Ross Macdonald. The Way Some People Die (1951)

     Ross Macdonald. The Way Some People Die (1951) The third Lew Archer novel, and still one of the best. Archer is engaged by a mother to find her missing daughter, who has married a small-time hood. He uncovers an elaborate plot to kill off an undesirable husband and abscond with his ill-gotten money. Mobsters who want their money and their heroin complicate the problem. The girl is the murderer, and like many villains of the period she is a psychopath.
     Leslie Fiedler noted the frequent appearance of evil women in American literature, and put it down to American men and women’s inability to treat each other as mature equals. There is some truth to that; around the same time Betty Friedan’s suburban housewife whinge reignited the feminist movement, whose thesis was that men do not treat women as equals. (Friedan wasn’t really a feminist; she was just annoyed that she couldn’t get the (female) help she wanted so as to be free to pursue a career, and further annoyed that she wasn’t wooed by prospective employers. Where she got such fantastic notions about the working world is anyone’s guess. She seems to have led a very sheltered life).
     But Fiedler ignored the evidence available to him or anyone else capable of observing actual life, which is that men and women in the USA, like men and women everywhere, manage to get along pretty well. They do so by discovering and more or less accepting each other’s foibles and quirks, and by negotiating revisions to their roles in every generation, and above all by treating each other with kindness, most of the time.
     However, literature is another matter. It both reflects and distorts the realities of life. Popular literature tends to present a more or less idealised fantasy of what its readers wish life were like. This idealised world includes its own corrections. The virtuous virgin is contrasted with the slutty bitch, the comforting mother with the cruel witch. The hero pure in word and deed faces the villain impure in everything he does and says. The strong and just father contrasts with the weak and unjust uncle. And so on. The moral vision may be black and white, but it is powerful, and commands the assent of the readers. The same moral vision appears in the tabloids, which differ from pulp fiction only in that the stories are purported to be true.

     Macdonald gives us a villain whose appearance (the virtuous virgin/wife) hides the reality (the sluttish bitch/cruel witch). He plays with the stereotypes and tropes of pulp fiction in a way often imitated. He plays with the moral verities: the universe in which he sets Lew Archer is one of dark greys and dirty whites, where simple moral judgments break up on the reality of human complexity. Lew Archer’s meditative melancholy provides the setting for these themes. He’s a man who’s seen too many mixed motives, too many flawed heroes, and too many villains with a streak of kindness. He knows how often justice is compromised and why: desire for convenience, lack of money and time, devaluing of those who live in and beyond the borders of respectability. The academic critics revere Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the best practitioners of this mode, but I think Macdonald is the better than either of them.

    Recommended. ***½ (2008)