Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

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.” [57] Find a Victim.

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.” [58] The Moving Target.

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…” [59] Ross Macdonald, The Ivory Grin (Knopf, 1952). 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.” [60] The Chill.

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.” [61] The Far Side of the Dollar.

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.

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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.” [62] The Barbarous Coast. )

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.” [63] Black Money.

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.” [64] The Galton Case. Another time, he observed: “Money usually has strings attached to it.” [65] The Chill.

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.” [66] The Instant Enemy. 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.” [67] The Barbarous Coast.

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.” [68] The Doomsters.

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.” [69] The Doomsters. )

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.” [70] The Galton Case. 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.” [71] The Blue Hammer. 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” [72] Black Money. – 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.” [73] The Ivory Grin. At the same time, he expected his clients to pay attention to what he said.