My name is Archer, by the way.”

“Gimpel. Jack Gimpel.” He offered me an arthritic hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Archer. I hope there won’t be any trouble, though.”

“I’m here to head off trouble.”

That turned out to be one of my emptier boasts.

Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).

The original handwritten manuscript of the 1965 Ross Macdonald novel The Far Side of the Dollar ended with a brief final chapter chapter featuring an exchange between protagonist Lew Archer and another of the book’s characters.

Before having his manuscript typed, the author decided not to include that ultimate scene. Above it, he wrote to his typist: “I think leave off this chapter. Yes, disregard it, please.”

29

“She had a dreadful life,” Susanna said, “and a dreadful end. I would have given her access to her sleeping pills.”

“You can say that because you didn’t have the responsibility. I helped a man to die once, in similar circumstances. It still wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

She studied me across the table. She herself had a slightly convalescent look, and she was wearing a gardenia. It was Saturday night; we were about to have dinner in one of the medium-priced places on Restaurant Row; I had just ordered martinis.

“You’re a curious combination,” she said. “Very hard, and quite soft.”

“Most men are. So are most women.”

“It certainly applies to Elaine Hillman. You know, I can almost sympathize with her. Or empathize. He did almost the same thing to me as he did to her – getting me to take care of Carol, without any hint that he was the father of the child she was carrying. He may even have recruited me for that purpose,” she said, making herself wince.

“I don’t think he’s as cold an operator as that.”

“Don’t you?”

“How do you feel about him, Susanna?”

“I have no feeling whatever about him,” she said with feeling. “I’m much more interested in what’s going to happen to the boy. How can he possibly survive such trouble?”

“He’ll survive. He has some choices now. His father is willing to send him away to prep school. Or he may even spend the next year with his grandfather Rob Brown. I introduced them to each other yesterday, and they seemed to get along. He even has a nice girl waiting for him.”

Susanna gave me a bright opaque look, as if she could think of another male with similar advantages. “Stella is a nice girl. I’m sorry I couldn’t or didn’t stay with her the other morning. I felt–” She fumbled with a spoon in some embarrassment.

“You felt Ralph Hillman’s needs were overriding.”

“No. I simply felt he had a right–”

“The droit du seigneur?”

“You’re being unpleasant,” she said. “And I was so looking forward to seeing you.”

“I’m trying to get certain things out of the way. Then we can go on from there.”

“Can we?”

“We can try. You haven’t told me what you and Ralph Hillman talked about at breakfast. Did he know his wife had killed those people?”

“Maybe he did. He didn’t say anything about it.”

“If he knew, it would explain his asking you to marry him, as well as something he did Thursday night. He suddenly told me about his fling with Carol, and the fact that Tom was his son. I think he was feeding me evidence of Elaine’s guilt. He wanted her to be found out, even if it meant that he was found out, too.”

“And then he was going to marry me and live happily ever after.” She looked quite pale and haunted for a moment.

The bar girl brought our martinis, and we went on from there.

Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).

It had rained in the canyon during the night. The world had the colored freshness of a butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis stage, and trembling in the sun. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air or played a game of tag without any rules among the branches of the trees. At this height there were pines and giant firs among the planted eucalyptus trees.

I parked my car where I usually parked it, in the driveway of the Trumbull estate, just inside the gates. The posts, rather the gates had rusted and fallen from their hinges. Trumbull had died in Europe, and his country house stood empty since the war. It was one reason I visited the canyon: nobody lived there.

Until now, at least. The window of the stone gatehouse which overlooked the driveway had been broken the last time I’d seen it. Now it was patched with cardboard. Through a hole punched in the middle of the cardboard, bright emptiness watched me. A human eye’s bright emptiness.

“Hello.”

My voice was loud in the stillness. A jaybird erupted from a red-berried bush, sailed up to the limb of a tree and yelled back curses at me. A dozen chickadees flew out of the oak and settled in another, more remote. The door of the gatehouse creaked, and a man came out.

He wore faded jeans, a brown horsehide jacket, and a smile. He walked mechanically, as if his body was not at home in the world. The very sound of his feet on the gravel was harsh and clumsy. Perhaps he was used to pavements.

“Hello,” I said again.

He came right up to me without answering. I saw that his smile was not a greeting, or any kind of a smile that you could respond to. It was the stretched blind grimace of a man who hated the sun. His bright and empty eyes looked at me as if he hated me because I was under the sun.

But all he said was: “Bud, you can’t park here. This driveway is in use.”

“Who’s using it?”

He shrugged awkwardly. One of his hands was in his jacket pocket. His other arm hung stiff as a board at his side:

“I got no instructions to answer questions. The question is, what you think you’re doing here? This is private property, all the way down to the highway. You’re trespassing.”

“I know that. I knew the Trumbulls at one time. Miss Trumbull sold the property?”

“Looks like it, don’t it?”

“To you?”

“Not to me. Listen, bud, you admit you’re trespassing. Why don’t you beat it now?”

I was on the point of complying. I had no right there, though over the years I’d established what I thought of as squatter’s rights. But he said one word too many:

“Beat it before I get rough.”

The hair on the back of my neck hadn’t bristled since the war. I could feel it rise like iron filings magnetized by his smile.

Published in The Archer Files (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2015).

Editor’s Preface

Kenneth Millar, raised in Canada, moved to Southern California in 1946. There, for two and a half decades, under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, he wrote books involving California detective Lew Archer – books that reached the bestseller lists in 1969.

Macdonald’s popular breakthrough coincided with a re-newed interest by Canadians in their heritage and identity, and a renaissance in Canadian letters. New voices from up north (Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Alice Munro) were being heard down in the States and around the world.

Ross Macdonald’s was a Canadian voice, too. Ken Millar though Lew Archer, like his author, looked at California through Canadian eyes. The Archer books were filled with Canadian references; some even had Canadian content.

In the 1970s, Millar yearned to write a book (whether fiction or nonfiction) that would deal explicitly with his Canadian background. He mulled an autobiographical family history that would trace the Millar roots from Galashiels, Scotland, to southern Ontario, to Southern California. He worked on a couple of novel plots set in or near Winnipeg in the 1920s, where he’d attended private school. Millar even considered having Lew Archer discover that the detective himself had been born in Canada.