Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

“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.” [74] The Instant Enemy.

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.” [75] The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

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.” [76] The Ivory Grin.

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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.” [77] The Barbarous Coast. 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.” [78] Find a Victim.

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…” [79] The Ivory Grin.

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.” [80] The Far Side of the Dollar.

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.” [81] The Doomsters. 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.” [82] The Doomsters.

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.” [83] The Doomsters.

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…” [84] The Underground Man.

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.” [85] The Chill.

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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,” [86] The Instant Enemy. 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.” [87] The Barbarous Coast.

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.” [88] The Underground Man.

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.” [89] The Far Side of the Dollar.