On the birthday boy who exemplifies one of the most American literary
genres—and whose novels will send the best kind of winter chills down your
spine.
When I was initially thinking about
what to include in this blog’s purview, I went back and forth on whether to
include topics that are particularly, deeply personal, authors or texts or
events that have captivated my attention and interest at various moments in my
life (and still do) but that aren’t necessarily quite as far-reaching in their
significance as others on which I’ll focus in this space. But what I have realized,
at least as of this point in my thinking, is a combination of two things: everything here is here, first and
foremost, because I care deeply about it, so it’s kind of silly to try to parse
out which ones I care about for which reasons; and the central reason why I
care about these things enough to consider ‘em as topics isn’t just that they
make me happy, but that I think they’re meaningful and powerful enough to merit
our attention. Which is to say: I love the movie Willow (that’s right, I do), but I’m not going to create an entry
on it. But birthday boy Ross
MacDonald’s series of hardboiled PI novels? Yes, yes I will.
At one early point in my plans
for a dissertation—and I do mean early; I was the kind of high school nerd who
was already thinking of dissertation options—I thought about tracing the 20th
century evolution of the hardboiled PI novel,
from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond
Chandler, Mickey Spillane to Ross MacDonald, and up to the female authors (Marcia
Muller, Sara Paretksy, Sue Grafton) and protagonists who dominated the 80s and
90s in the genre. The character type is one of the most genuinely and
meaningfully American in any artistic medium, and so we can certainly identify
core elements of our national identity in each time period across those
different authors—Hammett’s cynical and bitter PIs in the late 20s and early 30s
shifting to Chandler’s more intellectual Phillip Marlowe in the 40s, for
example. In the 50s and 60s, Spillane and MacDonald created amazingly
contrasting PIs: Spillane’s Mike
Hammer is an old-school hard-ass and misogynist, a creature of the
masculine 50s, someone who watches a woman strip naked for him, thinks to
himself that “she was a real blonde,” and then shoots her dead in cold blood a
moment later; while MacDonald’s Lew Archer is a romantic idealist, an echo of
the Beats and counter-cultures of these decades, someone who often articulates
a cynical perspective aloud but whose narration is consistently lyrical and
impassioned, sympathizing with the worst in who and what he finds in the course
of his investigations and consistently seeking the best in them (including
falling in love multiple times, and never once, to my knowledge, shooting one
of them in cold blood).
Archer’s voice and MacDonald’s
prose style are consistently pitch-perfect, and make any one of the twenty or
so books in the series (which MacDonald published between 1949 and 1976, while
publishing a number of other works under other names; MacDonald itself was a
pseudonym for Kenneth Millar) well worth a read. But in the series’ best
novels—and I think the high-water marks are The
Chill (1964), The
Underground Man (1971), and Sleeping
Beauty (1973)—MacDonald also creates rich and layered
multi-generational historical mysteries, plots that stretch back decades and
involve literally dozens of characters, different families and settings and
eras, and a wide range of core social and political issues. The structures of
these novels are ridiculously tight and impressive and the payoffs deeply
satisfying (let’s just say that The Chill
in particular is very aptly named), but this historical depth makes these books
a lot more than just pleasure reads; they are American sagas without question,
tracing families and relationships and identities and places across much of the
20th century, considering how both one very full and compelling
world (that of Southern California) and the diverse and changing nation that it
in many ways encapsulates grew and decayed, lived and died, from the end of
World War II to the post-Vietnam and -Watergate era.
Some of the authors with whom I
was obsessed for a time I look back on and, well, I try not to look back on
‘em; I won’t name names, but one such rhymes with Dom Chancy. But every time
I’ve gone back to MacDonald in the two-plus decades since my first encounters,
I’ve found new aspects within these texts, new ways in which they can help me
understand not only the mysteries of love and relationships and family (as can,
say, Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle as well), but also of American identity;
there is perhaps no character type more American than the hardboiled PI, and no
PI more worth our time and attention than Lew. Final Fireside Reads tomorrow,
Ben
PS. You know what to do—nominations
for Winter Reads, please!
12/13 Memory Day
nominee: Ella Baker,
whose mentoring and leadership
inspired virtually every
Civil Rights activist, and helped change the course of American
and world history.
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