The Archer Files Read online

  Ross Macdonald

  THE ARCHER FILES

  Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the British Crime Writers of Association Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

  Tom Nolan

  Tom Nolan, editor of The Archer Files and author of the critically acclaimed and Edgar Award–nominated Ross Macdonald: A Biography, has reviewed crime fiction for The Wall Street Journal since 1990. He lives in Los Angeles.

  BOOKS BY ROSS MACDONALD

  The Dark Tunnel

  Trouble Follows Me

  Blue City

  The Three Roads

  The Moving Target

  The Drowning Pool

  The Way Some People Die

  The Ivory Grin

  Meet Me at the Morgue

  Find a Victim

  The Name Is Archer

  The Barbarous Coast

  The Doomsters

  The Galton Case

  The Ferguson Affair

  The Wycherly Woman

  The Zebra-Striped Hearse

  The Chill

  The Far Side of the Dollar

  Black Money

  The Instant Enemy

  The Goodbye Look

  The Underground Man

  Sleeping Beauty

  The Blue Hammer

  The Archer Files (edited by Tom Nolan)

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JULY 2015

  Copyright © 2007, 2015 by The Margaret Miller Charitable Remainder Trust u/a 4/12/1982: Compilation and “The Trial” and “Part 2 of ‘Winnipeg, 1929’ ”

  Introduction copyright © 2007, 2015 by Tom Nolan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. This is an expanded edition of a work originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crippen & Landru Publishers, Norfolk, VA, in 2007.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101910122

  eBook ISBN 9781101910139

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery

  Cover photographs: woman © Doug Gray/Age Fotostock; man © David Sutherland/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1_r1

  a

  For Mary

  —TOM NOLAN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Permission to quote material from The Kenneth Millar Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC Irvine Libraries, has been granted by the University of California, Irvine.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Books by Ross Macdonald

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  “ARCHER IN MEMORY”—A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY TOM NOLAN

  THE ARCHER FILES

  FIND THE WOMAN (1946)

  DEATH BY WATER (1946)

  THE BEARDED LADY (1948)

  STRANGERS IN TOWN (1950)

  GONE GIRL (1953)

  THE SINISTER HABIT (1953)

  THE SUICIDE (1953)

  GUILT-EDGED BLONDE (1954)

  WILD GOOSE CHASE (1954)

  THE ANGRY MAN (1955)

  MIDNIGHT BLUE (1960)

  SLEEPING DOG (1965)

  CASE NOTES

  PREFACE TO THE CASE NOTES

  THE 13TH DAY (1953)

  HEYDAY IN THE BLOOD (1952)

  LADY KILLER (1954)

  LITTLE WOMAN (1954)

  THE STROME TRAGEDY (1955)

  STOLEN WOMAN (1958)

  DEATH MASK (1959)

  CHANGE OF VENUE (1961)

  DO YOUR OWN TIME (1963)

  THE COUNT OF MONTEVISTA (1964)

  100 PESOS (1965)

  WE WENT ON FROM THERE (1965)

  TRIAL (1958)

  WINNIPEG, 1929 (1977)

  SOURCES

  ARCHER IN MEMORY

  A Biographical Sketch by Tom Nolan

  Possessed even when young of an endless backlog of stored information, most of it sad, on human nature, he tended once, unless I’m mistaken, to be a bit cynical. Now he is something much more, he is vulnerable. As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. He cares. And good and evil both are real to him.

  —Eudora Welty, 1971

  For all his goodwill and energy, there is a touch of sadness in his expression, as if there had been some trouble in his life, a fracture in his world which all his investigative efforts had failed to mend.

  —Ross Macdonald, 1977

  “You must tell me the story of your life,” a woman he’d just met dared Los Angeles private-detective Lew Archer in 1964, when the L.A. investigator was nearing his personal half-century mark.

  “I started out as a romantic,” Archer shot back, “and ended up as a realist.”

  He was half-joking, but there was truth in that one-liner. Lew Archer, in the course of a thirty-year professional life, moved away from a Technicolor-vision of himself as a sort of Sunset Strip culture-hero, and into a life-sized portrait, in muted tones, of a much more ordinary man. As a person, though, he grew from a rather brash if self-deprecating wise-guy into a poetically observant and almost religiously empathic human being.

  All our knowledge of Lew Archer’s personal history comes from the elegant and elaborately written detective stories of Ross Macdonald, the Santa Barbara, California, author who served as Archer’s authorial amanuensis from 1946 until 1977. Any life-account of Archer is necessarily based on revelations gleaned from these admittedly fictionalized dozen short stories, eighteen novels, and a few other fragments. Out of such scattered facts and hints, though, may be constructed a sort of impressionistic biographical sketch—one which, like a private-detective’s case notes, mixes a few verifiable truths with a fair number of plausible deductions.

  —

  Lewis A. Archer was born in Long Beach, California, on June 2, probably in the year 1915.

  One of his earliest memories was of holding his father’s hand and taking his first wading steps into the Pacific Ocean that he would love to swim in and look at all of his life.

  By 1920, Lewis was attending grade school in Oakland, where a favorite treat was the fried-potato chips bought at a nearby lunchroom and eaten out of greasy newspaper wrappings. Cracking walnuts open was another happy childhood memory. And Lewis was fascinated by the stereopticon he found in his mother’s great-aunt’s attic, with the sepia-tinted glimpses it gave of a vanished Union Pacific world.

  Except for that brief time in Oakland, young Lew was raised in Long Beach, within walking distance of the waterfront. He said little or nothing in later life about his parents—an indication perhaps of an influence too ordinary to mention, or more likely of memories too painful to reveal.

  He was more forthcoming about two other relatives who helped form his personality. One was his uncle Jake, a prize-fighter “who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith, to no decision.” A quarter-century after meeting him, Lew could no longer recall wh
at Uncle Jake looked like, but: “I could remember the smell of him, compounded of bay rum, hair oil, strong clean masculine sweat and good tobacco, and the taste of the dark chocolate cigarettes he bought me the day my father took me to San Francisco for the first time.” Told as an adult that he fought well, Archer boasted: “I was taught by pros.” Uncle Jake was the first of several veteran battlers who’d instruct Lew in the finer points of how to slip a punch, stay on your toes, lead with your left, and throw a combination. But not every Archer saw the value of such training. “My mother never kept [Uncle Jake’s] pictures,” Lew remembered, “because she was ashamed to have a professional fighter in the family.”

  Archer’s mother, a Catholic, took him instead to visit his grandmother: the other relative who became a formative figure to him. Very soft-spoken and highly religious, this woman lived in the picturesque old town of Martinez, in Contra Costa County, where she dressed in “crisp black funeral silks” and displayed a piety which embraced both Roman dogma and native superstition (she read tea leaves). On her bedroom wall was a motto she herself had stitched, which reminded: “He is the Silent Listener at Every Conversation.”

  Perhaps to please this woman, Lew had been named for Lew Wallace, the soldier-author of the greatly popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. His grandmother, Archer later said, “had marked me for the priesthood, but I…slipped away under the fence.” Nevertheless, the fear of God she instilled in the boy was the beginning of his moral life. His later accounts of Southern California crimes would flicker with Dante-esque glimmers of infernal depths, purgatorial slopes and hovering souls. Archer would learn no Latin in school, but he’d never forget the Latin words of his childhood prayers: Ora pro nobis—pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

  So he began to swing like a gymnast between two emotional spheres: the glamorous-seeming world of aggressive action and the sere oasis of spiritual humility. And, perhaps, between his father and his mother.

  One family member must have instilled in Lew an early love of stories, for later in life Archer told so many stories so well. A striking characteristic of those tales is their frequent descriptions of people through animal imagery (“He looked at her sideways, swinging his head like a bull.” “She turned on him like a hissing cat.”). Might it be that some relative had the habit of sitting Lew down and making up fables for him in the oral tradition, cloaking real-life people in the guise of animals?

  At the same time, the boy’s eyes must have been opened to an awareness of the entire natural world—so alive was he, in every story he helped create, to the trees and plants and birds Southern California displayed in lush profusion. Included in that awareness were the less-beautiful predators—especially rats, of which there must have been no scarcity in the waterfront-adjacent Long Beach neighborhood where Archer grew up. A rat scurries briefly through almost every Lew Archer book, sharp-toothed symbol of a spoiled paradise.

  The then-silent movies were a great source of entertainment for Lew as a child. Along with most boys of six, seven, or eight, he loved cowboy pictures at the Saturday-afternoon matinees featuring such heroes as Fred Thompson and Tom Mix; but his favorite serials were the adventures of an English police detective, Inspector Fate of Limehouse, played by the now-forgotten American actor Raymond Campbell.

  Certainly Lew learned to read at an early age. The avid reading of books was a habit Archer continued until he died. It makes sense to assume one of the first “grown-up” volumes he tackled was namesake Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, a landmark bestseller that combined theological concerns with high adventure—and which was also, not incidentally, an account of a man falsely accused of plotting murder.

  Reading for pleasure was one thing; doing well in school, quite another. There’s no indication that young Lew Archer, much engaged in such physical pursuits as football and track and fishing, was an especially good student. He was intimidated by female teachers, for one thing: “tall women behind desks,” like the vice-principal of Wilson Junior High, “who disapproved of the live bait I used to carry in the thermos bottle in my lunch pail, and other ingenious devices.”

  And there were other distractions—such as the enchanting girl he used to follow home from junior high. (“I never did work up enough nerve to ask her for the privilege of carrying her books.”)

  By the time he reached high school, such distractions had proliferated, even as they stretched farther out of reach: beautiful rich girls in soft wool coats buttoned up to their soft chins, “the girls with oil or gold or free-flowing real-estate money dissolved in their blood like blueing.”

  If such girls noticed Lew Archer at all, it was as an object of condescension. Long after leaving Long Beach, he’d recall, he was plagued by a realistic recurring dream:

  I was back in high school, in my senior year. The girl at the next desk smiled at me snootily.

  “Poor Lew. You’ll fail the exams.”

  I had to admit…this was likely. The finals loomed…like the…slopes of purgatory, guarded by men with books I hadn’t read.

  “I’m going to college,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  I had no idea…back in Mr. Merritt’s classroom, dreading the finals and wondering what I would do when I had failed them.

  “You’ll have to learn a trade,” the snooty one said.

  There were worse fates chasing Lew Archer through adolescence than the prospect of flunking high school. “The teens were my worst time,” he later judged. An irreconcilable rift grew between Lew and the possibly abusive adults closest to him. One day, he remembered decades later (in one of only three printed references ever made to his male parent), with anger stinging his eyes and clenching his fists, “I took the strap away from my father.”

  After that, it seems, Lew was on his own—free to cruise the boulevards of Long Beach all night in a model-A Ford “hot-roadster,” to hang around drive-ins, where the air was thick with “the blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease”; to find a “rough and forlorn” excitement in the company of other hot-rodders, the sound of whose cars (“whining, threatening, rising, fading”) “spoke to something deep in my mind which I loved and hated.” And he roamed beyond Long Beach, sharing “joy-rides and brawls with the lost gangs in the endless stucco maze of Los Angeles.”

  He learned dubious skills: how to force a Yale lock, how to break into an automobile, how to hot-wire a car’s ignition. A working-class boy at the height of the Depression, an alienated son full of righteous anger, Lew was headed down a bad road. He stole goods, money, and cars. He was, in his own later assessment, “a street boy…gang-fighter, thief, poolroom lawyer…I was a frightened junior-grade hood in Long Beach, kicking the world in the shins because it wouldn’t dance for me.”

  Luckily, he was apprehended.

  As he revealed in a 1958 work:

  [A] whisky-smelling plain-clothes man caught me stealing a battery from the back room of a Sears Roebuck store in Long Beach. He stood me up against the wall and told me what it meant and where it led. He didn’t turn me in.

  I hated him for years, and never stole again.

  But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls. It felt as cold as death around the heart, and after a while the heart would die and there would be no more hope, just the fury in the head and the fear in the bowels…But for the grace of an alcoholic detective sergeant, me.

  Scared out of a life of crime, Archer still had to make a living. And he had to figure out things mostly on his own, for “people started dying” on him—maybe one or both parents, no doubt his grandmother, possibly his uncle Jake. After high school, he took a seasonal job to buy some time and sort out his thoughts; and he found that being a self-sufficient adult might have consolations:

  “When I was seventeen I spent a summer working on a dude ranch in the foothills of the Sierra. Toward the end of August, when the air was beginning
to sharpen, I found a girl, and before the summer was over we met in the woods. Everything since,” he concluded in the 1960s, “[has] been slightly anticlimactic.”

  Back in Long Beach, Lew confronted his options. A big earthquake hit his home town in 1933, when Lew was about eighteen. Maybe it jolted him into college—and right back out of it; Archer’s attempt at higher education “hadn’t worked out.” It’s possible he boxed in some Golden Gloves matches, but professional prizefighting was not for him.

  Perhaps blows gotten in the ring, though, jarred loose memories of Inspector Fate of Limehouse, the English copper whose silent-film adventures meant so much to an eight-year-old Lew and who now, oddly or not, came to mind as an inspiration. Might Inspector Fate have merged in Lew’s imagination with the alcoholic Long Beach cop who’d rescued him from a life of crime?

  In any case, Lew Archer had a brainstorm. In 1935, at the age of twenty, he applied for a job with the Long Beach police department; and he was hired.

  —

  I was one of the ones who turned out different and better. Slightly better, anyway. I joined the cops instead of the hoods.

  —Lew Archer

  As a rookie officer in the middle 1930s, “new to the harness,” Archer had a willing spirit. He was eager to succeed. He worked long hours and showed initiative. His instincts were good, and he was persistent. He earned quick promotion.

  But the higher he rose in the ranks, the less he approved of how things worked. “The police mind likes simple, obvious patterns,” is how Archer put it later (how different this would be from the mind of the private investigator!). A likely suspect became, for cops, the only suspect. Archer saw men, in Long Beach and in L.A., railroaded on skimpy or circumstantial evidence—sometimes all the way into the gas chamber.

  And his superiors didn’t like complaints. Archer’s job seemed to have as much to do with preserving the status quo—in the p.d., as well as in society—as it did with crime-fighting. (Not that civilians were much grateful for the job he did. Archer felt the snobbery of those who didn’t want cops at their parties.) To get ahead on the force, you had to be a bit of a brown-nose; and Archer was still enough of a rebel that he couldn’t stand “podex osculation,” as he’d euphemistically put it.