Lew Archer, ex-cop searching for truth.

      Ross MacDonald Black Money (1965) A missing-person case turns into a complex tangle of love triangles, murder, and money laundering. Archer plods along, is pistol whipped, falls for the wrong woman (again), and untangles the mess. But that’s not the same as cleaning it up. MacDonald is one of the crime writers who understands how evil spreads like a stain that permanently darkens the lives of everyone it touches. He also knows that crime springs from delusions driven by misplaced passion and an inability to accept that life has no fairy-tale happy endings. He knows the American Dream pursued becomes a nightmare reality. ***

     Ross Macdonald. The Name is Archer (1983) The short stories featuring Lew Archer. More tightly plotted than the novels, but with the same cast of dream-chasers whose naive belief in a happy ending triggers the evil that engulfs them and the bystanders caught up in the backwash. ***

     Lew Archer, ex-cop, ex-soldier, ex-husband. A loner who connects with the drifters and grifters that his cases wash up. He has a powerful sense of justice, and a stubborn focus on finding the truth. 

   The truth reveals dysfunctional families, domestic abuse, fraud, impersonations, long-buried secrets and corpses, corruption in high places, and men and women who confuse respect with love, and money with happiness. There are good cops, power-mad cops, cops bought by some rich sponsor, cops defeated by the evils they can’t prevent. Fathers who abandon their sons and daughters or overwhelm them with their own unfulfilled dreams. Mothers who spoil their children or demand a perfection they can’t achieve. Social strivers who will do anything to preserve their reputations, or to protect the family from scandal. Fantasists who believe that one final job will propel them into a life of ease and status. Losers who will never win because they can’t recognise that what they already have is better than anything they yearn for.

     MacDonald’s style derives from Hammett, but improves on it. I read my collection of Archer novels one after the other, which showed that MacDonald rearranges the same cast of characters and suite of events into new designs which nevertheless demonstrate the same bleak vision of the American Dream become the American Nightmare. No matter how people try to achieve some resolution of all their problems, the best they can hope for is a life without serious troubles. Recommended. *** to ****