Sweet Jesus!
Did Rara-Avis suddently turn into SFMS? I go away for one day
and come back to find EIGHTY-odd Rara-Avis messages in my
in-box! Could Ross Macdonald really generate this much
controversy? Why do we even need a Ross Macd. month? It looks
like we already had one.
And you managed to generate all that correspondence without
me? Well, we can't have that.
First, as to Macdonald's influence. Macdonald himself was
clearly far more influenced by Chandler than Chandler was by
Hammett. Early on you can see Hammett's influence on Chandler
in, for example, the two Mallory stories in which Chandler
tries to replicate the ultra-objective 3rd person style
Hammett had used so well in THE MALTESE FALCON and THE GLASS
KEY. By his third story, "Finger Man," essentially the first
Marlowe story (though he wasn't called that in its initial
publication), Chandler was pretty much going his own
way.
Macdonald, on the other hand, followed the Chandler playbook
far more slavishly than Chandler did the Hammett playbook,
and did it for his whole career.
Macdonald admitted, in the forward to the Archer omnibus
ARCHER IN HOLLYWOOD, that Archer was deliberately modeled on
Marlowe. And certainly Archer followed what I've called the
Marlowe Paradigm in every single respect. In his first
book-length appearance, he's a 30-ish, unmarried ex-cop, who
operates his own, one-man detective agency out of a large
American city and tells his stories in the first person. And,
except for getting older (which Marlowe did, too), he
continues to follow the paradigm throughout the series.
The two elements regarded as Macdonald's particular
contribution to the PI genre, a compassionate hero and
mysteries involving screwed-up families with long-buried
secrets, both have their roots in Hammett and Chandler,
too.
What after all are the Leggetts/Dains in Hammett's THE DAIN
CURSE, or the Sternwoods in Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP, if not
templates for the dysfunctional families that form the core
of so many Archer novels? What motivates the Op's caring for
Gabrielle in CURSE or Marlowe's looking out for the
Sternwoods long after he's really completed what he was
actually hired to do in SLEEP if not compassion?
Macdonald's following the Chandler model seems natural when
one considers how much they had in common. Their lives had
many parallels. Both raised by single mothers. Both
native-born US citizens who were, nevertheless, raised
primarily in the British Empire
(Chandler in Ireland and England, and Macdonald in Canada).
Both combat veterans of World Wars. And both fascinated by
the literary possiblities of American colloquial language
upon their return to the US.
Macdonald once said, "Democracy is as much a language as it
is a place. If a man has suffered (as we
[Chandler and Macdonald] both had) under a society of
privilege, the American vernacular can serve him as a kind of
passport to freedom and equality. Marlowe and Archer can go
anywhere at least once, and talk to anybody."
Even the development of the Marlowe series parallels the
development of the Archer series. Just as Marlowe was called
something else in his early appearances in BLACK MASK and
DIME DETECTIVE (Carmady and Dalmas), so Archer is called Joe
Rogers in his first short story appearance in EQMM, "Find the
Woman" (a title that seems to evoke an early Chandler story,
"Try the Girl"). And just as Carmady/Dalmas became Marlowe
when the stories were collected in THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER,
so Rogers became Archer when "Find the Woman" led off THE
NAME IS ARCHER and its expanded hard-cover edition, LEW
ARCHER - PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
If Macdonald was so influenced by Chandler, it follows that
everyone who's influenced by Macdonald is simply being
influenced by Chandler at one remove.
Still, if Macdonald wasn't as influential as Chandler, he WAS
both more consistent and more productive. Chandler wrote
seven Marlowe novels and two collections of short stories
(one posthumous). Macdonald wrote eighteen Archer novels,
five standalone mysteries, and two collections of short
stories (one posthumous). And while Chandler occasionally
swung and missed (THE HIGH WINDOW is definitely sub-par after
THE BIG SLEEP and FAREWELL, MY LOVELY, and his last novel,
PLAYBACK, is a major disappointment), there really isn't a
clunker in the Archer series. If there's a certain
familiarity in the plotlines, there is also an amazingly high
level of performance in each individual book. If he was never
as good as Chandler at his best, it must also be admitted
that he was never as bad as Chandler at his worst.
If we're only going to read one Archer, I'd recommend THE
NAME IS ARCHER/LEW ARCHER - P.I., one of the best private eye
short story collections ever. If it has to be a novel, why
not the first, THE MOVING TARGET, which was the basis for the
biggest PI film of the
'60's, HARPER? If it has to be post-GALTON, I'd personally
choose THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE, but I've heard that
Macdonald himself once said that he regarded BLACK MONEY as
his best effort.
Dewey's DRAW THE CURTAIN CLOSE is the first Mac novel, and,
in that early effort, tough and heard though he is, he's
already displaying the tender heart and concern for children
that will mark books like EVERY BET'S A SURE THING, THE MEAN
STREETS, and A SAD SONG SINGING. Published in 1947, it does
predate THE MOVING TARGET. On the other hand, the
Rogers/Archer short story, "Find the Girl," was published in
'45 or
'46, so who's to say?
On other subjects:
Chandler's method of developing novels from short stories was
markedly different from Hammett's and it's not really fair to
compare them. Hammett wrote novels intended for magazine
serialization that, by editorial edict, had to be written in
such a way that each magazine installment could stand on its
own as a short story. This is the method he used for BLOOD
MONEY, RED HARVEST, THE DAIN CURSE, and THE GLASS KEY. Only
THE MALTESE FALCON was written so that each installment was
nothing more than a serial installment. Apparently Cap Shaw
was sufficiently impressed that he was willing to let it
appear as a regular serial rather than a consecutive series
of semi-autonomous short stories.
Chandler, on the other hand, took completely unrelated short
stories, and combined and expanded them, rewriting scenes
from the original stories extensively, and adding wholly new
chapters to help fuse the disparate plotlines. It was a
method entirely different from conceiving a novel that, from
the start, had to be made up of semi-independent portions,
and made for a less episodic structure.
The '50's were an angry era because, after having supposedly
won the good fight for Truth, Justice, and the American Way,
we were suddenly confronted by the reality that Stalin and
the commies were at least as bad, and probably worse than
Hitler and the Nazis. In a relatively short period of time,
they'd grabbed up virtually all of Eastern Europe, taken over
Chican, stolen our A-bomb secrets, popped a nuke just to show
us they could, induced North Korea to invade South Korea,
thus involving us in another shooting war, and, most
importantly, to a far greater extent than the Nazis were able
to, apparently infiltrated all levels of American life up to
and including the highest levels of government.
I wasn't around then, but if I'd just spent four or five
years fighting a war to defeat totalitarianism and was then
confronted with the fact that the threat was still there
despite all my efforts, it would make me mad as hell, and I
wouldn't want to take it anymore. And, not to nitpick about
the use of words
(well, actually that's exactly what I'm doing), it's not
paranoia if they really are out to get you.
Daly, at least according to Spillane, didn't sue Spillane.
His agent did. Daly, actually flattered by the first fan
letter he'd gotten in years, killed the suit and fired his
agent.
Okay, now that I've settled everything, you can all calm
down.
JIM DOHERTY
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 01 Dec 2004 EST