What Book to Read?

I desperately need more space on my already overcrowded bookshelves, so I’m always looking out for books that can go to the op shop. My eye recently fell on a row of aging paperbacks by two American detective story writers, Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald. (No, my books aren’t shelved alphabetically, I’m not that organised, it’s just chance they were together.) Ross McDonald (no relation to John D. and in fact a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar) published a series of eighteen detective stories featuring private eye Lew Archer between 1949 and 1976. John D. came a little later with his twenty books featuring Travis McGee, a sort of private detective, between 1964 and 1985. So my paperbacks are at best over thirty years old, the spines show wear and tear, the print is small and the pages are yellowing. Would anyone want them? Is the recycle bin more appropriate than the op shop? I decided to re-read a couple before making up my mind.

The Lew Archer books are very easy to read so I read two, The instant Enemy and The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which is a catchy title but has little to do with the story. First published in 1968 and 1963 respectively, they are among his later books. They are in some important ways very similar, and I think it likely that they are fairly representative of all of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer stories. This similarity arises firstly because of the ongoing, and engaging, character of Lew Archer himself, a former policeman turned private detective working in Los Angeles. He is the natural successor of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Like Marlowe, Archer is tough and honourable, with a good line in deadpan humour. Secondly, both of the stories involve family dramas and secrets. There is remarkably little sex, though there is of course some violence; you can be sure that at some point in the story Archer will be variously left for dead, but most of the violence happens off stage. Archer is more concerned with the patient acquisition of information, what he learns from one person leading on to the next until the missing connection is made and the puzzle is unravelled. And this is where a third similarity comes in; both these plots, and probably the plots of most of the books, depend on misdirection. The real baddy is never who he/she appears to be, leading to quite complicated dénouements in the last few pages. So although the plots are clever, Archer is a delight and MacDonald’s prose is slick – as in ‘under the sound of money, her voice remembered times when there hadn’t been any’ –  there is a degree of sameness about the stories that marks them as genre fiction, rather than something more challenging – though not everyone agrees with this.

John D. MacDonald included a colour in the titles of each his Travis McGee stories (he wrote lots of other books, including suspense and science fiction) and the book I read was Free Fall in Crimson, first published 1981 so it’s a fairly late one. McGee works out of Port Lauderdale in Florida calling himself a ‘salvage consultant’, with a talent for ‘finding things for people’, or, as another character puts it, ‘slipping about, doing shifty things for people’. He fought in Vietnam, is large, physically fit and good at the rough stuff. And though he is not a private detective as such, he operates very much like one. Clearly Travis got fairly battered in the previous book (The Green Ripper, 1979) and is trying to put his life back together, but he agrees to follow up an unsolved murder for the son of the man who was killed. This involves him in talking to everyone with any connection to the man and his family, including bikies and film people, and stirring things up until he gets the information he needs – though not without further murders;  these however mostly occur off stage. Travis acquires a girlfriend, which Lew Archer never does, so there is a bit of sex, though it is chaste by today’s standards. It doesn’t add much to the story, so I guess it’s about fleshing out Travis’s character. I’m always interested in how civilian detectives – or salvage consultants – resolve their case, since they have no power to arrest anyone. Travis finds a clever way to deal with this problem.

One of the things that surprised me a bit is that none of these books feels particularly dated. There are of course no personal computers or mobile phones to play a role in detection but in any case, both Lew and Travis rely on talking to people face to face, seeing their reactions and making judgements about their credibility. I noticed that there are almost no people of colour in the books; it is a white world, which is doubtless no longer the case. Doubtless someone from Los Angeles or Fort Lauderdale would see many social and physical changes since these books were written that an outsider would not be aware of. But they are nevertheless remarkably modern in their concerns.

Both these writers have received high praise. Ross MacDonald has been favourably compared to the two earlier ‘hard boiled’ crime fiction writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, he has had a major influence on writers like Sue Grafton and his books are now being reissued. John D. MacDonald has been praised even more fulsomely, for example by Stephen King as ‘the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller’ and by Kingsley Amis, who claimed that MacDonald ‘is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels’. I think Amis is a bit over the top, but can certainly agree with King about John D. being a great story teller. I personally prefer Lew Archer to Travis McGee, but that’s a matter of taste.

You can read more about Ross MacDonald here, and John D. MacDonald here.

So op shop or recycle bin? In truth I can’t bring myself to do either. They are classics. They’ll stay on the shelf for a while longer.