[For this year’s
installment in my
annual Beach Reads
series, I wanted to focus on mystery authors and novels about which I’ve previously
blogged in this space. Leading up a new post and author on Friday, and then one
of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year—so add your Beach Read
suggestions in comments, please!]
On the author who exemplifies one of the most American literary genres—and
whose novels will send the best kind of summer chills down your spine.
When I was initially thinking
about what to include in this blog’s purview, way back in 2010, 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 try to focus in this
space. But what I have realized, more and more fully as this blog has developed
over those six and a half years since, 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 probably not going to create
an entry on it (although don’t hold me to that). But 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.
Every time I’ve
gone back to MacDonald in the nearly three 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, on the beach and anywhere else, than Lew
Archer. Next mysterious read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Read nominees, mysterious or otherwise, you’d share?
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