Ross MacDonald's
mysteries, and his main protagonist
Lew Archer, occupy a crucial place
in literary history.
These stories are the
essential link between the tough-guy private eye stories of
Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler, which built the genre, and contemporary private eye fiction,
with darker, more troubled and psychologically raw characters like James Lee Burke's
DaveRobicheaux and Lawrence Block's
Matt Scudder (to name two of my
favorites).
MacDonald's Archer was often
plunged into such cases involving the
misdoings of the wealthy and influential and the ways that families could destroy
themselves.
Archer was definitely a
tough guy like his antecedents, but he was also the first of the bunch to start down a path filled with looming shadows of psychic doom and
devastation that deepened and darkened the genre overall.
The Doomsters and
the Galton Case are good places to dive into Archer's
adventures, as they represented the ratcheting up of psychological intensity
in the series.
You might also catch
PaulNewman's interpretation of the character, renamed Harper for some reason, in
two movies based on Mr. MacDonald's books, namely
Harper and
the Drowning Pool.
Reading through these books has put me in
the mind of writing a mystery and how an author might
bring this noirish sense into a YA setting most effectively and
believably.
One signpost in this
direction is the movie
Brick, in which a high school student looks into the death
of his girlfriend, and it comes complete with a hard-boiled voice-over.
Somewhere down the line, I'm going to take a
stroll down the path that Mr. MacDonald blazed so compellingly.
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