Macdonald's digression from the PI conventions begins by
making Archer
"two-dimensional," although what he did say was that Archer
was a welder's mitt. Archer was how to handle "hot stuff."
Archer's job was a mitt to carry the "hot stuff" within the
tragedy of the mystery. Archer was a looking-glass, I suppose
you cold also say, and we telescoped out of or microscoped in
to a family tragedy.
The family tragedies often were based on Gatsby, on the
Oedipus complex (the Freudian angle), or on some personal
perspective Macdonald had of our American dystopia. (Damn, I
sound academic. Maybe I should go kill somebody cruelly,
viciously before I go on.) The first two I think everybody on
rara-avis knows. Black Money is a rewrite of Gatsby. After
The Galton Case, almost all of his books were variations on
Oedipus. Is that old myth trite & cliched? Think about
Dubya & his old man.
I know Terrill hates "location as character" as being
cliched, but Macdonald wrote his books sharply focused on the
life & styles of 1950s & 1960s California; he was a
Californian writer more than he was a mystery writer.
"Location as Character" goes the slogan. Not local color, but
a deeper appreciation of how a Location acts & reacts
itself within a story.
The movie Chinatown is a very Angeleno story, while the
Falcon could happen in any city in the world. The Big Sleep
is Los Angeles, and Los Angeles as a Character is crystal
clear in Chandler's opening paragraph of "Red Wind." In
Macdonald's The Underground Man, the California fire itself
is a character in the story. Yes, the fire is more
three-dimensional than Archer, but Archer is just the prism
we see a family tragedy through. In Sleeping Beauty, the oil
spill is a Character.
For my money, what I like most about Macdonald's work is that
he added compassion to his tragedies. The Blue Hammer, for
instance, which was Macdonald's last work, ends with a father
& son embrace. Forgiveness, in a curious way, for murder.
On the other hand, compassion is absent in Hammett, for
instance. There's zip mercy on any page. Can you talk about
Chandler & Compassion? I dunno. At the risk of pissing
off people, when I consider Chandler & Compassion in the
same breath, Marlowe makes me think of him as a whiner. Can
we talk about Compassion in the Hard-boiled Novel? Compassion
in Noir?
Stepping back into the shadows to reload...
Fred Zackel
"In my tenure as a homicide lieutenant, every Thanksgiving
there's a murder," Las Vegas Metro Homicide Lieutenant
Monahan told the Las Vegas Sun.
"I'm told by my predecessor that in his five years, every
year there was a murder."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 Nov 2004 EST