Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

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. And 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.” [90] Black Money. 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.” [91] The Chill. Some came together in a sudden rush, constructing themselves “in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.” [92] The Goodbye Look. 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.” [93] The Instant Enemy.

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.” [94] The Zebra-Striped Hearse. 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.” [95] The Barbarous Coast. 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.

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,” [96] Black Money. 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.” [97] The Drowning Pool.

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.” [98] The Zebra-Striped Hearse.

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.” [99] The Far Side of the Dollar.

The fact was, as Archer knew, he “sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.” [100] The Underground Man.

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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.

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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,” [101] The Goodbye Look. 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.” [102] The Goodbye Look.

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For a time, after moving into the apartment, he had “forgotten how to sleep.” [103] Sleeping Beauty. 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.