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VISIONS AND VALUES IN THE ACTION DETECTIVE
NOVEL: A STUDY OF THE WORKS 0F RAYMOND
CHANDLER, KENNETH MILLAII, AND JOHN D.
MACDONALD

Thesis for the Degree Of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
ETTA CLAIRE ’ABRAHAMS
1973

A w
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L“...

J J, J ,,,, ,, H
IIJIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIJII IIII IIIIIIIII II IQ”

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

Visions and Values in the Action Detective /)
Novel: A Study of the Works of '
Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Millar and John D. MacDonald

presented by

Etta Claire Abrahams

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph . D 0 degree in English

 

WKAJP

Major professor

 

0-7639

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

VISIONS AND VALUES IN THE ACTION DETECTIVE NOVEL: A
STUDY OF THE WORKS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER, KENNETH
MILLAR, AND JOHN D. MACDONALD

BY

Etta Claire Abrahams

This dissertation is a study of the attitudes, values
and codes of three action detectives: Philip Marlowe, Lew
Archer, and Travis McGee. Their creators, Raymond Chandler,
Kenneth Millar (whose pseudonym is Ross Macdonald), and
John D. MacDonald, span forty years of the hard-boiled
tradition.

Hard—boiled detective fiction is perhaps the most
widely read kind of popular literature both in America and
abroad. A primary reason for its success is that it rein-
forces the values of society at large, and provides it with
a modern day hero who will enforce these values. In order
to understand the kinds of attitudes and values that action
detective fiction reinforces, I have chosen three popularly
and critically acclaimed artists of the genre. I have

selected five major areas with which all three authors

Etta Claire Abrahams

concern themselves: the hero and his world; the law;
villains and victims; violence and sadism; and social
criticism.

The heroes of Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Millar,
and John D. MacDonald are all outcasts of society. But
their alienation is self-imposed, in part because of their
dissatisfaction with modern society. Philip Marlowe and
Lew Archer were once former Los Angeles policemen who
found too much routinization and corruption in the police
force and left it to impose their own order on society.
Travis McGee sits back on his houseboat-yacht in Ft.
Lauderdale, Florida, and views the chaos of modern America.
The first chapter, then, focuses on the characters of the
three detectives. What is it that makes them heroes? What
personal values do they hold? And what is the code or order
by which they live and which they impose on society? In
order to answer these questions, an analysis of the worlds
they inhabit is necessary, and this too is discussed in
the first chapter.

The second chapter defines the detectives' relation-
ships with organized law enforcement agencies. The law,
that is, sanctioned law, is not often to be trusted by
action detectives. Although there are good police officers
in the worlds and three detectives inhabit, they are often
incapacitated from carrying out their assignments by red-

tape or internal corruption. This chapter examines the

Etta Claire Abrahams

nature of established law and order, the natures of the
official law enforcers, and the reasons that the three
detectives feel it is often necessary to work outside the
law.

Chapter Three explores the roles and characters of
the villains and victims as they are represented by each
writer. Unlike the earlier dime western novel, villains
and victims in the action detective novel are rarely all-
evil or all-virtuous. Nor do they belong to any specific
social group. Thus, an indistinct line is often drawn
between villain and victim. The chapter studies the types
of villains and victims with whom the three detectives
deal, as well as the detectives' attitudes toward them.

Punishment and justice is studied in the fourth
chapter, which concerns violence and sadism in the detective
novel. When a detective drills a man in the heart, it's
violence; when he shoots him in the belly it's sadism.

This is a simple, but workable metaphoric distinction between
violence and sadism. Violence is at once a way of life and
deplorable to the three detectives. Sadism exists both
explicity and implicitly in the best of the action detective
novels: eXplicitly in the kinds of punishments dealt to

both victims and villains and in the descriptive passages
about these punishments, and implicitly in the effect of
these passages upon the reader, be it nausea or vicarious

pleasure.

Etta Claire Abrahams

The final chapter demonstrates how the detective is
a social critic. Why he is a social critic is rather
obvious: he is an outsider, an outcast, and as such may
view our world more objectively than we ourselves View it.
But more important is the "what" of what he criticizes, for
this raises the issue of popular taste. If one of the
characteristics of pOpular fiction is that it reinforces
the values of the society for which it is written, one
wonders just how far a writer can go in criticizing the
society while continuing to maintain his pOpular appeal.
How the authors handle this tricky problem is one of the
major thrusts of this chapter.

The dissertation is primarily a creative one in
that few sources, other than the novels, were used. Until
recently, little study has been done in the hard-boiled
genre. For an introduction to hard-boiled fiction, I

highly recommend Ron T. Goulart, editor, The Hardboiled

 

Dicks, and David Madden, editor, Tough Guy Writers of the

 

Thirties.

VISIONS AND VALUES IN THE ACTION DETECTIVE NOVEL: A
STUDY OF THE WORKS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER, KENNETH

MILLAR, AND JOHN D. MACDONALD

BY

Etta Claire Abrahams

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1973

<:> Copyright by
ETTA CLAI RE AB RAHAMS

1973

For My Parents
Frances Sherman and Herbert Norman Abrahams

With the love they taught me to give.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It's a special pleasure to acknowledge the peOple
who so much contributed to the success of this dissertation,
because my relationship with them has been a long and warm
one; I am a Michigan State University "baby," nurtured
through my Bachelor's and Master's degrees by many of
these peOple. Professor Russel B. Nye directed my thesis
with perception and sensitivity. He set me at ease, and
made me feel that I could succeed, even in those last
frantic moments of trying to meet a deadline. He is truly
a gentle man. Professors Virgil Scott and Victor Howard
read the dissertation with care and eXpedience. The
creative moments I enjoyed while writing are due to the
early guidance I received from Professor Scott when I was
an undergraduate. Bernard Engel, Chairman of the Depart-
ment of American Thought and Language at Michigan State,
also deserves a word of thanks. He understood the dif-
ficulty of teaching full-time and writing full-time, and
never pressured me.

There are friends, too, who must be thanked. Jeff
Greenberg provided the inspiration for the anecdote at the
beginning of the fifth chapter. He's a beautiful person.

Jack Thrush shared late-night coffee, listened to my

iii

ravings, and much more. The sisters in my rap group, and
especially Marilyn Frost and Ann Howard, helped me to
overcome the fear of success which is shared by so many
other women. Most of all, I'd like to thank Herb Greenberg.
He has given more than he has known, and is a loving and

much-loved person. Like his son, he too is beautiful.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
DEDICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vi
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. THE HERO AND HIS WORLD . . . . . . . . 18
III. THE TROUBLE WITH COPS IS . . . . . . . 47
IV. VILLAINS AND VICTIMS . . . . . . . . 78
V. WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS: VIOLENCE AND
SADISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
VI. WHERE HAVE ALL THE VALUES GONE: THE PRIVATE
EYE'S VISION OF AMERICA . . . . . . . 155
VII. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

PREFACE

The action detective story was as much a part of
the 1920's as prohibition, bathtub gin, and organized crime.
While local law enforcement agencies accepted the bribes of
big city gangsters and turned their backs on the man in the
street, the private detective, a somewhat tarnished knight,
emerged in the granite jungles as a source of hope.
Through the use of guns, his fists, and pure cunning he
fought both the gangsters and the police on his own terms.
And he won.

Historically, the popular fiction hard-boiled
detective has always been concerned with the social problems
of his time. In the 1920's Dashiell Hammett's Continental

Operative fought organized crime in Red Harvest. In the

 

30's, 40's, and 50's Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe

found crime among the wealthy members of elite Los Angeles
society, in the offices of doctors, dentists, lawyers, and
more sophisticated crime syndicates. For Ross Macdonald
(Kenneth Miller's pseudonym), crimes were and are concen-
trated among the wealthy, with greed, the shame of old
skeletons in modern sliding-door closets, and mental illness

as the motivators. Freudian analysts, high school guidance

vi

counselors, and the current Hollywood hip scene are only a
few of Macdonald's contemporary villains. And for John D.
MacDonald, the dragons are real estate syndicates, psycho-
paths, the drug-youth culture, and middle-class America in
general.

Hard-boiled detective fiction is among the most
widely read kind of popular literature both in America and
abroad. A primary reason for its success is that it
reinforces the values of society at large, and provides
it with a modern day hero who will enforce these values.
In order to understand the kinds of attitudes and values
that action detective fiction reinforces, I have chosen
three novelists, Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Millar and
John D. MacDonald. All three are critically and pOpularly
acclaimed artists of their genre. I have selected five
major areas with which all three authors concern them-
selves: the hero and his world; the law; villains and
victims; violence and sadism; and social criticism. The
dissertation will treat each of these themes separately

and in the order in which they are listed above.

vii

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

I am the lover wed to tears . . .
I am the cynic old and sage .
--Raymond Chandler
That the action (or hard-boiled) detective story
did not blossom until the 1920's is, I think, significant.
Because although its plot and characters are directly
indebted to the western dime novels of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, its themes and the codes of its
heroes are products of the change in values and the result-
ing alienation wrought by World War I and its aftermath.
It is therefore no coincidence that the codes of the Heming-
way hero and that of the tough private eye are closely
related.
The man most responsible for the success of the
hard-boiled school was Joseph "Cap" Shaw. Shaw, a business
man and World War I veteran with literary ambitions,

succeeded to the editorship of Black Mask (one of three

 

pulp magazines originally published by H. L. Mencken and

George Jean Nathan in 1920), in November, 1926. He served

as editor for a full decade, and during that time changed
the entire pattern of the detective story.

The ratiocinative tale was created by Edgar Allan
Poe in 1841, developed by such British writers as Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle through the Victorian period, later
imitated with minor variations by Americans like Mary
Roberts Rinehart and S. S. Van Dine. It included, in its
established, not-to-be-deviated—from formula, a detective
who, through the process of rational analysis, solves a
crime that all others, including the police, are at a loss
to explain. He then demonstrates to a friend the method
he used-~"Elementary, Watson"~~and shows where the police
went wrong.1 The pattern, consistently followed into the
1920's, included obscure clues, mysterious puzzles in the
form of cryptograms and anagrams, the locked room mystery,
and foreshadowing, also referred to as the "had-I-but—
known" story.

Poe began his brief career as a detective writer
(although the word "detective" is never used for August
Dupin) as a means of self therapy. The actions of madmen
in his tales of horror and delusion were carefully inter—
preted and explained by the detached, totally rational Dupin

in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of

 

1For a more complete description of the origins of
the ratiocinative tale see Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed
Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New YorE, I575),
Chapter X.

 

Marie Roget" (1842-43), and “The Purloined Letter" (1845).
Poe's attempt to create order in his own mind was exter-
nalized by the detective who, through his solution of a
crime which has disturbed the order of things, restores
that order. Although Poe's effort to restore his own
sanity was ultimately a failure for him, the new genre
brought fame and fortune to his saner successors.

The formula was, and still is, successful and
appealing. It describes a world set apart from the real
world, a setting of gardens and gardeners, maids and butlers,
manors and manners. The order which has been upset is a
limited one, and therefore easy to restore; it does not
extend beyond the lives of those directly affected. There
are no snipers, no Richard Specks, no Charles Mansons.2 No
psychological explanation of motive is needed other than,
say, a phrenological one or, in the case of the infamous
Professor Moriarty, a chemical imbalance.

Captain Shaw, on the other hand, demanded realism,
or at least the illusion of reality, from his writers. And
he got it. He desired "simplicity for the sake of clarity,

plausibility and belief," and "held that action is

2Critics have often speculated as to why Conan Doyle

did not make use of the Jack the Ripper murders in London
which took place while he was writing the Holmes stories.
One suggestion is that he feared a loss of Holmes' credi-
bility if the detective's solution to the crimes might be

in error. Another is that the far reaching crimes could

not be successfully handled within the confines of the
formula.

meaningless unless it involves recognizable human

characters in three-dimensional form."3 Don't tell the

reader, he admonished his writers,smow them, or better
yet, let the detective show them by talking and acting for
himself. Don't make the detective talk and act tough; let
him do it for himself. Talk tough they did, sometimes to
an extreme, as in the case of Carroll John Daly's Race
Williams: "I shoved a butt into my face, gave it heat."

It was Dashiell Hammett who became the first
standard by which Shaw measured quality in his hard-boiled
writers. Hammett, a former Pinkerton Detective agent,
began to turn his experiences into fiction:

Although he was credited with being the leader of
the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, and
although his hero had the basic characteristics
found in the traditionally tough hero, it is no
good trying to make Hammett all of a piece. . . .
The good writers of Hammett's group, as do good
writers in any group, experimented with writing
techniques in order to determine what was most
useful and effective for their own individual
expression. They worked with plot, trying to keep
it from becoming too obviously stereotyped; they
created a character in their developing short
stories who would later stand up in the longer
works of fiction; they agreed on the theme of the
rugged individualist righting wrongs; they tried
both the third and the first person to see which
would make the style more objective; and they
concentrated on their hard-boiled style, hoping
to make it as action packed as possible.4

 

3Philip Durham, "The Black Mask School," in Tou h
Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. by David Madden (CarEon-
dale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1968), p. 53.

4Durham, pp. 58-59.

A relative latecomer to Hammett's group was Raymond
Chandler. Born in Chicago in 1888, Chandler moved to
England with his Ireland-born mother, Florence, when his
parents were divorced. He was eight years old. There,
under English law, his mother became a British national.
Chandler, however, remained an American citizen. He was
educated in England's public schools, and upon graduation
took the Civil Service examination in which he placed third
out of six hundred.

His success on the examination was rewarded with a
position in the Admiralty, but he found the atmosphere
stuffy and the work tedious, and after six months he resigned.
He then moved to Bloomsbury where he began to learn to write.
His first poem, which he said was written in the bathroom,
was published when Chandler was nineteen. He continued to
publish poetry as a freelance writer in such magazines as

The Westminster Gazette, The Academy, and The Spectator.5

 

In 1912, Chandler decided to return to the United
States. He borrowed money from a British uncle, arrived
in New York, and began his journey to Los Angeles. In
Los Angeles he worked at anything he could find--on an

apricot ranch, stringing tennis rackets. When America

 

SPhilip Durham, Down These Mean Streets A Man Must
Eg: Raymond Chandler's Kfiight YChapeIfiHill, 1§E3T, Chapter
I. Much of the ififormation of Chandler's life has been
gleaned from this book.

entered World War I, he went to British Columbia and
enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces, where he served
from 19KT>to 1919.

Returning to California in 1919, Chandler went to
work for an English bank in San Francisco. However, he
disliked the stand-offishness of the English who, he said,
"don't live in England, don't want to live in England, but
bloody well wave their Chinese affectations of manner and
accent in front of your nose as if it was some kind of
rare incense instead of a distillation of cheap suburban
snobbery, which is just as ludicrous in England as it is
here."6 He shortly left the firm and returned to Los
Angeles, where he began his career as an accountant for the
Dabney Oil Syndicate.

Early in 1924, Chandler's mother died. A few weeks
later he married twice-divorced Pearl Cecily "Cissy"
Hurlburt. Chandler was thirty-five and she was fifty-
three. The marriage, a loving one, lasted for thirty
years, until Cissy's death.

Things went well for Raymond Chandler in the 1920's.
He was promoted to assistant auditor and subsequently to
vice president of three companies in the Dabney Syndicate:
South Boon Oil Company, Dabney-Johnston Oil Company, and

Herndon Petroleum Corporation. Yet in 1933, at the age of

 

6Durham, p. 15.

forty-five, Chandler decided to leave his successful
career and return to his first love, writing.
His first story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot,"

appeared in the December, 1933, issue of Black Mask. His

 

original private eye was named Mallory, and from 1933
until 1939, he appeared in twenty stories, under ten
different names, and in different occupations (detective
lieutenant, narcotic squad undercover man, hotel detective).7
Through these years Chandler carefully polished his detec-
tive and his style, paying strict attention to minute
detail and terse description. His efforts were appreciated
by "Cap" Shaw, who used Chandler's writing as an example to
would—be hard-boiled authors. He would hand the writer a
blue pencil and a Chandler paragraph saying, "Would you
cut that somewhere. Just cut a few words."8 Chandler's
paragraph, of course, could not be cut; it was too cleanly
written.

The result of Chandler's early efforts drove up to
Colonel Sternwood's Los Angeles mansion one morning in 1939.
He was tough, tall, handsome, and thirty-three. His name
was Philip Marlowe and he was "everything the well-dressed
private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million

bucks." The novel was The Big Sleep, and although Chandler

 

 

7Durham, "The Black Mask School," p. 76.

 

8Durham, p. 54.

said that it was "just another detective yarn that happens

9 the critics

to be more interested in people than in plot,"
highly praised it.
After Chandler's first novel, he wrote six more,

all with Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles policeman-turned-

private-detective as the hero. They were Farewell, My

 

Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake

 

(1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Goodbye (1953-
54), and Playback (1958). His novels and short stories
were almost simultaneously published in London (The Long
Goodbye was released in London before it was published in
America), and have been translated into Italian, Portuguese,
German, Danish, Japanese and Swedish. Furthermore, three of
his novels were made into films: The Big Sleep, starring

Humphrey Bogart, Farewell, My Lovely, starring Dick Powell,

 

and most recently, The LongyGoodbye with Elliot Gould as

Philip Marlowe.10

Of the detective genre, Chandler wrote:

[The] peculiar appropriateness of the detective or
mystery story to our time is that it is incapable
of love. The love story and the detective story
cannot exist, not only in the same book--one might
almost say in the same culture. Modern outspoken-
ness has utterly destroyed the romantic dream on
which love feeds. There is nothing left to write

 

1

9Durham, Down These Mean Streets . . . , p. 33.

 

loChandler also wrote for the screen. His greatest
personal triumph was the screenplay for James M. Cain's
Double Indemnity, with Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson
in the leading roles.

about but death, and the detective story is a
tragedy with a happy ending.11

The honesty with which Raymond Chandler wrote of
modern California specifically, and modern America in
general, did not go without recognition. The Head of
Special Collections at the University of California, Los
Angeles, requested that he donate his manuscripts to its
library. Although he was hesitant to do so at first (he
thought them of little significance to scholars), he
finally agreed. The Raymond Chandler Collection at UCLA
is of much importance to the student of the detective novel,
of California, and of Raymond Chandler. He was also
honored by his peers. He received the coveted Edgar
Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the "Best

Mystery Novel" of 1954 (The Long Goodbye). In February,

 

1959, he was elected to the presidency of the Mystery
Writers of America.

Raymond Chandler's last years, however,were not
happy ones. In December, 1954, Cissy Chandler died. On
February 22, 1955, two weeks after what would have been
their thirty-first anniversary, a depressed and broken

Chandler made a melodramatic attempt at suicide.12 An old

 

llDurham, p. 3.

12Durham suggests that Chandler's devotion to women
(he had lived solely with his mother until her death, and
immediately married after she died), his gallantry and
reverence of them, and his need to take care of them, were

responsible for his depression and loneliness after Cissy
died.

10

drinking habit returned and for long periods of time he
would go on hinges, suffering guilt and depression after-
wards.

In early March, 1959, Chandler attended a cocktail
party in New York to celebrate his election to the presi-
dency of the Mystery Writers of America. It was a cold,
snowy, dreary day. After the party he took ill, and
instead of continuing to England, where he had planned to
retire, he flew home to La Jolla. On March 26, 1959, he
died of bronchial pneumonia. Seventeen persons attended
his funeral.

Raymond Chandler left a legacy of force, of style,
of toughness, of character and a sense of social commitment
to his followers. Among those who followed in the Chandler

tradition is Kenneth Millar, a devourer of Black Mask

 

fiction in his youth. Of Raymond Chandler, Millar says,

"He wrote like a slumming angel."

Kenneth Millar, or Ross Macdonald as he is known

to his readers, was born in California in 1916.13 His

parents, like Raymond Chandler's, were divorced when he

 

13To avoid confusion between Ross Macdonald and
John D. MacDonald, I will use Kenneth Millar, the author's
name in private life, throughout the dissertation. Millar
wrote under his own name, but thought it would confuse
readers, since his wife was also publishing mystery fiction.
He tried John Macdonald and John Ross Macdonald. He gave
up the "John" after John D. MacDonald's mother bought
twelve of Millar's novels, thinking they were authored by
her son.

11

was quite young, and Millar and his mother went to Canada
where they lived with different relatives. Millar says
that "The year I graduated [from high school], 1932, I
counted the rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen
years and got a total of fifty."14

It is not surprising that Millar became a writer.
His grandfather and father were both journalists, and
there were writers on his mother's side of the family as
well. Although he began to write when he was at a boys'
boarding school in Winnipeg at the age of twelve, his
first story, a parody of Sherlock Holmes, did not appear
until he was sixteen. The publication was the Kitchener
Collegiate Institute's Grumbler.

In the same issue, a first effort by another
writer also appeared. Six years after graduation, Millar
once again met his wife, Margaret. They confessed to each
other their desire to become writers. In June, 1938, they
were married.

The Millars went to the University of Toronto in
the fall of 1938, and Kenneth prepared to become a high
school teacher. The following year he began to publish
stories, poems, and humorous anecdotes. His main publish-

ing source was the Toronto weekly, Saturday Night:

 

 

l4Kenneth Millar, in his "Introduction" to
Matthew J. Bruccoli, compl., Kenneth Millar/Ross
Macdonald: A Checklist (DetrOIt, 1972), p. xii.

 

12

"Payment was just a cent a word, but the early joys of
authorship were almost as sweet as sex."15
Millar taught high school in Canada during the
winter and attended the University of Michigan summers,
while Margaret wrote promising gothic novels. The success
of her work permitted her husband to give up his high
school teaching and accept a full—time fellowship at the
University of Michigan where he earned a doctorate in

English.

His first novel, The Dark Tunnel (1943), was

 

written while he was at Ann Arbor. A somewhat clumsy
attempt at spy-murder fiction (a Nazi spy is loose on the
campus), it was nevertheless an important effort for Millar.
"Part of the terror that permeates the book," he declares,
"was my own terror, I think, at the act of committing

16

myself to a long piece of writing." After serving in

World War II, two other novels appeared, Blue City and

 

The Three Roads (both written in 1946, but published in
1947 and 1948, respectively).

His first hardboiled detective novel, with its
hero, Lew Archer, was published in 1949. For those who
would ask why he chose to write detective fiction rather

than straight fiction, Millar responds:

 

lsMillar, p. xiii.

16Ibid.

 

\\ I‘ll. .I

13

I had less choice than the reader may suppose.

My one attempt to write a regular autobiographical
novel about my unhappy childhood turned out so
badly that I never showed it to my publisher.

. . . The deadly game of social Snakes and Ladders
which occupied much of my youth had to be dealt
with in another form, more impersonal and objective.

1?
But Millar's reason for writing crime fiction

goes beyond personal, psychological necessity. For he

sees in the detective developed by Hammett and Chandler,

a continuation, in an urban society through a popular and

democratic literature, of the "masculine and egalitarian

traditions of Natty Bumppo and his nineteenth century

descendants."18

Thus, Lew Archer, in post World War II
America, shares similarities with the nineteenth-century
frontiersman. However, he "is not so much a knight of
romance as an observer, a socially mobile man who knows
all the levels of Southern California life and takes a

. . . . "19
peculiar wry pleasure in exploring ltS secret passages.

Three thousand miles from California, on the
seemingly more civilized and peaceful Atlantic seaboard,
Travis McGee sits aboard his houseboat-yacht, the Busted
Flush. He sips his Plymouth gin as he chats with his
economist-friend, Meyer. McGee is the creation of John

Dann MacDonald, best—selling paperback author of over

 

l7Millar, p. xv.

lsIbid.

191bid., p. xvi.

l4

sixty novels, thirteen of them in the Travis McGee series.
McGee's relatively carefree Ft. Lauderdale existence (in
contrast to the driven Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer),
reflects MacDonald's own normal childhood.

Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania in 1916, his family
moved to Utica, New York, when he was twelve. He received
a B.S. from the University of Syracuse in 1937, and a M.B.A.
from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration
in 1939. He followed the wishes of his father, a financial
officer for the Standard Tank Car Company and Savage Arms
Corporation, and entered the business world as a consultant.20

Unlike Raymond Chandler and Kenneth Millar, Mac-
Donald had no early literary ambitions. He had always
been an avid reader, but his main hobbies were stamp col-
lecting, model airplanes, golf, skiing and archery. He
himself suggests that had his business career not been
interrupted by World War II, he might never have begun
writing.

MacDonald joined the army in 1940 and served until
1946, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Since war-
time censorship prohibited him from writing long descriptive
letters to his wife, Dorothy (whom he had married in 1937),

he wrote a short story for her enjoyment. His wife

 

20Much of this biographical information has been

obtained from Len and June Moffat, compls., The JDM Master
Checklist: A Biblio ra h of the Published writings of
John D. MacDonald (Downey, California, 1969).

 

15

submitted it for publication, and eventually sold it to

Story Magazine where it appeared in the July-August, 1946,

 

issue as "Interlude in India."

When he returned from the service, MacDonald,
encouraged by his initial success, continued to write.
He literally barraged the pulp magazine industry
with his stories, selling so many of them that the magazines
were often compelled to publish fiction under house names
such as John Farrell, John Wade Farrell, Robert Henry,
John Lane, Scott O'Hara, Peter Reed, and Henry Rieser.
Since other writers also published under theSe names,
checking for MacDonald's fiction is sometimes difficult.

In his first full year of writing, 1946-1947, John
D. MacDonald sold one short story each to Esquire, Liberty,

and Cosmopolitan. Although these magazines were certainly

 

prestigious, MacDonald was not so much interested in place
of publication. He just tried to sell them wherever he
could, and he soon became popular in all types of pulp
magazines--science fiction, sports, western, adventure, and
mystery.

MacDonald's approach to writing fiction is similar
to that of a businessman making money. He has a large
office, works a nine-to-five day, and composes on an IBM
Selectric typewriter (unlike Kenneth Millar, who writes on
the back of torn-off calendar pages). His goal is sales

rather than prestige, and he has rarely published in the

l6

hardcover industry, preferring, instead, the paperback
originals. Prestige, however, has been given him. He
was one of the first--if not the first-—paperback original
authors to be elected to the presidency of the Mystery
Writers of America.

His business sense is carried into the Travis
McGee series. Each McGee novel has a color in its title

(Pale Gray for Guilt, Nightmare in Pink, The Quick Red Fox,

 

etc.), thus making it easy for the consumer to distinguish
between those novels he's read, and those he hasn't.
Furthermore, the characters and plots of the Travis McGee
series also reflect MacDonald's continuing interest in big
business. McGee's lifestyle and that of his friend, Meyer
(whose own boat is named the John Maynard Keynes),
resembles that of the successful, early-retired executive.
His sleuthing is an avocation, rather than a profession,
and the plots of the novels often involve intricate big-
business swindles and double-swindles.

The choice of these three novelists, Raymond
Chandler, Kenneth Millar, and John D. MacDonald, is, I think,
significant. Chandler represents the beginnings and the

development of the Black Mask short story detective into a

 

more intricately characterized Philip Marlowe in the longer
novels. Kenneth Millar has expanded upon the character,
adding further objectivity and more insight about his past

and what drives him, to the character of Lew Archer. John D.

17

MacDonald demonstrates how the formula of the hard-boiled
story may be varied. Travis McGee, however, although he
operates out of a houseboat in Florida, still retains many
of the characteristics of his California counterparts.

How these characters relate to their society, how they are
similar and how they differ, will be discussed in the

following chapters.

CHAPTER II

THE HERO AND HIS WORLD

When the American cowboy hero in those famous early
western movies rode into the sunset, where did he head?
Geographically, he headed West. In our imagination we can
still see him, straight-backed and square—shouldered, a
solitary shadow against the brilliance of the setting sun.
If we extend our vision we can see this cowboy, this loner,
squatting by his campfire, speculatively smoking his hand-
rolled tobacco, sleeping under the stars with his saddle
for a pillow, his gun next to him for protection against
night enemies. In the mornings he rises early and continues
on his way, under the glaring heat of the sun and the dust
of the prairies, forever moving West through the last
decades of the nineteenth century.

On his inuney he encountered foes with whom he was
trained to deal: rattlesnakes, hostile Indians, outlaws.
His guns and his fists were his weapons. In the small new
towns where he occasionally stopped, he met others: lawmen
good and Lad, women of high and low moral virtue. With
these too he could cope. He dealt with them with primitive,
common-sense psychology. His reward was an inner satis-
faction that justice had been done and that he had had a

18

19

part in it. Stolidly he continued his trek, alone and
lonely, hoping perhaps, that at the end of his journey he
would find peace, contentment, something to fill the void
inside him.

Instead, in California, there was nothing. He
reached the Pacific Coast and what he found was the treach-
erous and indifferent roar of the ocean as it slammed
against the weathered, craggy cliffs. The ocean echoed
the life in the large coastal cities, a life of treachery
and indifference, as unpredictably cruel as the ocean, and
far less majestic.

The hero had reached his Promised Land and found it
somewhat less than promising. But he had come so far, and
the way had been so hard, that he decided to stay. He
settled in the city, and as the years passed he traded
his chaps for a suit, his horse for an automobile, his
morning cup of coffee for a shot-glass of whiskey, his bed
under the stars for a cramped apartment. He swapped his
romantic idealism for romantic cynicism. And although he
still had the urge to see justice done, he rented an office
and charged for it. He kept his gun and his fists and his
primitive psychology. And he remained alone.

This metamorphosed cowboy, the twentieth-century
hard-boiled detective, is the one we meet through the persons
of Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Travis McGee. They are

the literary outgrowths of the cowboy heroes of dime western

20

novels. All three are loners, and all are outcasts of the
society. Their alienation, however, is self-imposed, in
part because they have become disenchanted with American
society. Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's hero, was a
former police detective who found too much corruption in
the Los Angeles police force and left it to impose his own
order on society. Lew Archer, Kenneth Millar's character,
is also a former Los Angeles police officer who has struck
out on his own. He is divorced, and the loneliness of his
profession is often intensified by this fact of his existence.
Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald's detective is also removed
from society. From his house-boat yacht moored in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida, he sits back and views the chaos of
modern America. Although not a detective by trade, McGee
feels compelled to help those who are in need.

Of the three, Phillip Marlowe, the detective of
Raymond Chandler's series, is the first to arrive on the
Los Angeles scene. It is significant that Los Angeles
serves as a base of operations for California-born Marlowe.
Los Angeles in the 1930's provided a panacea for all the
ills caused by the Great Depression. While millions of
Americans starved, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire waltzed

their way through The Gay Divorcee (1934), and Busby

 

Berkley musical extravaganzas assured the world that nothing
was so bad it couldn't be mended with a tap dance by Ruby

Keeler and a hug from Dick Powell. Crime in the cities?

21

Certainly. But James Cagney in Public Enemy (1932), and

 

Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (1931), proved that

 

it just doesn't pay.

Los Angeles itself participated in this fantasy.
Movie kings and queens erected their castles in Hollywood
and Beverly Hills, and they were much like the ones they
inhabited on the movie sets. Wilshire Boulevard and
Sunset Strip took on the same fairyland air as the Warner
Brothers lot. Yet all was not well in Camelot. Inside
its walls, hidden from the public eye, the new kingdom
was already crumbling. It took the private eye of Philip
Marlowe "by seeing beyond the brightly colored facade and
by going down the mean streets in the rear"1 to bring the
reality of Los Angeles into focus. George P. Elliott, in
his essay "Country Full of Blondes," observes: "If you
want the feel and aspect of Los Angeles and vicinity during
the thirties, forties and early fifties, you hardly do
better than to read [Chandler's] fiction."2

A romantic who has had his idealism tempered by
reality, Marlowe neither chooses to submit entirely to
that reality, nor to submerge himself in a rose garden

fantasy. Instead, his relationship with the city is much

 

lPhilip Durham, Down These Mean Streets a Man Must
Go: Raymond Chandler's Knight (Chapel Hill: The University
ofINorth Carolina Press, 19637, p. 49.

 

 

2George P. Elliott, "Country Full of Blondes," The
Nation, April 23, 1960.

22

like that of a lover who is secretly aware of the indis-
cretions of his mistress, and who therefore balances his
tenderness towards her with a cynical objectivism:

It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we
get in the early spring in California before the high
fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still
green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you
can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores
are advertising their annual sales. The call houses
that Specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing
a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the
jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

It is not until The Long Goodbye (1954), the next—

 

to-last Chandler novel, that Marlowe becomes sufficiently
disillusioned with Los Angeles to move from his city
apartment to a house in the Laurel Canyon district. It is
in this novel, too, that the ageing Marlowe begins a romance
with Linda Loring, a romance which is culminated with his
proposal, and her acceptance of marriage in Chandler's last
novel, Playback (1958), the major setting of which is
removed from Los Angeles to the wealthy resort of Esmeralda,
a city with Oz-like overtones, if only in name.

Marlowe's final commitment to a romantic future,
however, is established when he is in his mid-forties and
tired of too many lies, too many superficial relationships
with both men and women, too much violence, and too many

years of living the life of a loner. Age and loneliness

 

3Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (New York:
Pocket Books, 1949), p. 1. Although origihally published
by Houghton Mifflin Co., all quotations from The Little
Sister will refer to the Pocket Books edition.

 

 

23

have crept upon him, and we may forgive him his dreams
(although Chandler's critics, among them Kenneth Millar,
did not), when we consider that dreams are all he has
when all cause for dreams is gone.

Yet it is not the mellowed Marlowe of Playback to

whom we are first introduced in The Big_Sleep (1939), the

 

first full-length Marlowe adventure, but to the young,
aggressive, wisecracking, romantic-cynic, who brought
Raymond Chandler and his hero, Philip Marlowe, to the
attention of action-detective novel critics and fans.
Marlowe's gaison d'étre becomes evident in the opening

page of the novel: '

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories
high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let
in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad
stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor
rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have
any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair.
The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to
be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the
rOpes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting
anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived
in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb

up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really
trying.

In Millar's Tbe Chill (1964), Lew Archer sits on a

 

bench as he is tailing a subject, and reads from a book
about Heraclitus: "All things flow like a river, he said;

nothing abides. Parmenides, on the other hand, believed

 

4Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Pocket
Books, 1939), p. 1. Although originalIy published by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., all quotations from The Big Sleep
will refer to the Pocket Books edition.

 

24

that nothing ever changed, it only seemed to. Both views
appealed to me" (p. 161). This ambivalence in Archer is
typical of the way he views his southern California world.
It is a world of "short hairs, and longhairs, potheads and
acid heads, draft dodgers and dollar Chasers, swingers and
walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins"

(The Instant Enemy, 1968, p. 201).

 

In his office, pin-ups of "killers, embezzlers and
con men" stare down from the walls "with unabashed eyes"
(The Zebra-Striped Hearse, 1962, p. 3). Driving to a
hospital in Pacific Point, Archer recalls another time he
visited there, and reveals the daily tedium of his work:
"It was a rambling place of bilious yellow plaster, and
the sight of it depressed me. My client's wife had died
of [an overdose] of sleeping pills. All that he really

wanted was a divorce“ (The Way_Some People Die, 1951, p. 7).

 

"Nothing abides." People are born, they live well
or poorly, and they die--sometimes too early, sometimes
too late, often violently. Los Angeles is their city of
last resort. Some survive it, many do not. The pieces
of flotsam and jetsam of Archer's world rush past him in
the river or sewer that is Los Angeles. They are there
for a moment, only to disappear suddenly from his life.
The moment of their passing is too fleeting for Archer to
grasp, to hold on to, to make sense of, until a future date.

Then, after he has sorted and assimilated the chaos of the

25

world in which he lives he may make his second statement:
"Nothing ever changed. It only seemed to."

The disease that is modern America stretches its
tentacles beyond Los Angeles proper into California's
suburban valleys. For Chandler, the rotten odor of decaying
success is Bay City; for Archer it is Santa Theresa. Once
in a while Archer may meet someone like Stella Carson, in
The Far Side of the Dollar (1965), of whom he can say she
is "one of those youngsters who make you feel like apolo-
gizing for the world" (p. 40). More frequently, however,
he confronts people like beautiful, wealthy, multi-murderess
Elaine Hillman (in the same novel) who has been caught "in
a malign world where even things no longer cooperated and
even men could not be bought" (p. 216).

In Millar's most recent novel, The Underground Man

 

(Alfred A. KnOpf, 1971), only purification by fire, in this
case a raging forest fire, can solve a kidnapping, a fifteen
year old murder, a murder only a few hours old, a lost
father and a missing son. As the fire spreads, consuming
not only the forest, but the homes of the rich, decadent
Santa Theresans, the ageing Archer searches for Ronnie
Broadhurst, a small boy to whom Archer's commitment is
personal: they had fed blue jays together that morning.

In a perceptive review of The Underground Man (in the New

York Times Book Review, February 14, 1971), Eudora Welty

 

states that

26

from the time he fed the blue jays with the little boy,
[Archer] never had a choice. There is the maze of the
past to be entered and come out of alive, bringing the
innocent to safety. And in the maze there lives a
monster; his name is Murder.

Bringing the innocent to safety is Archer's mission.
Sometimes, as in the above case, he is successful. Other
times he fails. But it is always to the innocent that
Archer is committed. Like Holden Caulfield, he too is a
catcher in the rye, attempting to protect the innocents
from plunging into the abyss of a society gone mad.

Solutions are important, but salvation is crucial
to the three detectives. They are the protectors of
society's abused, of society's misfits. The problems of
the misfits take precedence over their clients, over
established law and order, over their personal lives.
Archer can be almost tender to a mental institution escapee

in The Doomsters (1958), or to a mixed-up, violent teenager,

Davy Spanner, in The Instant Enemy (1968). Marlowe delivers

 

a mentally abused secretary to her parents in Kansas in

The High Window (1942), and shows genuine compassion for

 

the plight of unloved murderer Moose Malloy in Farewell, My
Lovely (1940). Travis McGee in almost every episode saves
at least one woman or man who has been physically or
psychologically defeated and nurses them back to health.
Having witnessed the rotten fruits of social Darwinism,

the detectives have committed themselves to saving the

27

rejects, those who by society's warped standards are not
the fittest.

Ponce de Leon went to Florida in search of the
Fountain of Youth. He did not find it. Others also went
to Florida, and sometimes their search paralleled de
Leon's: retired widows and lonely widowers in search of
a new life; older couples from the northern, crime-ridden
cities, in search of a place to await the reaper in peace
and sunshine; college students hoping to have their last
real fling before entering the tedium of adulthood. Some-
times it was the search for a quick buck that drew them.
The 1920's Florida land scandals, the hotel and restaurant
entrepreneurs, the controlling hand of organized crime,
are just a few of the more unpalatable, although sometimes
lucrative lures of Florida.

John D. MacDonald captures a sense of Florida
through the eyes and ears of Travis McGee and through the
words of his other characters, a mildly bizarre combination
of showgirls, intellectuals, gangsters and good—time
Charlies, concentrated in and around the Ft. Lauderdale-
Miami Beach area. The amazing accuracy of MacDonald's
perceptions is validated in a recent article in The New
York Times Magazine (July 9, 1972), entitled "Report from
Convention City." In it, author J. Anthony Lukas interviews
a collection of Miami Beach residents who might easily

appear, mouthing the same phrases, in any Travis McGee novel:

28

There's no Mafias in here, no Sinatras in here. . . .
My accountants can tell you that, my lawyers can tell
you that. I built this whole thing with my blood and
sweat (Ben Novack, founder and board chairman of the
Fountainbleau Hotel, p. 9).

Frankly, honey, I'm not looking forward to [the Demo-
cratic and Republican conventions] . . . . Those
politicians are just uncouth. At the Republican
convention back in '68 I picked up this delegate from
Louisiana. I got him to my apartment and gave him

a daiquiri to get started. And would you believe it?
He threw up all over my white rug (Sally, a hooker,
p. 9).

The hooker, Sally, could be found as one of the

prostitutes in MacDonald's Darker than Amber. She could

 

also appear as the villain in The Long Lavender Look, or

 

the whore with a heart of gold in A Deadly Shade of Gold.

 

McGee's attitude toward her might be whimsy or nausea
depending upon the degree of her involvement in the current
crime. His response to her up-chucking client would be a
mixture of pity and antipathy in any case. But she would
be there, included in one guise or another in almost any
Travis McGee novel.
Another MacDonald character found frequently in

McGee novels is Chookie McCall, a tough woman with a warm
heart. She is a dancer in a Ft. Lauderdale nightclub, and
is very pOpular. Her common sense philosophy and her
somewhat tongue-in-cheek view of the world is echoed in the
words of this retired Miami Beach stripper:

I drive a Rolls-Royce. I live in a $110,000 house-

boat--a custom-made Sea View Floating home. . . .

Not bad for an old stripper, eh? (Zorita, former

stripper, now owner of Zorita's Go-Go Girlie Revue,
p. 37).

29

It is interesting to note that like Zorita above, Travis
McGee also relishes the idea that he lives on a houseboat-
yacht and drives a Rolls-Royce, albeit a vintage one turned
into a pickup truck.

McGee's own vision of Florida is also found in this
article. A defender of, among other things, nature, he
casts a jaundiced eye, the eye of the native Floridian,
upon the hotel owners and gimcracky dives crowding the
beaches. Another Floridian expresses it similarly:

They've built their big swimming pools and sundecks
virtually up to the water line and the rest has been
eroded away so there's almost no beach left. It's kind
of shocking what peOple will do to a beautiful thing
(Bevlin Friedson, owner of a barber supply business in
Miami Beach, p. 10).

"Certainly we've got an image problem," says Hank
Meyer, Miami Beach public relations director. "People think
of Miami Beach as gaudy, garish, vulgar, a city without
substance or purpose" (p. 44). Is this not also the view
we have of Hollywood and Los Angeles, Operations base for
Marlowe and Archer? How different these cities are from
relatively staid New York with its long-established tradition
of men in gray flannel suits, its Wall Street heritage, its
stage theatres and Metropolitan Opera. Or how different
from Chicago, the home of serious-minded men (even Al
Capone was a serious businessman), the meat-packer of the

world. Instead, in Florida and California there is a

rootlessness, a transient quality which appeals to

3O

rootless, transient men like Marlowe, Archer and McGee.

A little less rootless than the others, yet still afflicted
with modern man's homelessness, they are somewhat at peace
in their cities.

By the standards of Los Angeles, however, the
world of Travis McGee seems relatively simple. First, he
lives in a resort town, Fort Lauderdale. Second, he
doesn't really live i3 it, but anchors his fifty-two foot
houseboat-yacht, the Busted Flush, in Bahia Moor. Here
he passes his days listening to jazz and classical music,
devouring succulent steaks, sipping Plymouth Gin, playing
chess with his friend Meyer, and entertaining wealthy,
intelligent women in his king-sized bed. Third, he is
not a detective by trade, but a wreck salvager.

But danger lurks in this peaceful world, too.
McGee doesn't have to go far to seek it; it comes to him.
Usually, an old friend, or a friend of a friend seeks his
help. The crime has already been committed and often the
crime is not one that could be called illegal; it is
generally legal swindling involving large sums of money
or jewels or an inheritance. Over his own protestations,
McGee agrees to help-~for fifty percent of whatever is
recovered.

Archer and Marlowe rarely leave California. McGee,

however, travels quite widely. The action of Nightmare in

 

Pink (1964), takes place in New York City; A Purple Place

 

31

for Dying (1964) is set in Texas; The Quick Red Fox (1964),.

 

shuttles him from Florida to New York to California. Often,
however, the novel's action takes place in Florida, a land
of sun and surf, of happy tourists and unscrupulous real
estate brokers, of college nymphs on vacations and hardened
prostitutes, of muscle boys and muscle men.

Florida is also tropical, and in this paradise the
world has gone awry. Bodies are found rotting in lagoons
(Bright Orange for the Shroud, 1965), or are buried alive
in hot asphalt (A Tan and Sandy Silence, 1971). Homicidal
sociopaths roam the streets as freely as any retiree down
from the North for the winter. Hookers hook wealthy, lonely
men, dump their bodies overboard, then return to bask in
the warm Florida sun (Darker Than Amber, 1966).

What McGee defends is a time that, perhaps, never
existed. A time when man was not embroiled in society, a
time before machines and computerized love andumen in gray
flannel suits. McGee takes careful aim at the targets of
his dissatisfaction: modern music, automobile manufacturers,
race relations, higher education, the polluted environment.
John D. MacDonald, in a Newsweek interview about Kenneth
Millar and other detective novelists (March 22, 1971), observes
rather wistfully, "I can whip a lot of dead horses.”

That Marlowe sees himself as a modern errant knight,
and that Travis McGee is often referred to on the series'

jackets as "the thinking man's Robin Hood," is no mere

32

coincidence. For cynical about the world as he may be,
the tough detective cannot be a hero unless he has a cause,
a personal sense of commitment to a code. Sheldon Norman
Grebstein, in an excellent essay, "Hemingway and His Hard-
Boiled Children," suggests three criteria or tests that
the detective hero must meet in order to prove his tough-
ness: (1) Physical stamina and the ability to take punish—
ment; (2) Control over personal feeling and natural
appetites, especially in a professional situation; and
(3) The power to confront death without morbid pressimism
or specious piety.5
Although the three detectives to be studied here
pass the toughness test in their first novels, it is a
'test which is repeated in each successive novel. It is
necessary for the knights to prove themselves over and
over again. In order to examine the ways in which the

three heroes achieve knighthood, let us study three repre-

sentative novels: Chandler's The Big Sleep; Millar's The

 

Moving Target (1949); and MacDonald's Darker Than Amber.

 

 

The first of the three criteria is physical stamina,
a test which each of the heroes passes with ease. In

The Big SlegEJ Marlowe is brutally beaten by Lash Canino

 

and Art Huck, two goons who work for racketeer Eddie Mars.

 

5Sheldon Norman Grebstein, "Hemingway and His Hard—
Boiled Children," in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties,
ed. by David Madden (Carbondale: Southern IlIinois Uni-
versity Press, 1968), pp. 23-7.

 

33

When he awakens he discovers that "handcuffs held my wrists
behind me and a rOpe went down from my ankles and then over
the end of the brown davenport on which I sprawled. The
rope dropped out of sight over the davenport . . . it was
tied down" (p. 176). Yet when his ropes are cut, Marlowe
stands up and decides "I could still walk. I could run,

if I had to" (p. 181).

Indeed, Marlowe can do more than run. Still hand-
cuffed, he uses his wits as well as his skill to lure the
vicious Canino (described in the novel's cast of characters
as "a tough guy who looks at peeple as if they were meat”)
into a death trap by feigning his own violent death: "I
let the gurgle die sickeningly. . . . It was nice work. I
liked it. Canino liked it very much. I heard him laugh"
(p. 186).

In The Moving Target,6 Lew Archer, investigating

 

the disappearance of oil millionaire Ralph Sampson, is
ambushed in an alley behind the Zebra Room nightclub by
a goon named Puddler. Although knocked out by Puddler--
"I had time to run, but I lacked the inclination. Three
runouts were too much in one day. I went to meet him
and took the sucker punch" (p. 57)--and savagely beaten

while still unconscious, Archer's strength and stamina

 

6Kenneth Millar, Ross Macdonald (pseud.), The Moving

Tar et (New York: Bantam Books, 1949). Although originally
puinshed by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., all quotations from
The Moving Target will refer to the Bantam edition.

 

 

34

return and he continues his quest: "My lips felt puffed.

. . . It was just as well I couldn't stand on one of [my
feet]. I would have kicked the man on the pavement
[Puddler] and regretted it later--several years later"

(p. 58). When asked where he wants to be driven, Archer's
"brain was a vacuum for an instant. Then anger surged into
the vacuum. 'Home to bed, but I'm not going'" (p. 59).
Later in the novel, Archer and Puddler meet again, but

this time it is the detective who is victorious, at the
cost of the goon-villain's life.

Travis McGee in Darker Than‘Amber,7 displays a

 

grudging admiration for Griff, the strongarm who knocks
him down: "I could see how neatly he had taken me. He
had been . . . perfectly content to wait [in ambush] . . .
knowing it was the only way out" (p. 104). Nauseous as he
is made by the blow from Griff's Luger, which hit him
"briskly and solidly over the right ear," and "with echoes
of the first red and white explosion going off in [his]
head" (p. 104), McGee maintains his detective calm. When
Griff is about to execute him on a lonely strip of beach,
McGee uses the familiar ploy of asking for a last cigarette,
reaches into his slacks' pocket and uses his Bodyguard
pistol (Griff hasn't frisked him), to shoot and kill his

foe.

 

7John D. MacDonald, Darker Than Amber (Greenwich,
Conn.: Fawcett, 1966).

 

35

Itis only after McGee buries Griff in the sand:
"Like a nightmare bulldozer I crawled around the area,
shoving the board with two hands like a bulldozer blade,
covering him over . . ." (pp. 108-9), that his tension is
revealed: "I walked back to the car. I had to think out
the normal automatic motions of walking, lift of the foot,
bend of the knee, swing and placement of the foot, and the
alternate procedure with the other leg" (p. 109).

McGee's own horror of his murderous act, however
justified, is echoed by Archer's reluctant victory of his

drowning of Puddler in The Moving Target--"I was afraid of

 

what was behind me in the water" (p. 107)--and by Marlowe's
hysterical laughter after he kills Canino: "I began to
laugh like a loon" (p. 189). This human aspect of the
detectives' personalities is what primarily differentiates
them from Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, and adds to their
credibility as genuinely compassionate men who inhabit a
real and personally terrifying world. Grebstein suggests
a difference between those detectives who kill to survive,
"and the others who kill either for profit, politics, or
out of blood lust" (Grebstein, p. 38). Contrast the
reactions of Archer, Marlowe and McGee to their murders of
relative strangers against that of Mike Hammer after he

shoots his villainous fiancee in I, the Jugy:

 

There on the table was the gun, with a safety catch
off and the silencer still attached. Those loving
arms would have reached it nicely. A face that was

36

waiting to be kissed was really waiting to be splat-
tered with blood when she blew my head off. My blood.
When I heard her fall I turned around. Her eyes had

pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and
unbelief.

'How could you?‘ she gasped.
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I

got it in. 8 . .
t was easy,’ I said. (Italics mine.)
Hammer performs as voyeur, removed from his act, hard,
uninvolved except for a sadistic bent. That he deliberately
tortures his victime-"But I got it in"--no matter how
villainous she is, is further evidence that he is devoid
of human emotions.

Although it is proper for the detective to feel,
too much expression of his feelings is considered sloppiness,
and may deter him from the successful completion of his
assignment. Thus we come to Grebstein's second criterion
for toughness, control over personal feelings and natural
appetites, especially in affairs of the heart. This
criterion, then, must be tempered: if the hero becomes
involved with a woman, there must be affection, need and
emotional rapport.

Philip Marlowe is approached by two women in The Big
§l§EEJ Carmen Sternwood and her sister, Vivian Regan. Carmen
is coarse and obvious. She is a nymphomaniac who,.h1 the
concluding pages of the novel is discovered to be the
psychOpathic murderer of her brother-in-law, who has

rejected her advances. Marlowe too rejects Carmen, and

 

8Mickey Spillane, I, the Jugy (New York: Signet,
1947), p. 174.

 

37

his revulsion toward her is shown when he discovers her

in his bed:

. . . this was the room I had to live in. It was
all I had in the way of a home. In it was every-
thing that was mine, that had any association for
me, any past, anything that took the place of a
family. Not much. . . . Nothing. Such as they
were they all had my memories.

I couldn't stand her in the room any longer. . . .

The imprint of her head was still in the pillow,
of her small corrupt body still on the sheets.

I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to
pieces (146-47).

Vivian Regan is a bit more difficult to cope with.
She is a beautiful, sensuous woman, corrupted by blood and
wealth. Men exist to be manipulated, and Vivian attempts
to manipulate Marlowe. Marlowe, however, retains a certain
respect for General Sternwood, Mrs. Regan's father. Because
of his respect, and because he feels attracted to her out
of animal desire alone, Marlowe somewhat gracelessly
retreats from her overtures, although he deems her worthy
of an explanation: "Kissing is nice, but your father
didn't hire me to sleep with you," he tells her. When
she curses him, he confesses, "Don't think I'm an icicle.
. . . I'm not blind or without senses. I have warm blood
like the next guy." Pride in his work affords him his
final excuse: "The first time we met I told you I was a
detective. Get it through your lovely head. I work at

it, lady. I don't play at it." When Vivian responds to

38

his explanation with bitterneSs, Marlowe's reaction is an
ironic "You won't be a sister to me?" (pp. 141-2).

Marlowe's cutting irony, his cynicism, is what
saves him from becoming entangled in a relationship based
on sexual attraction alone, devoid of any human warmth and
understanding. To sleep with Carmen Sternwood would be a
repudiation of any Self, any goodness he has within him.
To sleep with Vivian Regan would be a lonely experience,
and would emphasize his aloneness, his need, to a degree
he might not be able to stand. Marlowe's toughness here,
then, is a protective device. I

Fay Estabrook, one-time queen of silent films, and
Miranda Sampson, daughter of missing oil millionaire Ralph
Sampson, are two women with whom Lew Archer becomes involved

in The Moving Target. Mrs. Estabrook is a pitiful character

 

with "eyes like dark searchlights" (p. 37) and a penchant
for hard liquor and heartless men. Archer, aware of her
weakness, preys upon it to glean information concerning
the missing Ralph Sampson. He is successful in winning
her over, and he does so without sleeping with her, but
his calculated phoniness sickens him. Catching his image
in a barroom mirror as he tries to smile at her, Archer
observes:

The wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes, the

wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth,

but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished

look like a coyote's sneer. The face had seen too
many bars, too many rundown hotels and crummy love

39

nests, too many courtrooms and prisons, post-mortems
and police lineups, too many nerve endings showing
like tortured worms. If I found the face on a
stranger, I wouldn't trust it (p. 41).

Archer takes Fay home, but not before he has gotten
her sufficiently drunk so that she will pass out, thereby
allowing him both to gracefully disentangle himself, and
to search her house.

Miranda Sampson, on the other hand, is a beautiful
girl-woman. In love with World War II flyer hero Alan
Taggert, and wooed by Bert Graves, forty-year-old lawyer
who, we are to learn, is her father's murderer, Miranda
tries to use Archer in an attempt to evoke Taggert's
jealousy. However, Archer is not to be fooled. In
character as a Dutch uncle, he reprimands her and calls
her play for him "Sophomore stuff. You should be able
to think of better ways to fascinate Taggert" (p. 74).

In the same scene, however, Archer grabs Miranda

and passionately embraces her. After she yields to him he
gives his reason for kissing her: "It salved my ego"
(p. 75). There is a kind of wistful yearning here for
Archer. Miranda, young, lithe, beautiful emphasizes his
own sordid life history. What Archer thinks of Bert Graves
might well serve as a description of himself: "A little
weary and old to tame a filly like Miranda" (p. 80).

Lew Archer's Dutch uncle style is not unique to

him. Travis McGee also plays this role. Although he has

sexual relations with women far more frequently than either

40

Archer or Marlowe, sex for McGee is rehabilitory in nature
Usually, the woman McGee chooses for sex has been sexually
abused, or has a history of frigidity. It is McGee's
mission, if she is a "good" person, to cure her. Generally
he achieves his goal, but since it is his fate by choice

to remain a loner, the woman either is killed (The Deep

Blue Good—By; §_Dead1y Shade of Gold; The Long Lavender

 

Look), dies of some disease (Pale Gray for Guilt), or they
drift apart because of basic irreconciliable differences

(A Purple Place for Dying; The Quick Red Fox; One Fearful

 

Yellow Eye).

 

In perker Than Amber, McGee is tempted by Vangie,
a prostitute and accomplice to murder whom he rescues from
death by drowning, but who is later brutally killed.
Vangie, aside from her seamy past, is basically a good woman;
that is, she is tough, open and honest, and has a healthy
laugh. She also has healthy sexual desires. Travis can-
not sleep with her, however. He expresses his feelings:

I gee a prude in my own fashion. I had been emotionally
involved a few times with women with enough of a record
of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. 11t is dif-
ficult to put much value on something the lady has
distributed all too generously.( I have the feeling
there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each
woman. And whether she gives herself, or sells her-
self, once she reaches her own number,ionce X pairs

of hungry hands have been clamped tightly upon her
rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein
her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change

to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a
windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping,
comes a tiny stink of death. '#

41
I could not want her on any terms. But I could like
her. And wish her well (p. 51).

A bad woman is Del, a mindless golddigger who "gives
off a tangible aroma of rot" (p. 189). She sees no wrong
in luring lonely, wealthy men to their brutal deaths.

McGee uses her to trap a gang of murderers and to avenge
Vangie's death. In order to gain Del's confidence, however,
he must pretend sexual interest in her. To his dismay he
discovers that he is drawn to her:
Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the
strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to
guarantee complete degradation. I wanted to pull her
down and roll into that hot practiced trap which had
clenched the life out of fourteen men. And there was
the big shiny rationalization. It's the way to make
her trust you, fella. Go right ahead and lull the
broad (p. 156).
However, he retreats at the last moment. "Who'll know the
difference?" he asks himself. "You will, McGee. For a
long, long time."

At the conclusion of the three novels each detective
remains alone. Philip Marlowe stops at a bar for "a couple
of double Scotches," after leaving the Sternwood estate.
But "they didn't do me any good. All they did was make me
think of Silver-Wig [gangster Eddie Mars' beautiful,
sensitive wife], and I never saw her again" (p. 214).

Travis McGee sits on the sundeck of his yacht and dreams
of a relationship destined to be transitive. It is Lew

Archer, however, whose thoughts most movingly and accurately

depict the ultimate aloneness of the detective—hero:

42

As we rolled down the hill I could see all the lights
of the city. They didn't seem quite real. The stars
and the house lights were firefly gleams, sparks of
cold fire suspended in the black void. The real thing

in my world was the girl beside me, warm and shuddering
any lost.

I could have put my arms around her and taken her over.

She was that lost, that vulnerable. But if I had,

she'd have hated me in a week. In six months I might

have hated Miranda. I kept my hands to myself and

let her lick her wounds. She used my shoulder to cry

on as she would have used anyone's (p. 184).

In The Big Sleep, Marlowe discovers the corpse of

Rusty Regan, Vivian Regan's missing husband, in the sump,
"a horrible, decaying thing" (p. 212). However, Marlowe's
view of Rusty's death seems rather detached:

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?

In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high

hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep,

you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and

water were the same as wind and air to you. You just

slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness

of how you died or where you fell (pp. 213-14).

Grebstein believes that the third criterion for

achieving toughness is the most crucial because "only the
hero who is tough enough to stare death down, but not so
tough as to be totally immune to its grim appearance is
indeed heroic" (p. 30, italics Grebstein's). Since part
of the detective's trade must be to confront death con-
tinually, either his own or that of others, he must be hard
and objective about it. But if he is not moved by death,
if he scoffs it, viciously enjoys it, or belabors it, he

cannot be heroic. Thus, although Marlowe gives us a

clinical description of death, the Sternwood estate now

43

has "a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching
me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself

had a mysterious something on its light" (p. 213). Further-
more, Marlowe discovers that alive, he is "part of the
nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan

was (p. 214). Finally, we must take into account the
title of the novel, which is derived from the last lines
of the text. It is almost as if Chandler, in this first
Marlowe novel, is himself putting his knight through
Grebstein's three tests for toughness, the culmination of

which is the test of "the big sleep."

When Albert Graves kills Alan Taggert in The Moving

 

Target, Archer immediately gives a description of the

corpse:
I caught Taggert's limber body as it fell, and laid it
out on the grass rug. The dark eyes were open and
glistening. They didn't react to the touch of my finger-
tips. The round hole in the right temple was bloodless.
A death mark like a little red birthmark, and Taggert
was thirty dollars' worth of organic chemicals shaped
like a man (p. 141).

Although his description is concise and objective, the fact

that he employs the adjective "limber" to describe the young

Taggert's body at the beginning of the paragraph, and con-

cludes that "Taggert was [now] thirty dollars' worth of

organic chemicals shaped like a man," implies Archer's

sharp awareness of the ironies of human existence. Further-

more, that Archer not only avoids specious piety himself,

but dislikes it in others, is evident when Graves delivers

44

a lengthy speech about how men like Taggert inevitably come
to a bad end. Archer bends down, closes the corpse's eyes,
and says to Graves, "We're becoming very elegiac. Let's
get out of here" (p. 142).

Graves' sentimentally sloppy language is in contrast
to Archer's terse, clean observations about death. Further-
more, Archer is critical of Graves' method: "I don't like
to quibble. But I wish you'd shot the gun out of his hand
or smashed the elbow of his gun arm" (p. 141). Killing,
to Archer, is not always a necessity.

The murder of the prostitute Vangie, whom Travis
McGee had rescued from a previous attempt on her life, is

what motivates him to avenge her death in Darker Than Amber.

 

Like Marlowe and Archer, McGee also views death with seeming
detachment as he observes her body in the morgue:

I imagine they had left the eye open to aid identifi-
cation. The other side of her head and the other side
of her face could be identified as having probably
been of human origin. From the waist down it was not
a woman-shape under the sheet, just a lumpiness like

a bed carelessly made up to resemble someone sleeping
there, and the shoulder on the bad side of her was
pushed in in a curiously sickening way.

I looked at that eye. An eye which had dried has an
oddly dusty look. Like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed
owl. It was the color I knew it would be. Darker than
amber. With green flecks near the pupil (p. 64).
Yet the latent necrophilia of the morgue attendant who stares
at Vangie's breasts, McGee's attempt to reconstruct Vangie's

feelings at the moment of her death, and his memory of

rescuing her the first time from the ocean reveal a deeper

45

concern: "You feel good to do a thing like that [save
Vangie's life]. And then when they take what you saved
and see how high they can splash it against a stone
building, you get annoyed" (p. 67).

Later, planning his mode of operation in a motel
room, McGee ponders the ironies of life and death. His
vision of death here, culminating with a stanza from
W. H. Auden's “The Aesthetic Point of View," is similar
to that of Archer and Marlowe:

The strange fragments of reality make patterns in
your head sometimes. They form a collage that is
static for a few moments, giving you the feeling that
you are on the edge of some perception that might
make all the rest of it a little more meaningful.

The elements of this design were Vangie's dry amber
eye, the yelping children at play [in the motel's
pool], the barely perceptible weight of the gun,

the slack underlip of the morgue attendant. . . .

Very probably all perceptions are second hand.

. . . And now this composite scene brought up from
memory one of Auden's irreverent perceptions:

As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well hung (p. 73).
Travis McGee has passed the final test.
The errant knights have emerged from their tests
victorious, although a bit more tarnished for wear. But
there is no King Arthur to welcome them. There are no fair

ladies to strew flowers in their paths nor trumpets blaring.

Instead there is a lonely bar, a dusty office, a cramped

46

apartment. And although they have exposed thieves and un-
covered murderers, their work is meaningless to few but
themselves.

What kind of gratification can the detective receive
from his work, then, other than personal knowledge of a job
well done? If the detective is merely a cynic, he can be
content that his vision of the world has once again been
proven accurate and will continue to be so. But he is not
merely a cynic; he is also a romantic. Kenneth Millar's
interpretation of the function of Lew Archer, serves Marlowe
and McGee equally effectively: "He represents modern man
in a technilogical society, who is, in effect, homeless,
virtually friendless, and who tries to behave as if there
is some hOpe in society, which there is. He's a transi-
tional figure between a world that is breaking up and one
coming into being in which relationships and people will

9

be important." This, then, is the action detective.

9Kenneth Millar, in Newsweek, March 22, 1971, p. 108.

CHAPTER III

LAW: THE TROUBLE WITH COPS IS

When Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story,
he included in it the now-stock character of the ineffective
police officer who was outdone by the intelligence, obser-
vations and skills of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This
character has been recreated in the pages of detective
fiction of all types. There are Scotland Yarders Gregson
and Lestrade of Conan Doyle fame; Inspector Cramer, foil
for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe; the myriad incompetents who
face Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple and M. Hercule
Poirot; and of course Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, Perry Mason's
fool.

It is only natural that readers take sides with the
detective against the police. In most cases, the detective
story is told either from his point of view or, as in the
cases of Nero Wolfe, Sherlock Holmes, and Auguste Dupin,
from the point of view of a close friend and ally. We
therefore look at the police through the private investi-
gator's eyes and share with him feelings of frustration
and hostility as law enforcement agents throw roadblock

in the way of the detective's path to truth. "How can they
after roadblock in the way of the detective's path to truth.

47

48

"How can they be so stupid?" we exclaim indignantly.

"Don't they see that they've arrested the wrong man?"

Perhaps we are too nearsighted about the police.

We are so willing to despise him, so joyful at the detec-
tive's final victory over him, that we tend to ignore his
major function: to serve as adversary. And an adversary
must be worthy of his opponent. If the policeman were
really incompetent, as we delude ourselves into thinking,
we would be bored with the novel. Who would be left for
the detective to be at odds with besides the villain? He
would just go on his way blithely slaying dragons as they
pOpped out on the road, and we'd all politely yawn.

The policemen are not incompetents. Subconsciously
we must be aware of this, because if they were, our hero-
worship of the detective would be somewhat.impaired. They
merely operate differently from the private detective.

They have many cases under investigation at one time, while
the detective usually has only one. They must operate
within a complex system of rules and regulations while

the detective is a relatively free agent. A policeman

has more authority than a detective, and therefore commands
more immediate respect, but he cannot exercise his authority
without paperwork. In order to enter suspect premises,

for example, a law officer must have a search warrant. A

detective, on the other hand, may break into the house, or

49

if the residents are present, he may use charm, cockiness,
lies, or physical strength to gain entrance.

The police have at their disposal many aids which
the detective lacks. The first is manpower: a whole police
force available for tailing several suspects at one time
and for gathering special information. Nero Wolfe, sup-
posedly, can sit in his brownstone and maintain his regular
orchid-tending schedule because Inspector Cramer's men are
on the job. The detective has only himself to rely upon,
and he can't be in all places at one time.

The police also have a modern data-gathering system.
They can quickly find out a suspect's previous record.
Ballistics and fingerprint experts are near at hand.
Autopsies are performed by professionals with speed and
detached expertise. The detective relies on friends; the
newspaperman with inside information, other detectives,
paid informers, occasional leaks from police headquarters.

Why, then, one may justifiably ask, with all his
knowledge, equipment, and expertise, does the policeman
run a poor second to the private investigator? The foremost
exPlanation is that because the detective has only one case
to handle, he becomes a more acute observer and more per-
ceptive interpreter of human nature. The policeman is
under the pressure of expediency; the detective can take
time to sit down and probe at length the inner feelings

of his clients and their associates.

50

Because they are in a rush to justice, the police
often overlook the obvious, or if they see it, they cannot
put it in its prOper perspective. In their interpretation
of evidence they are blinded by routine. They manufacture
motives where there are none, and they arrest people on
the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

In addition to expedience, the policeman is often
motivated in his investigation by hopes of promotion and
public acclaim. Sherlock Holmes ironically notes that in
the newspapers Gregson and Lestrade get credit for cases
he has solved. Philip Marlowe cynically observes in Tbe
Big Sleep_that the morning papers' accounts of murders
"came as close to the truth as newspaper stories usually
come--as close as Mars is to Saturn," and that "Captain
Cronjager of the Hollywood Division got all the credit for
solving the two slayings in his district. . . ." (p. 109)-
The private investigator has only his fee to protect, and
as he becomes more enmeshed in his case, more closely
involved with the peOple it concerns, his fee becomes
secondary. Personal glory is a meaningless abstraction
to him, and he does not pursue it.

Nevertheless, however we might rationalize the
relationship of hostility that exists between the policeman
and the private detective, we may only finally answer that
it is, after all, a tradition, as old as the genre itself.

That this tradition is also carried on by Philip Marlowe,

51

Lew Archer and Travis McGee, who often sidestep the law

to achieve justice, should come as no surprise. But it

is not only the incompetence of many police officials

that turns Marlowe, Archer and McGee into out-laws. There
are good police officers as well as bunglers, but they are
entangled in the establishment red-tape and trivia.
Spillane's Mike Hammer gives his policeman-friend Pat
Chambers his reason for striking out alone after the

killer in I, the Jupy: "You're a cop, Pat. You're tied

 

down by rules and regulations. There's someone over you.
I'm alone" (p. 8). Although the detectives in this study
do not share Hammer's blood-lust, they too feel that the
traditions of established law and order are stifling.
Philip Marlowe, a former California policeman, left the
force for this reason.

Lew Archer was also once a police officer. In
The Way Some People Die (1951), we learn that he was forced
out of the Long Beach, California police force because he
wouldn't accept graft. Both Marlowe and Archer are sus-
picious of the honesty of the police because of their direct
experience with them. Often, their suspicions are justified.
Graft-taking on the part of the police appears in three of

Chandler's six Marlowe novels: The Big Sleep, Farewell, My

 

 

Lovely, and Lagy in the Lake.

 

To dismiss the police as basically corrupt or

incompetent, however, and to declare flatly the existence

52

of a natural adversary relationship between the police
officer and the private detective on this basis, would be
to do both a disservice. We have witnessed the loneliness
and tedium of the detective's work in the previous chapter.
Yet at the same time, the private detective remains an
individual, tied to no code but his own. This is not true
for the public police officer who must obey the System,
who cannot choose with whom he comes in contact on a day-
to-day basis, and who, through the routinization of his
daily work, becomes dehumanized.

Such dehumanization is evidenced in Robin Moore's

novel, The French Connection (1969), and in the excellent

 

screen adaptation which demonstrates the long hours of
often fruitless police detection. In the film, detective
Eddie Egan, the police protagonist, concludes interrogation
of his suspects with the question, "Do you still pick your
feet in Poughkeepsie?" He badgers the suspect with this
meaningless question until he finally capitulates and
admits that, indeed, he still performs this act in the
place mentioned, or anywhere that the policeman would have
him do it.

Egan's question is less absurd when viewed in the
light of another recent novel about police officers by

Joseph Wambaugh, The New Centurions (1970). In this novel,

 

which traces the lives of four policemen over a period of

five years beginning with their early training, the Los

53

Angeles police continually refer to the citizenry as
"assholes." What the users of "foot-picking" and "assholery“
share in common is their contempt for the worth and dignity
of human beings. To be viewed as an asshole is not to be
viewed as a whole person. And the admission of foot-
picking, ridiculous as the idea may seem, becomes just

as humiliating to the "offender" as if he had confessed

to child-molesting, incest, or sexual relations with his

dog.

The police become dehumanizers in part because
their work is alienating and dehumanizing. That they too
are victims is exemplified by the chief of detectives in
The French Connection who uses the Poughkeepsie line on
Egan.

Raymond Chandler is the most perceptive of the three
writers in understanding the causes for the often brutal
and sadistic behavior of members of the police force. In
The Little Sister (1949), Philip Marlowe makes his observa-
tions about the nature of the men in police work. He
understands, but does not condone:

They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in
hard condition. . . . The dull ready-made clothes,
worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look
of men who are poor and yet proud of their power,
watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it
into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm,
ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always
unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civili-
zation had no meaning for them. All they saw of it

was the failure, the dregs, the aberrations and the
disgust (p. 182).

54

The detective is not the only one to make obser-
vations about public crime fighters. Both Chandler and
Millar often allow the police officers themselves the
opportunity to explain the weaknesses of establishment law
and order. In one instance, police captains in Millar's
The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) and Chandler's Lady in
the Lake (1943) parallel each other:

It isn't easy recruiting men at the salaries the
supervisors are willing to pay. We can hardly com-
pete with the wages for unskilled labor. And this
is a tough job (Millar, p. 69).

Police business . . . is a hell of a problem. It's
a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest
type of men, and there's nothing in it to attract
the highest type of men. So we have to work with
what we get. . . . (Chandler, p. 164).

Both Kenneth Millar's and John D. MacDonald's
criticisms of the police force are less frequent and
intense than Raymond Chandler's. The police in their
novels are usually fully develOped characters in their
own right and are just as much villainized or victimized
as any other character in a novel. The concentration in
a Millar or MacDonald novel, then, is on the psyche of the
police officer as a person, more than as a functionary.

John D. MacDonald's The Long Lavender Look (1970)
brings forth the policeman as person. Sheriff Norman
Hyzer is the protagonist in this novel. A good sheriff,

honest, intelligent and well—trained, Hyzer runs a clean

county. However, he suffers from a mistake in his past

55

for which he has been punishing himself: he was making
love to a woman at the same time his wife and small
daughter were being crushed to death by a holdup getaway
car.

The fruit borne of Hyzer's fleeting, frenzied affair
is Lilo Hatch, a wild animal-woman, a sadist and a murderer.
Although it is not until the end of the novel that Hyzer
admits his fatherhood to Travis McGee, his guilt feelings
over the affair flaw him as a law officer. He refuses to
recognize Lilo for what she is. He ignores her obvious
connection with a racetrack robbery. He sees her as merely
a young girl sowing her oats.

Nevertheless, Hyzer is a good man, a man out of the
old West now residing in a Florida swamp county. His
entrance in the novel is coupled with a description of

him that makes us remember Gary Cooper in High Noon:

 

He had dark hair and noble-hero face, expressionless.
He kept his mouth pinched shut. The eyes were very
blue and his examination of each of us was long,
intensive, unrevealing (p. 22).

That Hyzer is flawed, however, becomes immediately
evident. In his desire to overlook his illegitimate
daughter's complicity in robbery and murder he casts about
for anyone else to take the b1ame--in this case, McGee and
his friend Meyer, returning from a friend's wedding.

Ignoring their explanations, and unwilling to investigate

their alibis, he tosses them both in jail. Here, Meyer

S6

is beaten up by one of the sheriff's deputies, Lew Arnstead,
and although Hyzer later suspends Arnstead, he describes
Meyer's beating as an accident: "He was stepping into the
issue coveralls when he lost his balance and fell, striking
his face on the wooden bench in the shower room" (p. 33).

Yet Lew Arnstead's suspension is significant. With
this act Hyzer begins to reclaim his dignity and self-
worth. For Arnstead has been blackmailing Hyzer. Aware
of Hyzer's affair and his parenthood of Lilo, Arnstead has
threatened Hyzer with exposure unless he is given free-
rein of a call-girl operation.

Lew Arnstead is another lawman whom MacDonald fully
develops. Once a young stud-about-town, Arnstead had
fallen deeply in love with a young innocent. But his
guilt feelings about his former relationships caused him
to become impotent. Defeated, he returned to his old
haunts only to discover that his importence remained. Then
Arnstead raided the high school's locker room for ampheta-
mines and found that with their aid he was once again
potent. But they too had their side effects. He became
erratic in his behavior. He sloughed off in his duties
as a deputy, and he began to be violent towards women.

His hostility towards women provided him, however,
with a means of making extra money to feed his habit. His
position as a law enforcement agent and his hold over

Hyzer made it easier for him. Arnstead would be called

57

in to investigate women who had overcharged their clothing
or who were involved in petty theft. He threatened them
with unrealistic prison sentences, then suggested that if
they partied with a select clientele they might earn enough
money to pay their debts. Arnstead, of course, would take
his cut.

Arnstead meets his death at the hands of King
Sturnevan, also a deputy, who sets out to avenge the death
of Linda Featherman, one of Arnstead's call-girls, but a
woman who had always treated Sturnevan with kindness.
Sturnevan is an ex-fighter who cut too easily. A man who
lives in past glories, he is obsessed with making it in
the ring again. Not only does he shoot Arnstead, but he
drowns Lilo Hatch after forcing her to tell him the location
of the hijacked racetrack money. Sturnevan's rationale is
simple: the money would have been his if he had had better
trainers and had stayed in the ring.

Other policemen have minor roles in the novel.
There is Deputy Billy Cable, basically a good and honest
officer and family man who nevertheless has a quick temper.
And there is the jailer, Mr. Priskett, a lover of words:
"Plentitude! One rarely hears the good words around here,
Mr. McGee" (p. 38). These men are controlled, however,
by Norman Hyzer, and since the novel revolves around him,
most comments about law enforcement come from his lips

or from McGee's.

58

Unlike Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who, as
we shall see later, attacks the specific situation of law
enforcement as it occurs in the immediate instance in the
novel, Travis McGee's comments are often more abstract
philosophical musings. Marlowe banters and wisecracks
with policemen; McGee conducts internal monologues or
classroom lectures:
The law, in its every dimension of the control of
criminals, is geared to limited, stunted peOple.
Regardless of what social, emotional, or economic
factor stunted them, the end product is hate, suspicion,
fear, violence, and despair. These are the weaknesses,
and the system is geared to exploit weakness. Mr. Norm
was a creature outside my experience. There were no
labels I could put on him (p. 42).

or: I
[Prostitution] is a useful and profitable sideline
by venal, underpaid, crooked police officers in every
urban area of the nation and the world where police
administration leaves enough room for improvisation
(p. 159).

Hyzer, on the other hand, cannot conduct internal
monologues since the novel is written in the first person
from McGee's point of view. A closed man about his pro-
fession and his life, we must depend upon Travis McGee for
our insights into his nature: "His knuckles and wrists
were soiled, and there was an edge of grime around the
white collar of his shirt. . . . It did not match my prior
observations of the fastidious officer of the law" (p. 150).
When Hyzer is finally permitted to speak for himself it is

because he has opened up to McGee: "He was asking for help

of some kind. A man proud, thoughtful, and troubled" (p. 228).

59

We are afforded a glimpse of Hyzer's personal vision of

justice. What we discover is a level of consciousness much

like McGee's:
The guidelines are blurred. Are cops pigs? If I
operate within a systemehere juvenile court cannot
touch rich kids, where the innocent--meaning those
presumed innocent because they have not yet been
tried--are jailed with the guilty when they can't
raise bail, where judicial wisdom is conditioned by
friendship and influence, where there are two kinds
of law, one for blacks and one for whites; then if
I go by the book, I am a kind of Judas goat, and if
I bend the rules to improve--on my terms--the
structure of local law, I am running my own little
police state. I'd better get out of it because I
can't live with either solution (pp. 228-229).

That Hyzer does not leave his position, but overcomes
his personal crisis and continues as a law enforcement agent
is made clear. Several weeks later, McGee receives a check
for twenty thousand dollars for his discovery of the stolen
money. The check is sent by Hyzer.

Hyzer then, is not a stock policeman by any means.
He is first a man whose chosen profession is law enforce-
ment, who tries to carry out his job in a clean and honest
way, who like many other men, becomes enmeshed in a
situation over which he has little or no control, but who
because of his inherent goodness must finally triumph.

Another policeman who triumphs over himself is

Sheriff Brandon Church, the major character in Kenneth

Millar's Find A Victim (1954). Church is sheriff of Las

 

Cruces, a southern California valley city inhabited mainly

by lower middle-class laborers, Mexicans, and a few members

60

of a dwindling California aristocracy. Like MacDonald's

Sheriff Hyzer, Church also resembles the Gary Cooper

cowboy:
The face under the hatbrim was long and lean like his
body, and burned by the valley sun. Though he was
young for the job, about my age, I could see the scars
of old pain branching out from the corners of his eyes
and bracketing his mouth. His eyes were deepset and
dark like the windows of a haunted house (p. 10).

Brandon Church's "old pain" is in part the result
of his long-suffering marriage to Hilda Meyer Church, a
psychopathic murderer with a father fixation. Church married
her, he tells Lew Archer at the novel's end, because "Some
men have a need to be needed. I'm one of them" (p. 218).
But Church found his role as father figure for Hilda—~80
well-developed, it seems, that she even calls him ”Father"
at the end of the novel--far from gratifying. Yearning
for adult love and a healthy sexual relationship, he begins
an affair with Hilda's younger sister, Anne Meyer.

His affair with Anne, although temporarily reward-
ing, causes him, finally, even more guilt and self-
recrimination. He holds himself responsible for the murders
of Anne, trucker Tony Aquista, and amateur racketeer Don
Kerrigan, when in fact, it was Hilda's hand that committed
the murders. Archer describes Church as "a man so deeply
split that he didn't know himself" (p. 56). His description
is more than accurate.

That Brandon Church is guilty is a fact. He had

guilty knowledge, given to him by Kerrigan, of Hilda's

61

murder of Anne. By giving in to Kerrigan's threat of
exposure unless he permits a truckload of hijacked whiskey
to leave his county, Church is also indirectly responsible
for the shootings of Aquista and Kerrigan. But it is
precisely his feelings of guilt about what he has done
that win Archer's support and admiration. "Naturally you
feel guilty," Archer tells him. "You are guilty. You
made some bad mistakes" (pp. 209-210).

It is not until the conclusion of the novel, how-
ever, that Church and Archer communicate. They are hostile
enemies throughout, in part because Archer is a private
detective, an outsider who inadvertently came upon Aquista,
in part because Church knows that he has been neglecting
his duties, and in part because he fears, quite rightly,
that Archer will discover the truth. Church slugs Archer
when he finds him searching Anne Meyer's apartment, and
he later fights him to a bloody draw. When Archer sug-
gests some moves Church might take in order to find Aquista's
killer, Church snaps, "You seem to be instructing me in my

duties,‘ to which Archer retorts, "It seems to be necessary"
(p. 89). Shortly thereafter, Church makes what Archer
interprets as a veiled threat: "I can't assume responsi-
bility for you if you keep throwing your weight around"

(p. 90).

Archer's hostility towards Church is tempered by

another arm of the law, District Attorney Westmore, a

62

"rising young lawyer who is using the office as a spring-
board to higher office or richer practice" (p. 149), but an
intelligent person who has known Brandon Church for a long
time. "Brandon Church is a genuine practical idealist. If
there's one man in the valley whose character I'm sure of,
he's the man," Westmore tells Archer (p. 189). He also
describes Church as a hard-worker who "works a sixteen-
hour day for less money than I get. . . . He does what he
thinks is right without regard for the consequences" (p. 158).
Westmore is so enamoured of Church that he overlooks
some facts in the case in order to find an out for him.
When Archer suggests that he has ignored evidence against
Church which might give a different interpretation to the
murders, Westmore coldly informs him that "there's a certain
law of economy in the interpretation of evidence." Archer
replies, "It's false economy if you don't cover all the
'facts" (p. 156).
Nevertheless, it is Westmore's blind faith in
Church as much as any other factor that helps alter
Archer‘s opinion of the sheriff. Instead of hostility
Archer now views him.with a compassion amounting to martyr-
worship, and instead of a tired cowboy, Church now looks
like "a ravaged saint stretched on El Greco's rack" (p. 210).
What brings about this change of attitude is
Archer's confrontation with Church, and the pitiful sight

of Hilda and Church relating to each other as Hilda fades

63

in and out of reality. That Church is willing to pay for
his sins because he realizes that "I couldn't leave myself
behind, that I'd have to go on living with myself no
matter where I was" (p. 207), completely wins over Lew
Archer who has also learned to live with himself and his
own past:
My judgment of Church had been turned upside down in
the last few minutes. He had broken some of the rules.
His life had been disordered and passionate. But he
was an honest man according to his lights (p. 209).
Like Travis McGee, Lew Archer is forced into the role
of confessor, a man to turn to when all else fails except
the truth. He listens to Church with compassion, and
responds to him with brutal honesty: "You're the sort
of conscience-stricken bastard who would get satisfaction
out of public disgrace and maybe a term in your own jail"
(p. 209). In the end, because he has confronted himself
with the aid of Archer's amateur, but perceptive analysis,
Church once again, or maybe for the first time, reclaims
himself first as a man, and by extension, as a law-man.
Raymond Chandler, on the other hand, spends less
time on individual analysis in general, and a greater time
trying to find the underlying causes for all the bad things
in the world—-including the police force. Bay City is his
microcosm. In this thriving Los Angeles suburb is con-
centrated all the corruption and decadence of a nation.

In its internal erosion it is reminiscient of Poisonville

(Personville) in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, although

 

64

unlike the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe never quite
succeeds at cleaning it up.

Farewell, My Lovely (1940), achieves the zenith of

 

crime and corruption in Bay City. The rather unwieldy plot
concerns an ex-felon, Moose Malloy, in search of his
paramour, Velma (now rich and living under an assumed
name in Bay City), who turned him in; the murder of a
homosexual, Lindsay Marriott; the discovery of a dope-ring
operated by pseudo-guru Jules Amthor; a phoney mental
hospital really a hide-out for thugs: and a top-notch
organization gangster, Laird Brunette. Drawing this and
more all together, however, is Marlowe's infatuation with
Anne Riordan, dauthter of Cliff Riordan, Chief of Police
of Bay City for seven years. Riordan was fired by Brunette
and his fellow gamblers who elected their own mayor. The
reason for his dismissal: his honesty. Assigned to a
lesser position in the Bay City Bureau of Records and
Identification, Riordan shortly died of a broken heart.
Anne Riordan emerges as a rose surviving in the center
of a cesspool, and it is really for her and to avenge the
memory of her father, that Chandler's knight sets out on
his quest.

In the course of his quest Marlowe turns over the
rock that is Bay City and finds the maggots that thrive
in their own dirt. There is John Wax, Chief of Police,

brought in by the crime syndicate. Wax prefers to ignore

6S

Marlowe's complaint that he has been beaten up by two Bay
City policemen: "His eyes now were the eyes of a man who
has other thoughts," Marlowe observes when he confronts
him (p. 186). A man who is elegantly dressed--too much so
for a police officer--Wax still has "small, hungry, heavy-
1idded eyes, as restless as fleas" (p. 184). His grammar
is poor: "I don't have no eastern windows. . . ." (p. 185)
and he is a man who sees Bay City the way he wants you to
see it:
I look out of my northern windows and I see the busy
bustle of Arguello Boulevard and the lovely California
foothills, and in the near foreground one of the nicest
little business sections a man could want to know. I
look out of my southern windows, which I am looking out
of right now, and I see the finest little yacht harbor
in the world, for a small yacht harbor. I don't have
no eastern windows, but if I did have, I would see a
residential section that would make your mouth water.
No sir, trouble is a thing we don't have a lot of on
hand in our little town (p. 185).
Marlowe notes that Wax doesn't mention "the two gambling
ships that were hull down on the brass waves just beyond
the three mile limit" (p. 185).

The fascist aspect of the Bay City police is presented
to us early in the scene, when Marlowe first enters the
office. He observes that "A stained wood desk was set far
back like Mussolini's, so that you had to walk an expanse
of blue carpet to get to it, and while you were doing that
you.would be getting the beady eye" (p. 184). This is

definitely enemy territory for the little man with no

money, and even Philip Marlowe cannot bully his way into

66

Wax's confidence until he drops the name of his wealthy
client. Then he receives not only cooperation, but a
couple of comradely shots of whiskey, followed by handfuls
of cracked cardamom seeds.

Marlowe's complaint is that while conducting a
private investigation of Jules Amthor, psychic consultant,
he has been beaten up by two Bay City police officers,
Galbraith and Blane. The scene in which Marlowe is abused,
although rather bloody, contains a great deal of wit. '
Chandler's dialogue is so self-consciously suggestive of
Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers," that Marlowe, in his
agony, is forced to comment upon it:

'Give me back my gun.‘
He leaned forward a little and thought. I could see

him thinking. It hurt his corns. 'Oh, you want your
gun, pally?‘ He looked sideways at the one with the
gray mustache. 'He wants his gun,‘ he told him. He

looked at me again. 'And what would you want your
gun for, pally?‘

'I want to shoot an Indian.‘

'Oh, you want to shoot an Indian, pally.‘

'Yeah, just one little Indian, Pop.‘

He looked at the one with the mustache again. 'This
guy is very tough,‘ he told him. 'He wants to shoot
an Indian.‘

'Listen, Hemingway, don't repeat everything I say,‘
I said.

'I think the guy is nuts,‘ the big one said. 'He just
called me Hemingway. . . . 'My name ain't Hemingway'
(p. 133).

. . . The big man said: 'Now that we are all between
pals and no ladies present we really don't give so much
time to why you went back up there, but this Hemingway
stuff is what really has me down.‘

'A gag,‘ I said. 'An old, old gag.‘

'Who is this Hemingway person at all?‘

'A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over
until you begin to believe it must be good.‘

'That must take a hell of a long time,‘ the big man
said (pp. 136- 137).

67

The stupidity of Captain Galbraith is also rather pathetic.
More pathetic, however, is his naively truthful comment
about law and order:

(Cops don't go crooked for money. Not always, not even
often. They get caught in the system. They get you
where they have you do what is told them or else.

And the guy that sits back there in the nice big

corner office with the nice suit and the nice liquor

breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell

like violets, only it don't--he ain't giving the

orders either. . . . A guy can't stay honest if he

wants to. . . . That's what's the matter with this

country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he

does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don't

eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety

thousand FBI men in clean collars and briefcases.

Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it

does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think

we gotta make this little world all over again (p. 194).

The policeman too is the little man, worn, angry,

frustrated, impotent. Nulty, a Los Angeles policeman who
is assigned to the Malloy murder case when Malloy murders
a black man, looks "poor enough to be honest, but he didn't
look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy" (p. 12).
He says bitterly: "Shines. Another shine killing. That's
what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police
department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the
want-ad section" (p. 12). The police force does not pay
much attention to black slayings. Only power, only money
is important. Even the "good" cops fall prey: "Olson.
Pickpocket detail. He's good too. Except once in a while
he will lift a leather and plant it, to keep up his arrest

record. That's being a shade too good. . . ." (p. 210).

68

These observations are made by Red Norgaard, an
ex-Bay City policeman who helps Marlowe. Norgaard was framed
and thrown off the force for being too honest. Devoid of
bitterness, however, he understands the dishonesty of his
fellow police officers:

I know how these boys figure. . . . The trouble with
cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough,

but that they think just being a cop gives them a
little something they didn't have before. Maybe it

did once, but not any more. They're topped by too many
smart minds (p. 212).

There are, nevertheless, a few honest policemen
left. Red Norgaard is one, although he is temporarily
inactive on the force. Another is Lieutenant Randall from
Central Homicide in Los Angeles, "a thin quiet man of
fifty with smooth creamy gray hair, cold eyes, a distant
manner" (p. 64). The relationship between Marlowe and
Randall is one of mutual, although distant respect and
admiration. Marlowe's admiration for him is Open: "His
eyes were going over my face line by line, corpuscle by
corpuscle, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass,
or Thorndyke with his pocket lens. . . ." (p. 164). "I
was beginning to like him. He had a lot behind his vest
besides his shirt" (p. 167). A loyal and intelligent law
enforcement agent, Randall is embarrassed by the Bay City
police force. When Marlowe suggests calling the Bay City
force into action, Randall says nothing: "When I looked

up at him his face was red and uncomfortable. 'For a cop,‘

I said, 'you're the most sensitive guy I ever met'" (p. 170).

69

At the conclusion of the novel, Randall has little
to be embarrassed by in Bay City. With his aid, Marlowe
has somewhat cleaned it up: Chief of Police John Wax has
been fired, half the detective force has been demoted to
patrolmen, and Marlowe's friend, Red Norgaard, is back at
his job. Racketeer Laird Brunette, who has to face the
Grand Jury, will probably get off scott free, but that's
to be expected.

Yet for all his sensitivity about his role and the
police force, Randall remains a "smart and deadly cop"
who is "not free to do a clean job in a clean way" (p. 199).
Once again, red-tape interferes. Furthermore, the years
of frustrating red-tape have drained even a good cop like
Randall of human compassion. He looks at the corpse of
alcoholic Jessie Florian "with a wolfish baring of his
teeth," and comments with sardonic detachment, "Brains
on her face. That seems to be the theme song in this
case" (p. 177). And when Marlowe suggests to him that
the murderess, Velma, was not all bad, that at least she
protected her husband, "an old man who had loved not wisely,
but too well," Randall retorts sharply: "That's just
sentimental" (p. 246). He fails to understand the dif—
ference between sloppy sentimentality and human compassion.

Sentimentality, of course, is a dangerous emotion
for a policeman. It is dangerous for any professional who

carries a gun. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer operates out

70

of sentimental/patriotic feelings when he sets out to avenge

the death of his World War II buddy in I, the Jury. In his

 

search for revenge he becomes the inadvertent killer of
several innocent people. Detective Degarmo of Chandler's
Lady in the Lake (1943) turns into a murderer out of love
and jealousy. Sheriff Ostervelt is corrupted by unrequited

love in Kenneth Millar's The Doomsters (1958), and Sheriff

 

Hyzer is eaten away by his wife's death in John D. MacDonald's

The Long Lavender Look (1970).

 

Not only is sentimentality dangerous, but also one
of the waves it rides on: Nostalgia. In a world gone mad,
members of the police force would rather return to the
simple solutions of the golden days of law enforcement--
the rubber hose and kid glove method of forcing a confession-—
than confront the existing problems of law enforcement and
seek causes and solutions. Captain Gregorius of Chandler's
The Long Goodbye (1954), is one of these: "A type of
copper that is getting rarer' but by no means extinct, the
kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft
sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the
fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of
the spine" (p. 37). There is also Maglashan in Chandler's
The Little Sister (1949), who carries a pigskin glove in
his pocket: "I've known guys of the not so voluntary type

that had to go to the can every fifteen minutes for weeks

71

after they got voluntary," Maglashan menacingly tells
Philip Marlowe (p. 173).

Even the good policemen are confused. Sheriff
Burgoon, who has just found some dead hippies killed by

one of his own deputies in MacDonald's Pale Gray for Guilt

 

(1968), asks simply, "What's going wrong with folks, McGee?"
(p. 157). But when McGee tries to explain the world to

him, Burgoon is incapable of understanding. Deafened by

the thunderous arrival of a new and confusing society, he
stumbles vaguely along his own way: "'Around here today,‘
he said sadly, 'it's beginning to seem to me like in my
sleep last night I must have forgot half the English

language" (p. 157). Bernie Ohls, Marlowe's sometime
policeman-friend, admits that he's an "old tired beat-up

cop. All I feel is sore," in The Long Goodbye, and tries

 

to put his finger on the causes and solutions to crime in
America. Marlowe corrects him, however, with a lengthy
sermon on the weaknesses of the law enforcers' point of
view that, among other things, gambling breeds gambling:

You're a damn good cop, Bernie, but just the same
you're all wet. In one way cops are all the same.
They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses

his pay check at a crap table, stop gambling. If he
gets drunk, StOp liquor. If he kills somebody in a
car crash, stOp making automobiles. If he gets
pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stOp sexual
intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building
houses. . . . We don't have mobs and crime syndicates
and goon squads because we have crooked politicians
and their stooges in the City Hall and the legis-
latures. Crime isn't a disease, it's a symptom.
Ceps are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for

 

 

72

a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure
it with a black-jack. We're a big rough rich wild
people and crime is the price we pay for organization.
We'll have it with us a long time. Organized crime
is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar (pp. 309-
310).
But Marlowe cannot say what's on the clean side of the sharp
dollar. "I never saw it," he admits with resigned self-
irony.
Police cliches such as "1aw and order," "we always
get our man," or ”the policeman is your friend" no longer

serve. When Captain Cronjager suggests to Philip Marlowe

that "a life is a life" in The Bingleep, Marlowe cynically

 

responds, "Right. . . . Tell that to your c0ppers next time
they shoot some scared petty larceny crook running away up
an alley with a stolen Spare" (pp. 100-101). This disso-
nance between public law and private citizen continues--

so much so, that the police have recently launched public
relations campaigns to improve their image. These include
meetings with the community members, mingling at rock
concerts, "pig-freak" football games, and even posters of

a kindly policeman bearing a small child in his arms, with
the caption, "Some call him pig."

But even the publicity campaigns resulting in minor
improvements in police-community relations do not soften
the public's attitude toward law enforcement in general.
"Dragnet," a radio program begun in 1949, and a television

series that attracted a large viewing audience that

73

sympathized with its pat solutions to pat situations in the
McCarthy '50's, is greeted in its current revival with
scornful contempt and disbelief by its younger viewers,

and merely as camp by its older ones. New York City
residents were gleeful in 1971 when large scale graft-
taking on the part of the police force was discovered (they
always knew it existed, but now it was out in the open).
Many followed with a vengeance the trials of policemen
implicated in cold-blooded slayings in the 1967 Detroit
riots. The Kerner Commission's report on the 1968 Chicago
Convention riots which condemned police brutality was
greeted with much enthusiasm by both young and old.

Police forces were originally established to protect
the haves against the have-nots; to keep the have-nots from
encroaching upon the property and advantages of the haves.
In race riots they sided with the whites against the
Chinese, the blacks, the Germans. In early labor-management
feuds they took the side of management, clubbing and some-
times killing members of the working class. No wonder that
there exists a We/They relationship between the law and
the public, and the law is the much-feared, though little-
respected They.

It is no wonder either that the private detective
becomes the folk hero of the people instead of the man in
blue. He is honest. He is not in uniform. He is con-
cerned with more than "just the facts, ma'am." And most

of all he is on his client's side; he cares.

74

When a client enters the offices of Lew Archer or
Philip Marlowe or Travis McGee's houseboat, he comes of his
own volition. He is not intimidated by the impersonality
of a police precinct. "When you pass in beyond the green
lights of a police station," Philip Marlowe observes, "you
pass clear out of this world into a place beyond the law"

(The High Window, p. 137). Abandon all hope seems stamped

 

across the face of the building. But when one enters a
detective's office, rather than the "remote, heartless

. .‘. not quite human" atmosphere of a police room, he
confronts a personality, a human being, reflected in his
surroundings.

It is the detective's commitment to his client that
most alienates him from the police. Although both the
detective and the police officer are concerned with justice,
the detective's first concern is the protection of his
client at almost any cost. His client must, of course,
level with him, but once she or he does, the detective
is more understanding than the police. The detective under-
stands, for instance, that guilty actions do not mean
guilty deeds. He understands that words like "I'd like
to kill you," must not necessarily be followed by actions.
Words don't kill; people do. And he understands panic and
flight.

Marlowe, Archer and McGee will go to prison rather

than give the police information they may misinterpret at

75

great cost to their clients' welfare. That they will be
imprisoned, that they won't give in, that they are
untouchable, adds to the law enforcer's frustration with
them. A circular relationship is established: the detec-
tive doesn't give the police the information because

(1) he's committed to protect his client, and (2) because
he doesn't trust the police. The policeman becomes in-
furiated with the detective's resistance. He threatens
him with the loss of his license: "You didn't report it
to us. . . . That wasn't smart of you, Archer, it wasn't
cooperative, it wasn't even legal. It's the kind of thing

that makes for license troubles" (Millar, The Way Some

 

People Die, 1951, p. 115). He beats him: "Ostervelt raised
the Colt and laid it raking and burning across the side of

my head" (Millar, The Doomsters, 1958, p. 69). He jails

 

him: "Immovable bunk and a thin hard mattress pad. Cement
floor with a center drain. . . . No other way to see any
other cell through the top half of the door which was of

sturdy bars" (John D. MacDonald, The Long Lavender Look,

 

1970, p. 39). The detective is now justified in his
hostility towards the police and continues to refuse to
cooperate. The police, therefore, refuse to cooperate with
the detective. "Their failure to co-operate suited me
reasonably well. I felt justified in holding back some of

the results of my own investigation," Lew Archer notes in

76

Black Money_(l966, p. 111). The circle and the alienation

is complete.

Can there be a reconciliation between the detective
and the policeman? Philip Marlowe says that such a thing
is possible, but only if the following terms are met:

Until you guys own your own souls you don't own mine.
Until you guys can be trusted every time and always,
in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out
and find it and let the chips fall where they may--
until that time comes, I have a right to listen to
my conscience, and protect my client the best way I
can. Until I'm sure you won't do him more harm than
you'll do the truth good. Or until I'm hauled before

somebody that can make me talk (The High Window,
p. 93).

 

These terms are met in Raymond Chandler's final
Marlowe novel, Playback (1958). Captain Alessandrg is an
honest policeman who is not bullied by the rich or the
poor. He is polite to Marlowe. Even his deputies are

civil. His office is neat and clean.

When Marlowe speaks to Alessandro, however, we are
disappointed. Because in the ageing detective's refusal
to answer questions there is a plaintive note. Gone is the

tough, wisecracking MarlOwe:

Don't bully me, Captain Alessandro. I haven't done
anything wrong. You've been very human so far. Please
don't get the idea that I had anything to do with
Mitchell's disappearance. . . . When I know why, I'll
let you know or I won't. If I don't you'll just have
to throw the book at me. It wouldn't be the first

time it's happened to me. I don't sell out--even to
good police officers (p. 164).

What is miSsing is the adversary relationship

necessary to a good hard-boiled detective novel. The

Illlllll“ '

77

police, like the villain, must be adversaries whom the
detectives overwhelm. This does not mean that they must
be stupid. On the contrary, the policeman must be worthy
of the detective in order for the detective to remain a
hero. But he must fumble at one or two essential points
so that the detective can out-do him.

We are left with a battle between underdogs.
"Dragnet" producer and star Jack Webb, in an interview in

the July 22, 1972 issue of T.V. Guide states: "I've always

 

felt that the policeman has been the underdog of society;
part of what he became was due to the indifference of the
public" (p. 25). If indifference no longer exists on the
part of the public, open hostility certainly does. And
although the private detective does not meet with such out
and out hatred, he is generally regarded as a snoop, an
invader, or at best a nuisance. Nevertheless, the adversary
relationship between official law and the private detective
must continue its tradition in the pages of sleuth fiction.
When the relationship ceases to exist, so will the detective

novel.

CHAPTER IV

VILLAINS AND VICTIMS

"All murder is melodrama, because the real tragedy
is not death, but the condition which induces it."
--Nero Wolfe

Once upon a time in our childhood, it was easy to
identify villains. In westerns they wore black hats which
came off in their fights with the heroes, who wore white
hats which they never lost. They drank whiskey. They
snarled. They were fat. They were stringy. In cartoon
strips, heroines had wide blue eyes, soft blonde hair, and
rounded bustlines; female villains had blue-black hair,
slitty eyes, long red fingernails, and pointed breasts.
Villains were either lazy ne'er-do-wells or men who "owned
the town"--and the people who lived there. And they were
all-evil, totally depraved.

Villains like these still exist. Children watch
them on daytime T.V. cartoons, or in re-runs of the Lone
Ranger. For children, the real world which smudges its

black and white, villain or hero, into a muted gray, is

 

1Rex Stout, The Red Box (New York: Pyramid Books,
1964), p. 177.

 

78

79

ox>caqflex. Either the guy is good or he is bad. There's
just no in between.

Detectives, however, are of the real world. They
recognize that there are fine lines, sometimes indistin—
guishable, between villain and hero and villain and victim.

Thus Travis McGee in John D. MacDonald's Bright Orange for

 

the Shroud (1965),2 is told that he's like the animal-goon-

 

villain: "Maybe . . . maybe he is ygg, gone bad. . . .
Maybe that's why you can handle him" (p. 103).

This bit of pedestrian psychology, although signifi-
cant, is by no means recent. We know, for instance, that
Sherlock Holmes would have been just as brilliant a criminal
as Professor Moriarity. We know that Sam Spade was no Philo
Vancian angel: he had been having an affair with his

murdered partner's wife in The Maltese Falcon. We are

 

aware that Lew Archer often views himself in the mirror

with disgust as he seems to take on the psycho-physiological
qualities of a wolfish Mr. Hyde during the course of an
investigation.

Perhaps this fine line within the detective hero
himself is what makes Sherlock Holmes stories more enduring
than prim and proper Philo Vance. It is certainly the
reason that Lew Archer is more intrinsically interesting

as a character than Mike Hammer. For Spillane's hero is

 

2John D. MacDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud

(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett,'1965)} All quotations will
be from this edition.

 

80

all for the good. He never errs in his judgment or his
behavior. And his criminals are all for the bad. They
are flatly drawn. All we have to know, we are told, is
that someone is a commie. We can easily fill in the rest:
he hates children and dogs, he is a rapist, a torturer,

he is physically abhorrent, he is an idiot. He is, in
brief, complete anathema.

This is all rather corny and unbelievable. We
know from our own experiences that the kindest people can
be motivated to commit the foulest of deeds. We know,
because we see these tendencies in ourselves. Most of us
just don't act upon them. Furthermore, modern psychology
tells us that criminals aren't all bad. And history
teaches us that even the infamous Al Capone established
soup kitchens in Chicago.

Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Millar, and John D. Mac-
Donald are writers who share a profound awareness of this
human condition. They use their knowledge of psychology
and history to further our insight into the nature of hgmgg
rather than merely criminal behavior. Therefore, although
their characters are action detectives willing to use their
guns and their fists where necessary, they rely more
heavily on their understanding of people in order to
discover the solution to a case.

Their understanding of people, however, does not

mean that they demonstrate compassion toward felons. They

81

realize that there is, for most, a choice. Human beings
can choose to live within the boundaries of social norms,
or they can choose to live outside them at their own risk.
Those who are treated with the least compassion are the
ones who have had the advantages of society, but who have
either refused to take advantage, or who have become too
greedy: doctors, lawyers, big-time brilliant syndicate
men.

Even victims are not automatically treated with
compassion. Here again is that fine line of distinction.
Victims may be complicit in their victimization, which
often makes them, if not simultaneously, congruently
villains and victims.

Simply, in this context, a villain is one who acts,
and a victim is the one who is acted upon. And although
the relationship between the two can be, as we shall see,
a complex one, it can also be somewhat clarified. Done £9,
in the case of the victim, means put upon, abused, raped,
swindled, or ultimately murdered.

Murder, with its finality, is not really looked
upon as the major tragedy in the action detective novels
under discussion. Certainly, one of the primary reasons
we read detective novels is to find out "who done it," and
by this we mean murder-~not arson, not robbery (although
these may be included), but killing. We are bored with a

detective novel which doesn't include in it at least one

82

good murder. At the same time, although we may not con-
sciously be aware of it, we also would be bored if motiva-
tion were omitted. The how and why of the crime is equally
as important as the who.

The real victims of a murder are the ones who
remain alive--and this includes the murderer--just as
funerals are more for the mourners than the mourned. The
ones who are left to pick up the pieces and pick at each
other, to live in fear, to question their own guilt or
the guilt of their loved ones; and then try to begin life
all over again, with a new awareness of themselves and of
the world in which they live.

The victims of action detective novels often exist
in a symbiotic relationship with the villains or victimizers.
This is a fact which the three novelists impress upon their
readers again and again. To see how this relationship is
developed in their novels, to study the role of villain
and victim, let us examine three representative works:

Raymond Chandler's The LongGoodbye,3 Kenneth Millar's The

 

Far Side of the Dollar,4 and John D. MacDonald's Bright

annge for the Shroud.

 

‘

3Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York:

Pocket Books, 1954). Although originally published by
.HOughton Mifflin, all citations will refer to the Pocket
Books edition.

 

4Ross Macdonald (pseud, for Kenneth Millar), The Far
Side of the Dollar (New York: Bantam Books, 1965). Although
(Iriginally published by Alfred A. Knopf, all quotations will
.be: from the Pocket Books edition. '

83

The LongTGoodbye, the next-to-last Chandler novel,

 

is also his most compassionate. In it, Philip Marlowe
establishes two deeply meaningful relationships, one of
which is betrayed at the novel's end, and the other which
is revived, with implications of marriage, in his final
novel, Playback (1958).

In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe, who in middle age
has moved from his cramped apartment in Los Angeles to a
rented house in the Laurel Canyon district, meets Terry
Lennox, a sometimes-alcoholic. The Marlowe-Lennox rela-
tionship begins when Lennox, drunk and almost destitute,
passes out in front of a Los Angeles nightclub and is
deserted by his ex-wife Sylvia Lennox, who drives away in
her Rolls-Royce. Marlowe's reason for taking Terry home
is rather unclear: "I'm supposed to be tough, but there
was something about the guy that got me. I don't know
what it was unless it was the white hair and the scarred
face and the clear voice and the politeness" (p. 5). It is
only because we know that the detective's mission is to
save "lost dogs," as he refers to Lennox, that he is a
humanist, that we can understand Marlowe's motives.

Terry Lennox is indeed a lost dog, albeit a polite
one, and he is, ultimately, the major villain-victim of
‘the novel. An ex-World War II hero who served in the

Baritish army and who saved the lives of two Las Vegas

gangsters, Mendy Menendez and Randy Starr, Lennox appears

84

at a loss to know what to do with himself. For him, as
well as for many others, the war has altered his values
and left in him a void which cannot be filled. Captured
by the Germans and disgusted with himself for what he let
them do to him (just what, remains vague), he contents
himself with leading a meaningless existence in, for him,
a meaningless world. He weds multi-million dollar heiress
Sylvia Potter Lennox, a six-times married tramp, and
allows himself to be kept by her wealth.

Marlowe's first meeting with Lennox is followed
by a second encounter several months later, just before
Christmas, when he rescues the hungry, drunken, filthy
man as he is about to be picked up by the police for
vagrancy. Marlowe again takes Lennox home, cleans him
and feeds him and suggests that if he needs a job he might
contact his "friends" in Las Vegas who are indebted to him
and who have promised him work. This second meeting ends
with Marlowe putting Lennox on a bus for Las Vegas.

Disgustedly, a few weeks later, Marlowe reads that
Lennox and Sylvia have been remarried in Las Vegas, and in
March, Terry Lennox, now looking "older, very sober and
severe and beautifully calm" (p. 14), turns up at Marlowe's
office. The two begin to meet frequently for drinks at a
quiet bar called Victor's, where Lennox introduces Marlowe
to the gimlet--English style, no bitters. It is at Victor's

'that differences in attitudes toward life and inner morality

85

begin to crop up. Marlowe asks Lennox how he got on with
Randy Starr in Las Vegas. "Down my street he's called a
tough number":

"In Las Vegas he's a legitimate businessman. You look
him up next time you're there. He'll be your pal."

"Not too likely. I don't like hoodlums."

"That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of

world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to

keep it. Randy and I and another fellow were in a

jam once. It made a sort of bond between us" (pp. 15-16).

Marlowe, annoyed with Lennox's constant self-mockery
and with his ironic detachment about being a kept man,
decides that he "liked him better drunk, down and out,
hungry and beaten and proud" (p. 18). However, like Travis
McGee later, who suspects that he can love only weak women
who make him feel strong, Marlowe questions his own dis-
illusionment with Lennox: "Maybe I just liked being top
man. His reasons for things were hard to figure" (p. 18).
Marlowe's last meeting with Terry Lennox at

Victor's ends with Marlowe walking out on him. He is tired
of Terry Lennox's self-depreciating remarks: "I'm a weak
character without guts or ambition. I caught the brass
ring and it shocked me to find out it wasn't gold. A
guy like me has one big moment in his life, one perfect
swing on the high trapeze. Then he spends the rest of
his time trying not to fall off the sidewalk into the

gutter" (pp. 19-20). He's tired of Terry's unwillingness

to be assertive and to change his life. Perhaps Marlowe

86

is sickened by his own participation as listener in Terry's
life of decadence. Perhaps Terry is speaking more Openly,
trusting and depending too much on his relationship with
Marlowe. Marlowe struggles to remain a private, uncommitted
man. He finally leaves. "You talk too damn much . . . and
it's too damn much about you" (p. 20).

The two don't meet again until one month later at
five o'clock in the morning when Terry shows up at Marlowe's
house and asks him to drive him to an airport in Tiajuana.
The reason, we are to learn later, is that Terry has found
Sylvia dead in the guesthouse where she conducted her
extra-marital affairs, her face smashed in, and he believes,
quite rightly, that he will be accused of the murder.
Marlowe, advising Terry not to tell him why he wants to
be taken to Tiajuana, drives him there and later gets
picked up by the police, spit upon, beaten and impriSoned,
and finally released without ever in any way betraying
Terry.

Terry, we discover, has first written to the police
to confess to the murder, and then has committed suicide
in Mexico after writing a letter to Marlowe asking him to
"drink a gimlet for me at Victor's and the next time you
make coffee, pour me a cup and put some bourbon in it and
light me a cigarette and put it beside the cup. And after
that forget the whole thing" (p. 73). In a poignant scene

for the hard-boiled Marlowe, he follows Terry's request:

87

l’Idid what he asked me to, sentimental or not" (p. 74).
Thus, temporarily, ends Marlowe's relationship with Terry
Lennox.

If it seems that a great deal of time has been
spent upon him, it is because he is integral to the plot
as a whole, although he doesn't appear after the first
seventy-five pages, until the end of the novel. Further-
more, it is to Lennox that Marlowe's long goodbye is
addressed, the first time when he receives the suicide
note, the second and last time when we realize that he
is still alive. Finally, it is the victim Terry Lennox
‘who turns out to be a villain. Had he stepped forward,
had he not lived in fear, two deaths might have been pre-
vented. For this weakness Marlowe cannot forgive him.

The rest of the story of The Long Goodbye centers

 

around Eileen Wade and her writer-husband, Roger. An
attempt is made by publisher's representative Howard
Spencer to hire Marlowe to keep an eye on Roger Wade who,
for some unknown reason (at first attributed to general
writer's alcoholism) has been hitting the bottle. Marlowe
refuses. It is not in his line of work to babysit for
alcoholic writers. But when ethereally beautiful Eileen
Wade calls him up to tell him that her husband has been
missing for three days, Marlowe cannot resist her request.
Thus begins a story of villains and victims, of

murder and madness. The first villains that Marlowe

88

encounters while working for the Wades are three doctors
known to the detective trade as "barred-window boys."
Simply, they are doctors who provide "cures" for their
patients at private clinics, or who run a drug sideline out
of their own offices. Marlowe checks them out because
Wade has been to one of these men before, and because he
has left an alcoholically cryptic note to a "Dr. V." at home.

The first doctor Marlowe sees is Dr. Verringer who
runs a home for writers, now closed, in Sepulveda Canyon.
Dr. Verringer is a cordial, mild-mannered man who has been
acting as protector to a psychopath named Earl, a man-child
who goes in for gaucho costumes and toy guns, but whose
brass-knuckled fists can be brutal. Earl is smooth and
handsome, an accomplished dancer and ladies' man, but
suffers from sudden moments of violence, sometimes even
directed against his benefactor. It is Verringer who is
keeping Wade hidden, weakening him, feeding him narcotics,
and trying to extort a sizeable sum of money from him. It
is not until later, however, that we discover Wade's
presence at Verringer's ranch. For the time being,
Verringer does a near-perfect job of throwing Marlowe off
his scent.

Verringer is, of course, a con-man. As a con-man
he must present a believable appearance. Indeed he does.
He is a man with "a strong beefy voice," with "meaty

shoulders" (pp. 106-7). His speech is educated and polite.

89

He cannot be shaken, even when Marlowe snidely suggests to
him that he's been running an illegal operation. His
response and bearing cause Marlowe to think, admiringly,
that "The guy had a kind of dignity, at that" (p. 108).

That Marlowe is capable of admiring a villain is
a common occurrence in detective fiction. All three
detectives--Marlowe, Archer, and McGee—-respect their
adversaries if their adversaries are worthy. Just as
we have seen in the last chapter, that the detective
respects his policeman adversary so he also respects a
good, tough, suave criminal opponent. If all police were
incompetent, the detective's battle against them would look
ridiculous. If all villains were incompetent or psycho-
pathic, the detective would need only his guns and his
fists, not cunning and intelligence, to win his battle.

If the conflict were only physical, any strong-arm might
serve. But the conflict must be more than this. The
psychopath Earl can be handled with quick acts of violence;
to defeat men like Verringer one needs intelligence and
skill.

The second doctor Marlowe interviews is Dr. Vukanich,
an ear, nose, throat and hard-narcotics man. He operates
out of a building "loaded with doctors, dentists, Christian
Science practitioners not doing too good, the kind of
lawyers you hope the other fellow has, the kind of doctors

and dentists who just scrape along . . . tired, discouraged

90

men (p. 112). Vukanich is not so suave as Verringer. A
"thin-faced man with an uninteresting pallor," Marlowe
suggests that he looks "like a tubercular rat" (p. 113).
In the middle of Marlowe's interrogation of him, Vukanich
leaves the room and returns "strolling happily." He has
given himself a shot. He too is an addict.

Marlowe responds to Vukanich's threats that he has
friends who "for a mere five hundred dollars . . . could
put you in the hospital with several broken bones," by
retorting "Shoot yourself in the vein, don't you, Doc?

Boy, do you brighten up." He then leaves the office without
heeding the receptionist's call to pay ten dollars: "The
waiting patients looked at me with disapproving eyes. That
was no way to treat doctor" (p. 115).

The third doctor Marlowe investigates is stronger.
Dr. Amos Varley of Altadena, who runs a rest-home where
lonely, aging people reside, is a man of dignity who, in
personality and general charm, seems a composite picture
of Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, and Arthur Godfrey: "He
was wonderful--and he was tough as armor plate" (p. 116).
Varley smiles "benignly." His sadness is "a rich full
sadness" (p. 117). He is, in brief, the perfect confidence
man, replete with all the proper mannerisms. Although
Marlowe admires his toughness, he finds his practices
disgusting: he takes as patients only those who can't

fight back. When Varley tells Marlowe that "Somebody had

91

to care for these sad old people," Marlowe replies, "Some-
body has to clean out cesspools. Come to think of it, that's
a clean honest job. So long, Dr. Varley. When my job
makes me feel dirty I'll think of you. It will cheer me
up no end" (p. 118).

Doctors and lawyers appear frequently as secondary
villains in the novels of Chandler, Millar and MacDonald.

We find villainous doctors in Chandler's The Little Sister

 

and Lady in the Lake, and in Millar's The Far Side of the

 

 

Dollar, Black Money, and The Goodbye Look. Lawyers are

 

 

 

villains in John D. MacDonald's Pale Gray for Guilt, and

 

in Bright Orange for the Shroud.

 

It is because doctors and lawyers have the trust of
their clients that their crimes are looked upon by the
detectives as particularly heinous. In a recent Gallup
Poll, doctors and lawyers rated high on trustworthiness
(plumbers, it might be noted, were on the bottom, second
only to used car salesmen). It is these two professions
about which the American public has the least knowledge:
medicine and law. Doctors and lawyers are special, people
to be revered. What they do is complicated and unclear,
but we automatically trust them. We might complain about
their fees, but we pay, for they must know a lot. There-
fore, the doctors and the lawyers are most capable (some
ministers might also be listed here) of fleecing the

public. We have only to remember the disapproval of

92

Dr. Vukanich's patients--"That was no way to treat Doctor"--
to understand the blind worship and gullibility of peOple
towards this esteemed profession.

After Marlowe leaves Dr. Varley he returns to
Dr. Verringer's ranch on a hunch, and rescues weakened Roger
Wade. He takes him back to his wife. The only payment he
receives is the one he takes: "I took hold of [Eileen
Wade] and pulled her toward me and tilted her head back.

I kissed her hard on the lips." Marlowe believes that
Eileen Wade knew where her husband was all along, that she
"just wanted to get me involved with him, tangled up with
him, so I'd feel a sense of responsibility to look after
him" (p. 132). Eileen denies the truth of this, but whether
or not it is true is never made clear. What is clear,
however, is that Roger Wade knew Sylvia Lennox and that

he had an affair with her. What is more clear is Marlowe's
fear of involving himself again, of liking someone too much,
of feeling too responsible: "If I hadn't been a nice guy

to Terry Lennox, he would still be alive" (p. 133).

Two weeks later Marlowe is invited to a cocktail
party at the Wades' home where he meets Dr. Edward Loring,
another villain, but a covert one, a "prissy-looking man
in rimless cheeters [sic.] with a smear on his chin that
might have been a goatee" (p. 150). Dr. Loring is a villain

because he is a prude, a man lacking in warmth and com-

passion who is more concerned with his self-image than he

93

is with human suffering. Furthermore, like Ernest Hemingway's
Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, he is leppy. He publicly
accuses Roger Wade of having an affair with his wife, Linda
Potter Loring. Wade responds with quiet dignity, earning
Marlowe's respect. Loring slaps Wade across the face with
his gloves, receiving in return only his wife's scorn:
"Dear God, what a ham you are, darling. Stop acting like
a damn fool, will you, darling? Or would you rather stick
around until somebody slaps ygg; face?" (p. 155). When
Loring is asked to leave the party he calls for his wife,
but she refuses to leave with him. He has humiliated him-
self and leaves alone.
A week later when Wade, drunk, calls Marlowe for

help and Marlowe discovers him passed out with a gash in
his head, Loring is called in. When he enters the Wade
home, he has the bearing and the "eXpression of a man who
has been asked to clean up after the dog got sick." Instead
of helping Wade, he states coldly, "As you know, I don't
treat alcoholics." He refuses to help Marlowe carry Wade
up the stairs. A contrast is shown between Dr. Loring
and Marlowe:

Just a minute, Doc. Must.be a long time since you

glanced at that little piece of prose called the

Hippocratic Oath. This man called me on the phone

and I live some way off. He sounded bad and I

broke every traffic law in the state getting here.

I found him lying out on the ground and I carried

him in here and believe me he isn't any bunch of

feathers. The houseboy is away and there's nobody

here to help me upstairs with Wade. How does it
look to you? (p. 168).

94

Loring is unresponsive, however, and as he leaves Marlowe
tells him, "As a professional man you're a handful of
flea dirt" (p. 169).

Since Loring is a covert villain because he does
not act, or because when he acts his responses are wrong,
he must be punished differently from the master-mind
villain or the psychopath villain or the goon-villain.
Public humiliation is the only punishment that fits Loring,
that will get to him. Thus we find at the end of the
novel that he has been castigated by another doctor for
prescribing too many demeral tablets--fifty at one time—-
for Eileen Wade. When he verbally tries to strong-arm the
police into suppressing information, he is told, "Get lost,
Jack" (p. 284). Finally, his wife humiliates him by
leaving him and flying to Paris to get a divorce.

There are, of course, more overt villains than
Dr. Edward Loring. Randy Starr, a Las Vegas big-time hood,
is one, although we really never meet him. He is one of
Terry Lennox's war-time buddies who comes to his aid in
Mexico, helps fake his suicide, and arranges for plastic
surgery to hide Terry's identity. He is, in a sense, the
master-mind villain of the novel, the one in control.
Marlowe's only contact with him is over the telephone,
and we learn that "He had a quiet, competent, man-of-

affairs voice" (p. 311).

95

Marlowe calls Starr for two reasons. The first
is to let him know that he believes Terry Lennox (whose
real name, it is discovered, is Paul Marston) did not
commit suicide, that he was either murdered or is still
alive. The second reason is to insure that Mendy Menendez,
one-time ally of Randy Starr, gets back to Las Vegas alive.

Mendy Menendez is another Las Vegas gangster, a
second to Randy Starr, although a somewhat rougher diamond.
Menendez is a typical 1950's Mafia syndicate gangster. He
is dapper, "tanned very dark," with "a hairline mustache."
When we first meet him he is waiting in Marlowe's outer
office, and his dialogue is the crisp, quick, semi-humorous
language of the gangster: "He threw the magazine aside.
'The crap these rags go for,‘ he said. 'I been reading
a piece about Costello. Yeah, they know all about Costello.
Like I know all about Helen of Troy'" (p. 63).

Dropping Frank Costello's name gives Menendez
credibility as a hoodlum high up in the rackets. What
gives him more credibility, however, are Marlowe's remarks
about him that "He was a guy who owned the place where he
happened to be" (p. 64), and that he is "A dressy type.

. . But very tough behind it all" (p. 67). Menendez
refers to Marlowe as "cheapie," and verbal one-upmanship
begins between the two:

"Know who I am, cheapie?"
"Your name's Menendez. The boys call you Mendy.

You operate on the Strip."
"Yeah? How did I get so big?"

96

"I wouldn't know. You probably started out as
a pimp in a Mexican whorehouse" (pp. 64-65).

What is most impressive about Menendez as a villain
in that he's both the stereotype of a big mob gangster,
and a small time Damon Runyon hoodlum, a la Nathan Detroit.
He carries a gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. He
wears expensive, gaudy shoes. He is a family man: "I got
a place in Bel-Air that cost ninety grand and I already
spent more than that to fix it up. I got a lovely platinum
blond wife and two kids in private schools back east."
When Mendy asks Marlowe "What do you got?" Marlowe responds,
"This year I have a house to live in--a11 to myself" (p. 65).
But Menendez for all his garishness and snappy,
wiseacre talk, is devoted to Terry Lennox. It is for this
reason that he comes to Marlowe to try to convince him not
to investigate further Sylvia Lennox's murder and Lennox's
suicide. And at this point we are given an insight into
just why Terry Lennox is so special to Mendy Menendez and

to Randy Starr:

A mortar shell plOps right in the middle of us and
for some reason it don't go off. Those jerries
have a lot of tricks. They got a twisted sense

of humor. Sometimes you think it's a dud and three
seconds later it ain't a dud. Terry grabs it and
he's out of the foxhole before Randy and me can even
start to get unstuck. But I mean quick, brother.
Like a good ball handler. He throws himself face
down and throws the thing away from him and it

goes off in the air. Most of it goes over his

head but a hunk gets the side of his face (p. 66).

He is angry that in his hour of need Terry went to Marlowe,

a "cheapie,' instead of to his other friends.

97

Although Marlowe finally slugs Menendez--"Next
time bring a gun—-or don't call me cheapie" (p. 68)--he
respects him as a man in touch with his world and with
himself. He even calls Randy Starr later in the novel to
insure that Menendez is not killed by Starr's men. Starr
is upset with Mendy because a vice-squad cop who got too
rough with Chick Agostino, Menendez's goon-bodyguard, was
viciously beaten on his orders. Again, the law of gang-
sterdom is made clear: never kill or beat up a police
officer, even one on the mob's payroll.

Removed from the world of guns, gangsters and
Philip Marlowe, the Wades, Eileen and Roger, reside in
elegant Idle Valley. It is the world of the rich, where
skeletons are well—hidden in closets with well-oiled
sliding doors. The skeleton in Eileen Wade's closet is
her past marriage to Terry Lennox, then Paul Marston, in
England during the war. Lennox/Marston was reported missing-
in-action, and after several years, assuming that he was
dead, Eileen married Roger Wade.

It is Eileen Wade who is the female villain-victim
of the novel. Something inside her snapped after she lost
Lennox. She is a fairy princess who lives in a fantasy
past. Unable to have a healthy sexual relationship with
her husband because of her commitment to a "dead" man, she
remains cold and aloof. It is only Philip Marlowe, and
only because he bears the same initials as her husband,

Paul Marston, who is able to arouse her:

98

She called out a name, but it wasn't mine. . . .
"I always knew you would come back," she said
softly. "Even after ten years. . . . All these
years I have kept myself for you" (p. 185).
Marlowe discovers that he is "erotic as a stallion," and
is saved from sleeping with Eileen only because the house-
boy interrupts. Disgusted with himself, he descends to
the Wades' livingroom and escapes by getting drunk:
The whiskey hit me hard and fast and I kept guzzling
it until the room started to get hazy and the
furniture was all in the wrong places and the
lamplight was like wildfire or summer lightning.
Then I was flat out on the leather couch, trying
to balance the bottle on my chest. It seemed to
be empty. It rolled away and thumped on the floor.

That was the last incident of which I took any
precise notice (p. 186).

That Eileen Wade doesn't remember her actions during
the preceding night, that she is obviously living in the
past, should be enough to convince Marlowe that she is, at
best, schizophrenic. It is not until she murders Roger
Wade and attempts to make it look like a suicide, however,
that Marlowe is finally convinced. There is no suicide
note, as Wade, a prolific note-writer, would have left.

It is at this point that we learn that Eileen Wade
had also murdered Sylvia Lennox shortly after her husband
had been there, and that Wade, drunk, could not remember
at the time if it was he who had killed her. Her murder
of Wade is both self-protective and symbolic. She must
protect herself against Wade's discovery that it was she,

not he, who murdered Sylvia Lennox. Furthermore, by

99

having sexual relations with Sylvia, Wade has become a
stand-in for Terry Lennox who Eileen believes has betrayed
her by his marriage. By killing Wade, she kills a part
of herself.

Marlowe traps Eileen into a confession of sorts:

"That suitcase you threw into the Chatsworth Reservoir--
was it heavy?"

She turned and stared at me. "It was an old one, I
said. Yes, it was very heavy."

"How did you get it over the high wire fence around
the reservoir?“

"What? The fence?" She made a helpless gesture.

"I suppose in emergencies one has an abnormal strength
to do what has to be done. Somehow or other I did it.
That's all."

"There isn't any fence,‘ I said.

"Isn't any fence?" She repeated it dully, as if it
didn't mean anything.

"And there was no blood on Roger's clothes. . . ."
(pp. 275-76).

Yet even with this knowledge of her guilt, Marlowe doesn't
call the police. Instead, he permits her to go to her
room where he knows that she will take her life by her own
hand--with over forty demerol tablets. When Marlowe returns
home he thinks of Eileen Wade:
She no longer seemed quite real. A murderer is always
unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are
people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There
are the cunning killers who plan and expect to get
away with it. There are the angry killers who do
not think at all. And there are the killers who are
in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind
of suicide. In a sense they are all insane. . . .
(p. 279).
Eileen Wade is this last, and although her life has been a
kind of living death, and her murders a "kind of suicide,"

her own death is no longer remote. Her final words in a

100

suicide note to publisher Howard Spencer reflect a girl-
woman, an inability to adjust to reality: "The tragedy

of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful things die
young, but that they grow old and mean. It will not happen
to me" (p. 289).

It is not to Eileen Wade that we must bid our long
goodbye, however, but to her former husband, Paul Marston/
Terry Lennox. One month after Eileen Wade's suicide he
appears in Marlowe's office, his skin dyed a deep brown, his
hair blackened, plastic surgery done to his face, as Senor
Maioranos. When Marlowe discovers his identity Lennox in-
vites him to Victor's for a drink, but this time Marlowe
will not be had. He accuses Lennox of being responsible,
indirectly, for Roger Wade's death, for knowing that Eileen
Wade killed Sylvia and for running away:

I'm not sore at you. You're just that kind of guy.
For a long time I couldn't figure you at all. . . .
You had standards and you lived up to them, but they
were personal. They had no relation to any kind of
ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you
had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with
mugs or hoodlums as you were with honest men.
Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English

and had fairly acceptable table manners. You're a
moral defeatist. I think maybe the war did it and
again I think maybe you were born that way (p. 331).

Lennox, who has turned into a fancy man with impli-
cations that he is a homosexual--"You've got nice clothes

and perfume and you're as elegant as a fifty dollar whore"

(p. 332)--tells Marlowe in his own defense of his dealings

101

with Starr and Menendez, "You're not the only guy in the
world that has no price tags." But Marlowe confesses that
You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a
nod and a wave of the hand and a few quiet drinks in
a quiet bar here and there. It was nice while it
lasted. So long, amigo. I won't say goodbye. I
said it to you when it meant something. I said it
when it was sad and lonely and final (p. 331).

Thus Marlowe says the final goodbye to Terry Lennox/
Paul Marston/Sefior Maioranos, a man wounded by the times in
which he lives, by his own failure to establish a set of
ethics to live by, to make sense out of chaos, a villain
and a victim as empty as any of Eliot's hollow men.

If Philip Marlowe's mission is to save "lost dogs"
who ultimately bite him, Lew Archer's mission is first to
find and then to protect them. He does so in a number of
his novels, although sometimes he is not successful in his

protection. Two cases in point are Davy Spanner in The

Instant Enemy_(l968) who is inadvertently killed by his

 

high school guidance counselor, and Carl Hallman in Thg_
Doomsters (1958) who is brutally shot, although not killed.
Archer is more successful in finding and protecting young
Ronny Broadhurst in The Underground Man (1971), and Tommy
Hillman in The Far Side of the Dollar (1965), the novel to
be discussed here.

A major theme that runs through Kenneth Millar's
novels is the search for a missing or unknown father, and

because of the age of the searchers (from small boy, to

102

teenager, to a young man in his early twenties), the
stories usually take us back in time ten, fifteen, or
twenty years. The past influences the present. "Life
hangs together in one piece. Everything is connected with
everything else," Archer tells his ex-mistress, Susanna
Drew. "The problem is to find the connections" (p. 171).
Millar implies that the past cannot be discarded. It must
be dredged up and our feelings laid bare along with those
old bones, in order for us to once again lead a relatively
normal life.

Such is the case in The Far Side of the Dollar, a

 

nightmarish novel about a lonely teenage boy in search of
his parents and of his past. Tommy Hillman, seventeen-
year-old son of Ralph and Elaine Hillman has run away-~no,
escaped--from Laguna Perdida School where he has been
committed by his father after an alleged attempt on his
mother's life. Dr. Sponti, director of the school, fearing
that he will be sued by the boy's parents, hires Lew

Archer to conduct a discreet investigation into Tommy's
whereabouts.

It is not long, however, before Archer leaves the
employ of Dr. Sponti, a "dark and florid and stout” person
"with the slightly desperate look of a man who had to lose
weight" and a hand that is "soft and chilly" (p. 2).

Dr. Sponti and his staff care nothing about their charges,

mostly deeply disturbed young people abandoned by their

103

wealthy parents. Money and discretion are their gods, and
Archer, sensitive to the problems of youth, despises them.

At Laguna Perdida5 we meet the awful Mr. Patch,
a Dickensian schoolmaster in name as well as behavior,
with "a face creased . . . into a sneer of power which didn't
go with his small, sensitive mouth" (p. 8). Patch cannot
cope with the boys in any humane way. Before Tommy Hillman
escaped the school, Patch had beaten him as a way of
asserting his authority.

Not being able to cope with teenagers is the problem
of most of the adults in the novel. Tommy's father, Ralph
Hillman, cannot understand where he went wrong. "I spent a
great deal of time with him. In fact, I deliberately
reduced my work load at the firm several years ago, partly
so I could enjoy Tom's growing up," Hillman says in bewilder-
ment. But Archer understands: "His phrasing was a little
strange, as if growing up was something a boy did for his
parents' entertainment" (p. 20). Elaine Hillman, Tommy's
mother, also cannot understand. Although "an aura of
desolation hung about her, a sense of uselessness, as if
she was in fact the faded doll she resembled" (p. 21), her
removal from Tommy as a person is similar to her husband's:
"What use is money," she says dully, "without a son to

spend it on" (p. 23).

 

5"Laguna Perdida" means Lost Lake, or also "Lost
Space." The meaning, I think, is intentional.

104

Stella Carlson, Tommy's girlfriend, is a young
woman of sixteen of whom Archer says she "was one of those
youngsters who make you feel like apologizing for the world"
(p. 40). Yet her own parents are leery of her judgment,
have forbidden her to see Tommy, and have lied to the police
about him, saying that he stole their car, when in fact it
was loaned to him by Stella. The Carlsons, Archer observes,
are "three well-intentioned people who couldn't seem to
stOp hurting each other" (p. 151).

There are really few out—and—out villains in this
novel. Dr. Sponti may be classified as one, a phony, a man
living off the dollar and other people's problem children.
Mr. Patch, an ego-maniac who should be portrayed with riding
crop in hand, is another. The third is Mr. Harley, Sr.,
and the fourth is Otto Sipe, two men who will be discussed
shortly. None of these, however, can be classified as
masterminds, as men in control.

Victims of one sort or another run rampant in this
novel: Tommy Hillman, a victim of his past and of his
parents' deception; Stella Carlson, victim of her youth
and of her own goodness; Susanna Drew, T.V. producer and
one-time lover of both Ralph Hillman and Lew Archer, victim
of an indiscretion she would rather forget; Carol Harley,
Tommy's natural mother, a victim of her beautiful mother's
coldness, of her own beauty, of the tinsel lure of Hollywood,

of the brutality of her husband, and finally of Elaine

105

Hillman's knife; Harold "Har" Harley, Carol's pathetic
brother-in-law, a victim of his own devotion to family

at any cost, of good—hearted weakness, and of his father's
ferocious religiousity; and Robert Brown, Carol Harley's
father, victim of his human kindness to abused Mike Harley
whom he took into his home and who repaid him by running
away with fifteen-year-old Carol.

If Victims abound, so too do villain-victims. There
is Ralph Hillman, Tommy's real father who cares for him but
who doesn't know how to show it. Hillman seems to prefer
the company of Dick Leandro, a not-too-bright, clean-cut
young man who crews for him on his sailboat and calls him
Skipper in memory of his World War II days in the Navy.
Tommy, on the other hand, likes playing jazz piano and
reading books. There are Rhea and Jay Carlson, Stella's
parents, who in their refusal to attempt to understand her
almost lose her love. There is Mike Harley, Carol's husband
who, beaten by his father in his youth is impotent in his
adulthood, achieving erection only if he is spanked, who
can relate to people best through violence, and who finally
is killed by Elaine Hillman's knife. And there is Elaine
Hillman who has been taught by her New England mother
'ealways to suffer in silence" (p. 154), and who does so
turtil the suffering overwhelms her and bursts her silence

.as she stealthily murders two people.

106

If, as Nero Wolfe intones, "the real tragedy is not

death, but the condition which induces it," The Far Side of

 

the Dollar is a powerful example of those conditions. In

 

the case of the Hillmans it is their unwillingness to tell
Tommy that he was adOpted and Ralph Hillman's refusal to
confront his wife with Tommy's parentage. He has carved
out a niche for himself in a very exclusive corner of the
California world, and it is in this corner that he tries
to escape his past. When Hillman is finally forced to
confront the fact that his son has been kidnapped, that
indeed he may have been complicit in his own kidnapping,
Hillman is hurt and confused:

We're prosperous and educated people, he seemed to

be saying, first-class citizens: how can the world

have aimed such a dirty blow at us? (p. 27).

It is Lew Archer who understands what may lurk on
the far side of the dollar--what money tries to cover up.
For the dollar, no matter how powerful, cannot completely
hide the truth. It cannot purchase Elaine Hillman's sanity
or Tommy's love. It cannot buy back Carol Harley's life
or put warmth into the Hillmans' cavernous, impersonal
home. It cannot bring back Ralph Hillman's romantic youth.
Nor can it erase the physical and psychological scars caused
by Mike Harley's father.

Mike Harley is perhaps the most interesting villain-
victim in the novel, although what we know of his past and

present is drawn for us by his associates and his relatives.

107

Texan Jack Fletcher, to whom Mike has lost all his ransom
money in a high-stakes poker game, says, "He's a born
loser," (p. 114) and his flippant remark is not far from
the truth. His father, a "tall old man wearing overalls
and a straw hat which brushed the rafters," with eyes that
are "flat and angry," and a mouth that is "sternly righteous"
(p. 117), is a man twisted by his angry worship of an angry
God. He had beaten one son, Harold, into weak submission.
Mike had been beaten until he fled his Idaho home, and
although he demonstrated more initiative than his brother,
the scars left upon him were deeper.

That Mike Harley's father had a villainous influence
upon both his sons that lasted through their adulthood is
made blatantly clear. Speaking to Archer, Harold Harley
"covered the back of his neck with his hand as if he feared
a blow from behind" (p. 97). He tells Archer that Mike's
"got scars on his back where Dad used to beat him. I got
some of my own." He shows Archer "white scars all up and
down his back, like hieroglyphs recording history" (p. 98).
Furthermore, when Archer finally meets Harley, Sr., on his
Idaho farm, the man's fanaticism is obvious: "I get my
instructions from a higher power. He gives me my instruc-
tions direct in my heart" (p. 117). And when he warns Archer
off his prOperty—-"Get out of here. . . . I've been fighting
the Devil all my life, and I know his cohorts when I see

one"--the detective silently observes, "So do I" (p. 118).

108

It should not seem odd, then, that Mike Harley would
completely rebel against his father by running away with
fifteen-year-old Carol. No one except a trained psycho-
logist could help him at that point, not even Carol Harley's
father, Robert Brown, a sensitive man, a high school guidance
counselor who tries to save him.

Ironically, salvation is not the answer for Mike
Harley. His father's salvation-by—the-whip corrupts him.
Mr. Brown's salvation by the kind word is so alien to him
that he can only sneer. Instead, he takes up with Otto
Sipe, a physical education teacher at his high school turned
drunkard. It is Sipe's promise to Mike that he will make
him a success in boxing that induces him to run to Cali-
fornia with Carol--a promise that is never fulfilled.
Instead, World War II intervenes and Mike Harley becomes a
Navy man on a ship run, for a short time, by Ralph Hillman.

When the war is over and he is dishonorably dis-

charged from the Navy for theft of government property,
Mike resumes his relationship with Sipe, and twenty years
later it is Sipe who is his partner in the "kidnapping"
of Tommy Hillman. Mike Harley's life of violence and
deceit becomes a progression toward his own violent death
at the hands of Elaine Hillman who discovers him in Los
Angeles.

Otto Sipe in 1965 is the drunken nightwatchman at

the abandoned Barcelona Hotel, the hotel where Ralph

109

Hillman had his affair with Susanna Drew and where Hillman
and Carol Harley conceived Tommy almost eighteen years
before. At this same hotel Sipe was once a corrupt house
detective who took candid photos of Susanna Drew and Ralph
Hillman in flagrante and sold them to Mrs. Hillman. Sipe
is a man with "a crude upturned nose, a bulging forehead,
a thirsty mouth." His face is that "of a horribly ravaged
baby who had never been weaned from the bottle" (p. 87).

With this man and at this hotel Tommy Hillman takes
refuge. Again, the past and present meet in a macabre way.
Tom, believing that Mike Harley is his real father, is
determined to live with him even though the man is a down
and out criminal.

This honesty and sense of commitment which young
people like Tommy Hillman and Stella Carlson share is
incomprehensible to their parents' generation. Archer
suggests that honesty, no matter how brutal it may be, is
the keyword of the day for Tommy and his friends: "No
phoniness, I thought, was the code of the new generation,
at least the ones who were worth anything. It was a fairly
decent ideal, but it sometimes worked out cruelly in
practice" (p. 189). It is the Hillmans' lack of honesty
that is at the root of their problems. Stella's parents'
deception of the police makes her distrust them. Both
Tommy and Stella believe that it is the way of adults to
lie. Stella's trust of Lew Archer is difficult to win

because she has been lied to so much by older people.

110

In Stella and Tommy's openness, however, Archer
witnesses a purity that he himself lacks. In a treehouse

conversation with Stella, he suddenly sees himself as a
heavy hunched figure seen from above in the act of tormenting
a child who was already tormented. A sense went through me
of the appalling ease with which the things you do in a good
cause can slip over into bad" (p. 38).

The good cause is finding Tommy. Even when Archer
is on his own, with no employer to pay his investigation
expenses, he continues his search: "I was doing what I
wanted to be doing. . . . I wanted to find Tom" (p. 100).
But things do slip over into the bad, and we are left at
the end with four people dead--two by murder, one by accident,
and one by her own hand-~and the lives of the survivors
radically changed.

Elaine Hillman is the killer. "A beautifully made
thin blonde woman in her forties" when Archer first meets
her (p. 21), as the novel progresses, Elaine moves back
and forth between beautiful woman, aging hag, and little
girl:

Her faded pretty face wrinkled up as if she could
feel the physical pressure of torture instruments
(p. 58) .

The morning light was unkind to her parched blonde
face. . . . She looked as if all the minutes in
those forty-eight hours had passed through her

body like knots in wire (p. 103).

She was well groomed and well dressed, in a tailored

sharkskin suit which concealed the shrinkage of her
body (p. 152).

111

She moved her head away from my pointing finger like

a stage-shy girl. A stage-shy girl playing the role

of an aging woman with monkey wrinkles and fading

fine blonde hair (p. 215).

Her voice was high and childish in complaint. The

little girl behind her wrinkles had been caught in

a malign world where even things no longer cooperated

and even men could not be bought (p. 216).

Elaine Hillman's schiZOphrenia is attributed to her

Puritan heritage and a mother who taught her to abhor men.
Ralph Hillman explains the reason for his affairs with
Susanna Drew and Carol Harley: "I never could understand.
the Puritan mind, Ellie. You think a little fun in bed is
the ultimate sin, worse than murder. Christ, I remember
our wedding night. You'd have thought I was murdering

you (p. 216). "Stallion," she spits at her husband.
"Filth." She kills Carol Harley because in discovering
that Carol is Tom's real mother and that Ralph Hillman

is his natural father, she sees herself as "just a fading
ghost in the world, with only enough life left to strike
back." She kills Mike Harley because he suspected that
she'd murdered Carol and tried to blackmail her.

Elaine Hillman begs Archer, "Just let me sleep one
more night in my own house." When Archer asks why, she
answers, "I'll be frank with you. I've been saving sleeping
pills for a considerable time--" But Archer is not as
sympathetic to Elaine Hillman as Philip Marlowe is to

Eileen Wade. He responds flatly, "You should have taken

your pills sooner" (p. 217).

112

But Elaine is not to be defeated. As Archer heads
for the front door to welcome the police, he hears Elaine
sigh "behind me like a woman in passion." With a final
sexual gesture, her only one it seems, she picks up her
knitting and presses "both steel needles into her breast.
She struck them into herself again before I reached her"
(p. 218). The following day she is dead, her final wish
fulfilled after all.

What will happen to Tom and Ralph Hillman is unclear.
The father makes a gesture of love toward his son "with a
hopefulness more grinding than despair," but Tommy evades
his father's "outstretched hands," and Archer hears them
"mounting the stairs, on different levels, out of step"
(p. 217). The wounds will be long in healing.

Perhaps, finally, Lew Archer's words to Tommy Hillman
offer the best solution:

I sometimes think children should be anonymous. . . .
I have no plan. I'd just like to change the emphasis
slightly. Peeple are trying so hard to live through
their children. And the children keep trying so hard
to live up to their parents, or live them down.
Everybody's living through or for or against some—
body else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it
isn't working too well (pp. 188-89).

There are neither lost teenagers nor missing parents

in John D. MacDonald's Bright Orange for the Shroud. But

 

there are, of course, villains and victims. Like many of
MacDonald's other novels, the story here involves a quasi-

legal real estate swindle. Also, as in his other novels,

113

the crime has already been committed, and it is up to
Travis McGee to try to undo, as much as possible, the
damage that has already been done.

MacDonald's victims are more physically had psycho-
logically victimized, and the acts of his villains far more
lurid than those of either Raymond Chandler or Kenneth
Millar. However, villainous deeds are tempered with an
immediate kind of poetic justice. That is, the punishment
often fits the crime. Thus, an abuser of women is flayed

alive from the waist down in Dress Her in Indigg (1969).

 

In The Deep Blue Good-by_(l964) the villain, who is always

 

grinning evilly, has his grin locked forever on the prongs

of an anchor. In A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971), the

 

psychopath who is about to bury McGee and his friend Meyer
in hot asphalt is himself buried in it. And in Bright

Orange for the Shroud, a rapist impales himself through

 

the groin on a piece of rotting driftwood.
MacDonald's plots and cast of characters are also
succinct. There are nine more-or-less major characters

in this novel, as compared to nineteen in both The Far Side

 

of the Dollar and The Long Goodbye. As for plot, the

 

 

problem is simple. One-time acquaintance and near-
millionaire Arthur Wilkinson staggers aboard McGee's
houseboat—yacht, The Busted Flush, after having been
bilked of his total inheritance and sexual potency by a

sophisticated con-man operation. McGee agrees to get as

114

much Of his money back for him as he can, taking a ten
percent cut Of whatever is recovered-—his usual fee.

But McGee's commitment is deeper than a mere busi-
ness relationship. He deplores women like Wilma Wilkinson,
a sexy tramp with eyes the color Of "Harvey's Bristol Milk"
held up to the light in a clear wine glass, and with "just
as much eXpression as still wine" (p. 9). Wilma is the
contact for the confidence organization. She Operates by
luring and marrying wealthy, lonely men, involving them in
a real estate scheme, and then cleaning out their bank
accounts and disappearing. In this case, the dupe is
Arthur Wilkinson. McGee ponders that he himself might
have been lured: "Perhaps if she had come along a few years
earlier--before I had seen and learned all the kinds of
con, before I had found some Of the sicknesses no clinic
can identify. . . ." (p. 10).

For Raymond Chandler and Kenneth Millar it is the
frigid woman who is the villain, those who are unable to
give sexually or in any other way. For MacDonald, it is
those women who take, who are insatiable, who drain men,
that are the villains. A frigid woman needs only the sun,
the surf, and McGee's understanding tO make her whole.

She is usually one Of the victims Of the novel and has
been physically mistreated by a man.

Thus, Wilma Wilkinson who uses her sex for evil

gain is a villain. Mrs. Mooney, former housekeeper for

115

the Wilkinsons before Arthur lost all his money, describes
some Of Wilma's tactics:

She had him waiting on her hand and foot, something
that she wanted that was closer tO her than him, he
had to go get it and bring it tO her. He brushed
her hair, that real pale thin kind Of hair, a
hundred strokes, putting a little bitty dab Of

some kind of perfume Oil on the soft brush every
ten strokes, with her whining if he lost count. She
had him Oil her head tO foot for going in the sun,
and another sickening thing, I tell you, she had
him run her little electrical razor, shaving the
fuzz off her pretty legs, then she'd feel to see

if he did it gOOd, tell him where he missed, and
pat him when he finished (p. 79).

In short, Wilma has emasculated Arthur.

That Arthur is a victim, a vulnerable man who with
McGee's help regains his confidence, is Obvious. But the
person who helps him recover his manhood is Chookie McCall,
a healthy dancer and friend tO McGee. Chookie is also a
victim. She is devoted tO a third-rate gangster who is
currently serving five years in prison. At the end of the
novel, however, she rejects him and marries Arthur.

Early in the story, confused and hurt by Arthur's
inability to have sexual intercourse with her, Chookie turns
to McGee for reassurance that she is still desirable. But
McGee rejects her, and in so doing reveals some Of his own
basic insecurity:

Maybe she was a little tOO much. She created a
certain awe in the standard issue male. I had
noted that fewer passes were made at her than she
deserved. All that robust, glowing powerful
vitality might actually have given me a subcon-

scious block, a hidden suspicion that I might, in
the long run, be unable to COpe--an alarming

116

prospect for male vanity, Of which I was certain I
had my share. . . .

Maybe I could be stirred only by the wounded duck-

lings. Maybe I could respond best to the cripples

I cut out Of the flock, the ones who, by contrast,

could give me a sense Of inner strength and unity

(p. 51).
McGee's self-analysis makes a gOOd deal Of sense. For in
many Of his adventures he "cures" stricken females. In
The Deep Blue Good-by_he rescues Lois and sexually nurses
her back to health, although she is finally murdered by
the villain. He cures a professor Of her frigidity in
A Purple Place for Dying_(l964), and rejuvenates a spoiled,
cold artist in One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966). Oddly enough,
in Bright Orange for the Shroud, McGee has only one sexual
encounter, and it is with a healthy Hawaiian woman who is
incidental tO the action Of the novel. However, if another
woman, Vivian Watts, had lived, it is probable that McGee
would have slept with her. Vivian Watts is the wife Of
Crane Watts, attorney for the swindlers. Now on the verge
Of alcoholism and financial disaster, he is deserted by
the group. Vivian, on the other hand, is a strong, bright,
athletic woman, referred tO by members Of her country club
as "a damned fine girl" (p. 65).

An excellent and confident tennis player on her

country club's courts, her confidence wanes when it comes

to her marriage. McGee notes, however, that Vivian Watts

is still devoted to her husband, "Still tied to him by

117

what remains Of her security, and by all the weight Of the
sentimentalities and warmths remembered . . . [yet] aware
Of her own vulnerability. . . ." (p. 68). At the same time,
though, she speaks her husband's name "with enough contempt
for a month," and points out their unhappy relationship to
McGee in the privacy Of their home.

If a battle exists over who gets victimized the most
in this novel, the "victory“ belongs tO Vivian Watts.
Arthur Wilkinson regains a substantial portion Of his
money and marries Chookie McCall. McGee gets a bad blow
on the head from goon-villain Boone Waxwell, but will
survive. The body Of Wilma Wilkinson has been fed tO the
alligators by Waxwell long before McGee enters the scene,
and after what we learn Of her activities, we really don't
care tOO much about her fate. But Vivian Watts has done
nothing. She is an innocent victim, the innocent bystander
who is swept along in a nightmare involving other people,
a nightmare that eventually overwhelms her.

It is Vivian who wears bright orange for her shroud,
a bathrobe in which she carefully dresses before shooting
herself. With her husband drunk and passed out, and the
television set on, Boone Waxwell enters her home and
repeatedly rapes her. But what is worst Of all tO Vivian
is her purely physical reaction to the act:

"AAAAAAA," she said. And again. "AAAAAAA." It was
not a sound Of pain or Of pleasure, of fright, Of

want, or Of denial. It was simply the sound Of
sensation, purified, dehumanized, so vivid that I

118
could visualize her head thrown back, eyes wide
blind staring, mouth wide and crooked (p. 150).

In the "trance state Of the amateur murderer,"
she kills her husband who "had slept through tOO much,"
who could not respond tO her cries for help while Boone
was raping her (p. 159). Then Vivian Watts showers,
applies makeup, and commits suicide.

Upon finding her body McGee reconstructs the thought
pattern that Vivian might have gone through before she com-
mitted murder and suicide. Her rationalization may have
been that many women have been raped and have somehow
managed. She should call the police and turn in Waxwell.
But if she does, she also accurately visualizes their
interrogation Of her:

Now let me get this straight, Mrs. Watts. Waxwell

was there from ten something last night until two

or three this morning? And you claim that during

this time you were repeatedly raped, during that

whole time your husband was sound asleep in front Of

the television set? And Waxwell was a client Of

your husband? And you had met him before? And he

left his car parked at your house, a very conspicu-

ous car, all that time? (p. 160).
Furthermore, she is appalled by her own behavior: "Had he
taken her quickly, she could have merely endured him, been
a helpless vessel for him. But he was so damned sly and
knowing, so crafty and so patient that each time, even the
last time, he had awakened the traitor body so that while
the soul watched, the body gasped and strained tO hungry

climax, to dirty joy, grasping powerfully" (p. 160).

119

It is Travis McGee who turns in Boone Waxwell, not
just for rape, but for double murder as well. He frames
Waxwell by removing Vivian from the bathtub where she has
committed suicide, and placing her back in her bedroom.

He smears her carefully applied lipstick. He musses her
hair, rips her orange shroud, destroys her confessional
suicide note, and disposes Of her gun. He makes her a
silent promise: "Sorry they'll see you like this, Vivian.
But you'll like the way it works out. I promise you,
honey. They'll pretty you up again for burying. But not
in orange. That's a color to be alive in. TO be in love
in. TO smile in" (p. 162). Then McGee turns up the T.V.
sound, makes an anonymous phone call tO the police and
gives them a description Of Waxwell's car and his license
number, saying he has seen it parked in the next-door
driveway Of the Watts' vacationing neighbors, and leaves.

Perhaps we should be dismayed by Travis McGee's act
Of vengence in framing Boone Waxwell for a crime he didn't
commit. But let us rationalize for a moment; let us give
in tO our real feelings. Had Waxwell not raped Vivian
Watts, she would not have shot her husband and then committed
suicide. Indirectly, Waxwell is indeed reSponsible for her
death and that Of her husband.

Boone Waxwell is the novel's arch-villain, a goon—
monster who looms in Florida's swamps. He is swamp-folk,

a kind Of corrupted leftover from the early days Of southern

120

feuds. His family is well-known, but not well-liked.
There are Waxwells lurking everywhere in the swamps, and
most of them are no-gOOd. But Boone Waxwell is by far
the foulest. Most local people fear him:
What he does, he comes smiling up, nice as pie, gets
close enough and kicks a man's kneecap Off, then
settles down to stomping him good. A few times he's
done it so good, he's had to gO way back into the
Park until things quieted down. A couple times
everybody thought we'd be rid Of him for a few
years, but the most it ever turned out was ninety
days the county give him. He prowls four counties
in that fancy car he's got now, but around here he
keeps tO hisself, and that suits everybody just
fine (p. 88).
Yet women are attracted to him: "Bogart, Mitchum, Gable,
Flynn--the same flavor was there, a seedy, indolent
brutality, a wisdom Of the flesh. Women, sensing exactly
what he was, and knowing how casually they would be used,
would yet accept him, saying yes on a basis so primitive
they could neither identify or resist it" (p. 89).

When McGee first meets Waxwell he is saying goodbye,
for the time-being, to fifteen-year-Old Cindy Ingerfeldt, who
has spent the night with him. When McGee asks if her parents
complain, Boone replies:

Maybe ten years ago it was, Cindy's daddy, Clete
Ingerfeldt, him and me had a little talk about
Clete's missus, and I pure liked to whip the ass
clean Off him. He got such a strong memory Of it,
I even say hello to him, his chin gets all spitty.
I tell you, fat stuff got the hang Of it a lot
better than her Old lady ever did (p. 93).

Waxwell's sexual prowess alone certainly doesn't

make him a villain, nor does his brutal beating Of Arthur

121

Wilkinson. These acts are Only contributing factors. The
local people describe him as "mean." Translated into
psychological terms, however, Waxwell is a sociopath. He
transcends all ethical judgment. TO him, there is no right
or wrong. One seeks one's own pleasures and concentrates
on not getting caught. Thus, he does not deliberately
murder Wilma in his own eyes. He puts his hand around
her throat "kiddingly" to stifle her complaints that she
has become bored in the swamps. But something inside her
throat snaps. Although Waxwell feigns a kind Of grief in
telling the story, he really chalks up Wilma's death tO
accidental bad breaks and blithely proceeds tO dump her
body in an alligator swamp and tO squander a great deal
Of his take and the gang's on large, expensive, and ulti-
mately discarded toys.

Waxwell is the strong-arm Of the novel. But he
is tOO much a sociOpath, and tOO uneducated to be the
mastermind-villain. This honor goes to Calvin Stebber,

a top—notch con—man, respected by all, including Travis
McGee. With Stebber, a stalemate is reached:
He marched up tO me and stared up at me, smiling,
and I could feel the impact Of his superb projection
Of warmth, interest, kindliness, importance. You
could be this man's life-long friend after ten
minutes, and marvel that he found you interesting
enough tO spend a piece Of his busy time on you.
It was the basic working tool Of the top grade
confidence man (pp. 119-120).

Unlike Waxwell, who lives in a swamp hovel, Stebber

resides in a cool penthouse with "Wall shelves built in,

122

with a collection Of blue Danish glassware, and another,
glassed in, with a collection of little clay figures Of Pre-
Columbian Latin America" (p. 119). Also unlike Waxwell

whose taste in women is undiscriminating, Stebber has another
built-in——Debra Brown, "never never Debbie." Debra is a
cool, sophisticated call girl of wealthy background who is
both Cal Stebber's secretary and mistress. Perfectly

trained and groomed-—"in walk and smile and gesture she

had all the mannered elegance Of a high fashion model"—-
Debra is totally at home in her surroundings.

What McGee wants from Stebber is assurance that he
will not try to regain the money he has swindled from
Arthur Wilkinson if McGee finds it. McGee also wants a
theory Of his own confirmed: that Wilma is probably dead,
that she had most Of the money, that she was supposed tO
hide out for a few days after deserting Wilkinson, and
then meet Stebber with the money, and that she never showed
'up. All this Stebber agrees tO and confirms.

Stebber, however, is not a pushover. The reason
he goes along with McGee makes gOOd business sense. He
and Debra are involved in another scheme, and he is faced
with the fact of having his cover lifted. Furthermore,
Stebber checked on McGee with a fellow con-man whose name
McGee gives him, and learns that "The Old bastard sounds
pretty shaky, McGee. He doesn't like you. One Of the

last scores he made, a little one, you got it back before

123

he could get out Of range" (p. 123). Stebber also learns
that McGee doesn't call in the police, but handles things
himself, and that his methods can be more damaging than

the law enforcers'.

With an agreement reached, McGee and Chookie McCall,
who has accompanied him, leave Stebber's apartment:

They both walked us out to the elevator, all charm
and assurance, convincing us we were lovely people
who had stOpped in for a lovely drink. As the
elevator door closed, my final look at them showed
their gracious smiles, the smiles Of an elegant
couple, tastefully appointed, mannerly. And
virulent as coral snakes (p. 129).

Arthur, Travis, and Chookie find the money buried
in jars in Waxwell's back yard and are celebrating on The
Busted Flush when Waxwell, that other virulent coral snake,
reappears. Hiding out in the swamps for three days from
the police, he coincidentally boards McGee's houseboat.

He overtakes McGee and Wilkinson and is about to rape
Chookie, when they rush him, and he jumps overboard:

You expect a great splash. He stopped with a horrid
abruptness, the waterline still a few inches below
his belt. He remained right there, Oddly erect,
silent, head thrown back, cords standing out in his
neck. I thought he had wedged himself into a shallow
mud bottom. But then I saw he seemed to be moving
back and forth, a strange sway, like a man on a
treetop. He reached down to himself, putting his
hands under the water, and he made a ghastly sound,
like someone trying tO yell in a whisper. He turned
his head slowly and looked toward the three Of us.
He held his right hand out toward us, opened his
mouth wide and made the same eerie sound once more.
Then he bowed slowly to us, laid over gently, face
down. Something seemed to nudge at him from below,
nudge him and shove him free, and as he floated
toward darkness, slowly there reappeared, with a

124

slowness that told Of the length of it that went
down through black water tO the dead root system,
just an inch or so showing above water, the dark
rotted end Of the stub, four or five inches thick,
upon which he had burst himself and impaled himself
(p. 187).

This is the gory end Of Boone Waxwell, but not the
end Of the novel, for all the loose strings must somehow
be joined. After a hamburger and champagne wedding cele-
bration for Chookie and Arthur Wilkinson, Debra Brown
unaccountably arrives to have a short-term affair with
McGee. But he rejects her:

Perhaps for any man there can be something very heady

about a woman totally amoral, totally without mercy,
shame or softness. . . .

"Sweetie,' I said, "you're a penny from heaven. And
you probably know lots and lots Of tricks. But every
one would remind me that you are a pro, from Wilma's
Old stable Of club fighters. Call me a sentimentalist.
The bloom is tOO far Off the rose, sweetie. I'd
probably keep leaving money on the bureau. You
better peddle it. Thanks, but no thanks" (p. 190).
Villains have nO place in McGee's life-style, and his
treatment Of Debra is his kind Of punishment for her, a
punishment that works more effectively, although it is
not as permanent, as an assassin's bullet.

Because there are so many villains and victims in
the detective novels discussed here, two charts follow
showing villains and victims. What is important to note
in studying the charts is the similarity between Kenneth

Millar and Raymond Chandler. Overlapping Of villains and

victims is quite common in their novels. With John D.

125

MacDonald, however, there is little overlapping. His
villains and victims are quite distinct from each other.
This should not be surprising. Travis McGee's ideas Of
morality and right and wrong are far more Openly developed
and stated than Lew Archer's or Philip Marlowe's. Further-
more, MacDonald's punishment is more consciously vindictive
then Chandler or Millar, a subject tO be pursued in the
following chapter.

Thus, a pattern exists as to the nature Of villains
and victims. For McGee, for Philip Marlowe, for Lew
Archer, crimes and villains and victims are a predictable
recurrent in their lives. Boone Waxwell, Elaine Hilman
and Eileen Wade will always have others tO replace them.
And there will always be victims, as well, for the

detectives to try tO save.

126

 

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CHAPTER V

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS:

VIOLENCE AND SADISM

The ten-year-Old son Of a friend Of mine was recently
practicing at being dead. He stood in the middle Of the
livingroom until he was shot by an imaginary assassin.

Then he staggered about and finally collapsed on the carpet
in a position closely resembling a corpse in a casket: eyes
shut, legs straight and together, hands serenely folded
across his breast. There he rested for a few seconds, in
complete peace. Suddenly he sat up and smiling, asked us
brightly, "Could you see me breathing EEEE time?" When we
replied that we could, he arose, disappointed but undaunted,
and repeated his performance.

During one short break I told him that no actor could
really hold his breath, that if he noticed T.V. programs in
which people were killed, the camera remained on the corpse
only briefly then panned around the room or studied the
faces Of the survivors. My friend's son took no heed.

Either he was enjoying his game tOO much, or he wanted to
be the first one on his block not tO move a muscle.

The childhood play abruptly ended as a result Of

the intrusion Of adult reality. During one of the moments

128

129

he was resting corpse-like on the floor, I arose and went

over tO him. His eyes fluttered Open unwillingly. "That's
all right," I reassured him. "People can die with their
eyes Open." Somehow, my statement was tOO much for him to

bear, and clutching his stomach for real now, he grimaced
in disgusted disbelief. "Ugh. Ugh. That's awful. They
don't really, dO they, Dad?" He checked out the validity
Of my words with his father who silently confirmed what

I had said.

After he had recovered from his initial repulsion,
however, the boy was full of questions: "How come they
don't close their eyes? DO the eyes dry up, or dO they
stay slimy? Does stuff get in them? Can dead people see?
DO their eyeballs rot and fall out?" His quest for knowledge
was innocent and honest, and as a child he did not know that
he might be giving Offense or that what he asked was sordid.
But I, the adult who had caused the whole line Of questioning
in the first place, began to feel uncomfortable. I wanted
him to end his gruesome questions while at the same time
such not-nice associations about death as loss Of sphincter
control, putrification, guts spilling out, brains exposed
by a bullet, passed through my mind.

What, one may well ask, has this anecdote to do
with violence and sadism in general, and violence and
sadism in the detective novel more specifically? The reply

is, quite a lot. For human beings are both repulsed by

130

and attracted to violence, especially violent death. A
case in point is what has become known as the Ann Arbor
Murders. In the summer Of 1969, the body Of Karen Sue
Beineman was discovered in a woods near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She was one Of several coeds who, over a period Of four
years, had been mysteriously murdered. However, the
discovery Of her body led to the arrest and ultimate
conviction Of an Eastern Michigan University student,

John Norman Collins.

What occurred after the discovery of Miss Beinman's
body is rather disconcerting, although not unusual. Women
locked their doors and asked for escorts in the evenings
or walked in groups Of two and three. The incidence Of
women hitch-hiking (Miss Beineman was last seen hitch-
hiking) dropped temporarily. People who lived far from
the scene Of the murder telephoned the police to report
suspicious-looking people in their neighborhoods. Several
deluded souls confessed to the murder.

Of more profound interest is the reaction Of many
people to the secrecy in which the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti
police cloaked their investigation. At first, everyone
was horrified and frightened by the murder. Soon, however,
the fear and horror were replaced with a combination Of
fascination and indignation. Newspapers were combed daily,
and their accounts Of what was going on were heatedly

discussed at lunch time, dinner and during coffee breaks.

131

Armchair detectives collected clues from the newspaper
stories and proposed, if not solutions, character profiles
Of the murderer. But they quickly became frustrated in their
efforts. Indignantly they protested that the police were
holding out tOO much. If the amateur detectives knew the
minute details of the murder then they could be more
accurate in their conclusions. As citizens they felt they
had a right to intimate knowledge Of the crime. With a

king Of macabre glee they latched on tO any information

they could glean, true or false. Example: "The father

Of the girlfriend Of one Of my students is on the Ann

Arbor police force. He told her (and she told my student)
that the murderer had performed a perfect medical dissection
of the Beineman body's right foot." "Ugh. Disgusting,"

was the first response. Then: "Really? And what about

her breasts? Did he dissect them, tOO?"

More widely publicized, Of course, was the assassi-
nation Of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Today, almost ten years
later, peOple are still indignant that the attending
physicians' detailed reports about the condition Of the
President's body (specifically his head), are being kept
from them. They excuse their ghoulish fascination as their
right to know. Tom Wolfe, in an essay entitled "Pause,
Now, and Consider Some Tentative Conclusions About the
Meaning Of this Mass Perversion Called Porno-Violence:

What it is and Where it Comes from and Who Put the Hair

132

on the Walls" (Esquire Magazine, 1967), recalls a conver-

sation he had with a friend shortly after the Kennedy

slaying:

. . . we were in a cab in the West Fifties in
Manhattan, at a stoplight, by a newsstand, and
Harrison suddenly pointed at the newsstand and
said, 'LOOk at that. They're doing the same thing
that The Enquirer does.‘

 

There on the stand was a row Of slick-paper, magazine
publications known in the trade as one-shots, with
titles like Four Days that Shook the World, Death

Of a President, An American Tragedy, or just John
Fitzgerald Kennedy (1921-1963). 'You want to know
why people—buy those things?T said Harrison. 'PeOple
buy those things to see a man get his head blown Off.‘

 

Are we a nation Of voyeurs, prepared tO peek, nay
linger upon tragedy at the mere report Of a rifle? Most
Of us would deny this, and if confronted with the actual
sight Of a man's brains blown out, would become physically
ill. Yet, as Wolfe further points out, the suspense Of

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood depends not upon the committal

 

Of the crime itself, which occurs on page sixty Of the book,
but upon "the specifics, what happened, the gory details,
[which] are kept out Of sight, in grisly dangle, until
(page 244."

Our fascination with violent acts is great, and has
become a subject of study for sociologists and psychologists.
Yet their concentration has been upon the mass media,
defined as television, radio, the movies, comic books, and
xnagazines, rather than the one-to-One experience Of a

jpopular novel. One reason for this is that mass media

133

reaches more children than do adult novels. The effects
Of violence in children's literature is a continuing
source Of debate among professionals in the area. What
effects either real or created violence has upon the indi-
vidual is not the main thrust Of this chapter, however.
Rather, it is the nature Of that violence and the context
in which it is unleashed that shall be explored.
After correlating the data gathered in a number
Of questionnaires distributed to men concerning perception
Of violence,1 a team Of University Of Michigan social
scientists concluded that:
On the whole, Americans view violence as fierce,
strong, unnecessary, avoidable and bad. One could
infer that when behavior is seen as not having such
qualities, it is not defined as violence. For
example, when the police shooting looters is defined
as not being violence by the majority Of Americans,
one can imagine that Americans might think Of such
police actions as fierce and strong, but neither
avoidable nor bad, and certainly necessary. . . . If
violence is committed by a legitimate power, it is
not seen as violence (p. 84).
Furthermore, in studying the idea Of retributive justice
they discovered that "In response to the statement that
'it is Often necessary to use violence to prevent violence'

. . . 19% of all men agreed strongly with this View, and

another 45% were somewhat in agreement" (p. 102).

‘

lMonica D. Blumenthal, Robert L. Kahn, Frank M.
Andrews, Kendra B. Head, Justifiying Violence: Attitudes
Of American Men (Institute for Social Research, University
Of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1972).

 

 

134

Both Observations can easily be applied tO violence
in detective novels. When Lew Archer, Philip Marlowe and
Travis McGee commit acts Of violence we rarely question
the rightness or wrongness Of their actions. We are
immediately on their side, and their side is the side Of
right. Moreover, with these three detectives, the violence
they commit is not always avoidable. If Marlowe doesn't

kill Lash Canino in The Big Sleep (1939), he will be killed;

 

if Archer hadn't.drowned Puddler in The Moving Target (1949),

 

he would have been drowned; and if Travis McGee hadn't
shot first, he would have been killed by Griff in Darker

than Amber (1966).

 

The idea Of retributive justice--an eye for an eye
or do unto him before he does unto you--is given sanctifi-
cation in the detective novels Of Mickey Spillane, where
Mike Hammer takes nO chances with anyone, but busts jaws
first and asks questions later. This kind of action, the
use Of violence to prevent violence, is rarely found in the
detective novels Of Raymond Chandler and Kenneth Millar,
and appears in more subtle psychological forms in those by

John D. MacDonald. In A Deep Blue Good-by (1964), for

 

example, Travis McGee alternately scalds and freezes a
man with bathtub water in order tO glean information from
him. Given the weak, self-serving character Of his victim

(besides being garishly nouveau riche he's also a bad

 

father), and the fact that the information McGee extracts

135

will be used to apprehend a really despicable person and
perhaps prevent another crime, his torture is looked upon
as somewhat justified.

What distinguishes John D. MacDonald from Kenneth
Millar and Raymond Chandler is just this idea Of retributive
justice. More Of a moralist that either Millar or Chandler,
MacDonald creates ends for his villains which will make
the punishment fit the crime. We have seen in the previous

chapter how rapist-murderer Boone Waxwell in Bright Orange

 

for the Shroud (1965) is suitably impaled through the groin

 

on a piece Of rotting driftwood in the dark swamps he has

inhabited. In yet another novel, The Deep Blue Good—by

 

(1964), the villain is Junior Allen, a sociopathic thief
and torturer Of women. What most women remember with a
shudder about Allen is his sadistic grin which is always
in view whenever he abuses them. Thus, MacDonald creates
for him a death suitable tO his nature, and his grin is
forever frozen in our memories:

Suddenly, as if tO show Off, as if to prove how well
he had everything under control, [Allen] made a
complete roll, exposing the metallic gleam Of the
anchor for an instant, then steadying again, face
high, making little white bow waves that shot past
his ears.

I could not move or think or speak. The known world
was gone, and in nightmare I fought something that
could never be whipped. I could not take the light
Off him. He rolled again. And then I saw what it
was. His throat was wedged in that space between the
flukes Of the Danforth, and the edges Of the points
were angled up behind the corners of his jaw, the
tension spreading his jowls into that grin. I got

136

tO the cleat, and with nerveless stumbling hands I

freed the line. He disappeared at once as the anchor

tOOk him down. I hugged the rail and vomited (p. 137).
A guillotine execution Of sorts is suitable for

sadistic Nazi escapee Fredrika in One Fearful Yellow Eye_

 

(1966). Even her final death throes are described with a
kind Of macabre humor, for MacDonald cannot permit this
depraved mass-murderer the slightest dignity:

With a look of alarm she tried to reach for the pistol.
I had lost my balance on the last hop and as I started
tO fall forward, I gave a final thrust and felt my
head ram the softness Of her belly, heard the air
grunt out of her. . . .

Her brick-red head hit the window wall section perhaps
two feet from the bottom. It punched a huge shard Of
glass out onto the grass, and ran diagonal cracks all
the way up to the top corners. Small pieces sprinkled
down onto the terazzo. She lay face down with her
throat across the sill where the plate glass had been
puttied in. The tOp section was suspended. It
shimmied. It cracked. Pieces Of dry putty fell, then
suddenly the great plate Of glass worked loose and
fell like a great blade, straight down.

She humped her purple hips high and smacked them down.
The final grind and bump. The falling glass had made
an enormous sound. The brick-red hair did not go well
with the spreading puddle Of bright red blood (p. 210).
Dress Her in Indigo (1969) contains one Of the most
vivid descriptions Of torture and subsequent death that
MacDonald has ever written. Walter Rockland, a villain
whom we never meet, has taken two college women, one Of
them the daughter Of McGee's friend, to Mexico on a
psychedelic horror trip. He fills them with drugs and

turns them into animals who have sex on call, and who

defecate in public. It is unclear who has killed Rockland

137

when McGee and Meyer finally discover his five-week-dead
body in his camper (it is hinted that a band Of outraged
Mexican Indians are the torturers), but the job was
performed with sickening precision and skill:
'Was he shot, or what?‘ Meyer asked.
'I don't think the question is material. I do not
know everything that was done to him. But I think
he was tapped on the head and then stripped, spread
and wired in place and gagged. Then various things
were done to him. The most impressive, perhaps, being
a knife line drawn across the belly, then down the
tops Of the thighs, then across the thighs about six
inches above the knees. Then the entire area thus
outlined was carefully flayed, skinned like a grouper.

I would guess that he was not blinded until a bit
later on' (p. 182).

What is apparent is that in the above situations
McGee is simply the Observer, not the activator Of the
fates of the villains. Junior Allen falls overboard and
is accidentally hooked on the prongs. Fredrika loses her
balance after McGee stumbles into her as he is trying to
get to a woman who is being tortured. Walter Rockland's
body is discovered by McGee.

There are few situations in which Travis McGee is
directly responsible for the death Of a villain. One has
already been mentioned: he shoots in self-defense in

harker than Amber. In A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971),

 

villain Paul Dissat, who is about tO kill McGee and Meyer
by burying them in a torrent Of hot asphalt, is himself
buried when he falls into it after McGee has beaten him

and he staggers into it. In The Long Lavender Look (1970),

 

138

McGee kills his would-be killer with the art of knife

throwing learned from a dead friend in A Deadly Shade Of

 

Gold (1965).

Tom Pike, the mastermind villain Of The Girl in the

 

Plain Brown Wrapper (1968), has killed his lovely young
wife by first driving her insane with drugs and then faking
her suicide by pushing her out the window Of a skyscraper
during a business party. Her body lands on a terrace, how-
ever, and McGee finds it before anyone else does. With the
cooperation Of the police, he wraps the body in tarpaper
(hence, the novel's title) and hides it in a phosphate pit.
When Dave Broon, Tom Pike's confederate, realizes just how
evil Pike is, he attempts tO hang him. However, he is
unaware that McGee and the sheriff are watching.

Pike does die by hanging, but it is because the
sheriff and Travis McGee make no attempt tO save his life.
Although McGee does make one feeble effort he is stopped
when the sheriff taps the back Of his skull with his carbine,
"; . . enough tO sag me to a squat, knuckles against the
turf, but not enough to spill me all the way" (p. 249).
When it is definite that Pike is dead, Stanger asks, "How
long would you say he's been dead, McGee? All things
considered," and McGee responds, "I'd say he must have
been dead by the time Broon started tO drive away, A1. All
things considered" (p. 250). Thus, McGee is an accomplice

tO Tom Pike's murder, as is Sheriff Stanger. Furthermore,

139

when Stanger apologizes for tapping him with a carbine
barrel, McGee replies, "I guess it was the quickest way
to stop me, Al." However, the fact that Tom Pike was
allowed to die his horrible death because Of the way in
which he ruined his wife's life and the fact that he
killed two other people (a doctor, and a nurse in whom
McGee showed a transient interest), does not mitigate
McGee's willing complicity in his murder. He admits that
Stanger was right in stopping him from saving Tom Pike's
life. McGee feels "just a little bit sick to my stomach,"
about what he has just witnessed, but "just a little bit."
In an interview in Newsweek (March 22, 1971),

detective novelist Donald Westlake (The Hot Rock, et a1.)

 

stated:

"A friend Of mine used to say that there's a difference

between Mickey Spillane and violence used as art."

Westlake quoted a line from Hammett: "I hit him with

the door repeatedly," and pointed out, "The word

'repeatedly' is art. In place Of that one line,

Mickey Spillane would have given a page-and-a-half

Of gore. I'm trying for 'I hit him with the door

repeatedly'" (p. 103).
John D. MacDonald Offers his readers a page-and—a-half Of
gore, and although one might argue that a description Of
gore might also be artistic and there is certainly an
asthetic difference between Spillane's lengthy descriptions
and MacDonald's, the gore remains. The truth is that
Travis McGee is a bit Of a sadist. He relishes those

descriptions Of groins impaled on driftwood, throats wedged

between the flukes Of a Danforth, rotting bodies which have

140

been flayed alive, and men futilely running from death even
as the noose tightens around their necks until their eyes
bulge and their skin changes color and they die.

McGee has a stock reaction to each event: he feels
sick. It is a valid reaction. We all feel sick--or should.
His sick feeling is used to demonstrate his human qualities.
The ploy Of feeling physically ill (or even emotionally
drained), is there to show us that his years Of experience
with brutal violence have not calloused him; he still has
feelings Of revulsion. Perhaps McGee's response is a
"better" one than Mike Hammer's glee. But just as Hammer
can always be depended upon tO enjoy each twist Of the
knife or the smack Of a bullet as it contacts flesh, so
McGee can always be depended upon to "feel sick." In the
end, both responses become meaningless.

Yet one cannot place all the blame on Travis McGee.
If McGee's hero is part sadist, his villains are all-sadist.

Lovely Lilo Of The Long Lavender Look (1970), relishes

 

killing men as they are engaging in sexual intercourse

with her. Boone Waxwell (Bright Orange for the Shroud)

 

and Junior Allen (The Deep Blue Good—by) use their brute

 

strength and diabolic charm to make women succumb to them
in every way. Certainly the description of Boone's rape
Of Vivian Watts in the previous chapter is a clear example

Of his sadistic bent. The men and women in Darker than

 

Amber (1966) are sadists when they lure elderly, lonely,

141

wealthy men onto cruise ships and then murder them.

Fredrika Of One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966) is known to have

 

tortured her young daughter. And Paul Dissat in A Tan and

 

Sandthilence (1971) murders his female accomplice by

 

trussing her, burying her alive to her neck in sand, and
waiting for the tide to come in and drown her. McGee's
world is the world Of the depraved, and the price Of
confronting it is that in the end, some Of the depravity
may rub Off.

Raymond Chandler's descriptions of violence and
sadistic acts are not as heavy-handed as John D. MacDonald's.
In fact, Chandler achieves Dashiel Hammett's terseness Of
description while at the same time he communicates the
horror Of death--any death. Furthermore, Philip Marlowe
is never in any way a sadist. In only one instance in The

Big Sleep (1939), does he torture anybody, and it is verbal

 

torture. But at the last moment Marlowe catches himself
and instead Of twisting the knife, condemns capital punish—
ment:

Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until
you can't hold it any longer and then tell yourself
that you have to breathe, that you're black in the
face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that
you're going tO breathe right now, but that you're
sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little
gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that
breath you're fighting with all your soul not tO tO
take, it won't be air you'll get, it will be cyanide
fumes. And that's what they call humane execution in
our state now (p. 93).

142

Overt acts Of violence are always in self-defense
Of one sozt or another. Marlowe kills Lash CaninO in The

Big Sleep to save his own life and then in a mixture Of

 

horror and relief, laughs "like a loon." In the same novel

he slaps murderer Carmen Sternwood, but it is in an attempt

to awaken her to reality, a feat he cannot accomplish. In

Playback (1958), he is attacked by a contract goon and

smashes both his wrists (one hand is holding a gun) with

a tire iron (p. 167). Yet even in this instance, Marlowe

is able to feel compassion for his attacker: "Suddenly

he crumpled. They're so goddamn tough when they hold the

stacked deck. And they never know any other kind Of

deck. . . . The redhead had guts. He had managed to get

into a sitting position against the wall" (pp. 168-69).
Usually, it is Marlowe who is the main target Of

violence, and he is vulnerable tO all comers. He is

beaten by Lash Canino in The Big Sleep. He is "slammed

 

in the belly, kicked in the shoulder, forced to drink
liquor under threat Of bodily harm, threatened with a gun
and struck with a black-jack while unarmed," by two police-

men in just one scene in The Lady in the Lake (1943, p. 155).

 

In the same novel he is beaten by the murderer and left
unconscious to bear the blame for the rape and death Of
Muriel Chess (p. 189). Marlowe is doped with a cigarette

and pricked with an ice-pick in The Little Sister (1949).

 

And he is beaten by two police Officers and an Indian goon,

143

and drugged by a corrupt psychiatrist in Tarewell, My

 

Lovely (1940).

Most Of the violence done tO Marlowe, however, has
a purpose: to intimidate him; tO make him discontinue his
investigations. The goons who beat him up or who try tO
kill him have a job to do. There is little that is personal
in their attacks upon him, and the only pleasure (and it
is a rare pleasure) that they receive, is in seeing their
job well done. Don Corleone's statement in The Godfather
echoes the general philosophy Of most Of the goon-villains
in Chandler's novels: murder is simply business. There
is nothing personal in it. Thus, although Philip Marlowe
despises gangsters as a general rule, he is able to show
respect for them. They tOO must earn a living.

Sadists, those who take lingering pleasure in
violence, dO exist in Chandler's novels, although they
are not nearly as large in number nor as magnificent in
quality as John D. MacDonald's creations. Captain

Gregorius, who beats up Marlowe in The Long Goodbye_is a

 

man who enjoys his power and brutality as a police Officer.

Carmen Sternwood, the depraved killer in The Big Sleep

 

delights in seeking revenge on men who have rejected her
advances. And Lash CaninO, after poisoning smalltime
gangster Harry Jones, comments, his voice "purring“: "You

ain't sick from just one little drink, are you pal?" (p. 162).

144

It is Dr. Lagardie, the villain Of The Little Sister

 

who is sadist supreme Of Chandler's fiction. Perhaps it

is because he is the only overt sadomasochist in the Philip
Marlowe series that he looms so large and evil. Yet
Chandler's characterization Of him is superbly sensitive
and one visualizes a Vincent Price performance in the

screen role:

"I'm just talking," I said. "Waiting for something
tO happen. Something's going tO happen in this house.
It's leering at me from corners."

Dr. Lagardie licked another pearl Of blOOd Off his
thumb.

I looked hard at him. It didn't buy me a way into
his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all
the misery Of life was in his eyes. But he was still
gentle.

"Let me tell you about the needles," I said.

"By all means." He picked the long thin knife up
again. '

"Don't do that," I said sharply. "It gives me the
creeps. Like petting snakes."

He put the knife down again gently and smiled. "We
do seem tO talk in circles," he suggested (p. 144).

However, even in Dr. Lagardie there is a gentle
quality, hidden and never tO surface in our presence. In
the end, he engages in a suicide pact with his lover; he
is capable Of love. Unlike John D. MacDonald who clearly
defines the good, the bad, and the sadistically ugly in
his novels, none Of Raymond Chandler's characters are
totally depraved. There is some good in everyone and
there is a reason for everything.

In The Little Sister there are two ice pick murders.
Philip Marlowe discovers both Of them. His immediate

reaction is revealing:

145

A brown army blanket was pulled up around his shoulders
and the lower part Of his head. He looked very comfort-
able, very calm. I stood Over him and looked down.
Something which was not an accidental fold held the
army blanket away from the back of his neck. I moved
it. A square yellow wooden handle was attached tO

the back Of Lester B. Clausen's neck. On the side Of

the yellow handle was printed the words 'Compliments

Of the Crumsen Hardware Company.' The position Of the

handle was just below the occipital bulge.

It was the handle Of an ice pick. . . . (pp. 31-32)
Marlowe assumes an air Of detachment. If he were Travis
McGee he vould philosophize. He would become ill. Instead
his response is, at first, more natural. His mind gives
him a moment Of respite from the gruesome scene. Irrele-
vancies are contrasted against hard fact: "Compliments Of
the Crumsen Hardware Company" is followed by "The position
of the handle was just below the occipital bulge." The
ironic yet innocent publicity statement for a hardware
store becomes the indifferent epitaph on a lethal weapon.

Descriptions of the dead in Chandler's novels are
not pretty. However, they are quickly dispensed with.
Philip Marlowe's mission is not tO dwell over the state
Of the dead person, but to discover who committed the deed.
Unlike Travis McGee, he does not need to become Outraged
by a particularly ugly murder in order tO give his full
attention to apprehending the murderer. Whether it's a
bullet through the heart (simple violence), or a head

smashed in (simple sadism), Marlowe perceives his duty

in the same way: find the villain.

146

On the other hand, Marlowe isn't totally immune to
brutal murder. In The Lady in the Lake (1943), the decom-
posed face Of Muriel Chess, whose corpse is found floating
in a mountain like is described as "A swollen, pulpy gray
white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth.
A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on
it" (p. 44). That night, Marlowe has a nightmare about

the body:

I dreamed I was far down in the depths Of icy green
water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long
blond hair that kept floating around in front Of my
face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a
bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam
around leering like an elderly roué. Just as I was
about to burst for lack Of air, the corpse came alive
under my arm and got away from me and then I was
fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling
over and over in the water spinning its long hair

(p. 87).

When he awakens from his dream he smokes a cigarette
and returns to sleep. In the morning he showers, shaves,
dresses and makes himself coffee, toast, and eggs. There
is no further mention of his nightmare. His future sleep
is calm. And there are no cries for vengeance, no oaths
like "I'm gonna get the bum that did this to Muriel." He
simply sets about his daily routine.

Lew Archer's daily routine also involves violence,
and although Millar's detective Often responds as feelingly
to the victims as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Kenneth

Millar's descriptions of brutality are as concise as Raymond

Chandler's. What is most notable about the Lew Archer

147

series, however, is the nightmare quality Of violence, a
quality which also permeates the novels in their most
peaceful moments. Evil lurks everywhere, even in the
pranks Of schoolboys:
I found my way into the labyrinth Of the downstairs
dressing rooms. School was out by now and a gang Of
small boys were snapping towels at each other's legs

and emitting shouts Of menace and horrible laughter
(Black Money, 1966, p. 31).

 

Concrete Objects tOO, dissolve into horrors, like nightmare
Shoelaces which turn into snakes: The two barrels and the
stock Of a sawed-Off shotgun, so-far unused, give Archer
"an ugly moment: they were like the leavings of a major

amputation" (The Instant Enemy, 1968, p. 27). The buildings

 

Of Laguna Perdida School in The Far Side Of the Dollar (1965)

 

lie "under the gray sky like scattered components Of an
unbuilt city" (p. 1). Artist Ellen Storm's home in The

Underground Man (1971), has twin conical towers standing

 

up against the night sky [which] made the house lOOk like
something out Of a medieval romance." But as Archer nears
it, "The illusion faded. . . . There was a multi-colored
fanlight over the front door, with segments Of glass fallen
out, like missing teeth in an Old smile" (p. 179).

The world Of Lew Archer is the world Of fragmented
dreams, a place in which he battles formless fears with
form, reminiscient Of Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's The

Emperor Jones:

 

148

A dozen men came out. They were small and brown,
moving quickly toward me. Their teeth flashed in
the moonlight. They came on silently, and I was
afraid Of them. Because Of that, or something else,
I held my fire. The brown men looked at the gun
and came on anyway.

I clubbed the gun and waited. The first two got
bloody scalps. Then they swarmed over me, hung

on my arms, kicked my legs from under me, kicked
consciousness out Of my head. It slid like a
disappearing tail light down the dark mountain-

side Of the world (The Moving Target, 1949, pp. 117-
18).

 

When Archer drowns Puddler in The Moving Target, the dream

 

remains: "I was afraid Of what was behind me in the cold
water" (p. 127).

As in a nightmare, everything becomes distorted.
The evil Of Betty Fraley, a woman whose voice is "a flat
caw," becomes the evil Of all women:2 "It seemed to me
then that evil was a female quality, a poison that women
secreted and transmitted to men like disease" (p. 159).
The corpse Of Ralph Sampson, tied in a chair and strangled,
is made grotesque by "the bright plaid socks, yellow and
red and green, on the thick dead ankles" (p. 169). Millar
describes these scenes Of violence with the lucid terror
of a patient on the therapist's couch trying tO analyze
his dreams, yet frightened Of the reality that tOO much

probing might uncover.

 

2With this statement in his first Archer novel,
Millar sets out on a course, perhaps sub-conscious, in
which the vast majority Of the evildoers in the Archer
series are women.

149

It addition to the nightmare quality Of the Archer
novels, the fact that the majority Of the mysteries include
the exhumation of pasts and murders which are at least
twenty years Old, creates the aura Of a horror movie. The

twenty-three-year-Old murder Of John Brown in The Galton

 

Case (1959), is a classic study in horror. All that is
omitted is the actual haunting:

"To make a long story short, when they were clearing
the land for the Marvista tract, a set Of bones were
unearthed. The local deputy asked me to lOOk them
over to see what I could learn from them. I did so.
They were human bones, which had probably belonged
to a man of medium height, in his early twenties."

"It's not unlikely, in my Opinion, that they are

John Brown‘s bones. They were found buried under

the house he lived in. The house was torn down to

make way for the new road. Unfortunately we had

no means Of making a positive identification. The

skull was missing, which ruled out the possibility

Of dental evidence."

"It rules in the possibility of murder."

Dineen nodded gravely. "There's rather more than

a possibility of murder. One Of the cervical

vertabrae had been cut through by a heavy instrument.

I'd say John Brown, if that is who he is, was

decapitated with an ax" (p. 58).
In one way, though, the ghost does exist: it festers in
the present, creating problems for the survivors, the
innocent as well as the guilty, until Lew Archer finally
brings about a kind of justice and sets the spirit tO rest.

It must not be assumed, however, that the violence

is only a dream, unreal, from which we can awaken. It is

real and it is ugly. In The Doomsters (1958), Archer

 

150

gently leads us from aging alcoholic Mrs. Gley who "looked
like the wreck Of dreams," and who "disappeared into the
back recesses Of the house," to young Carl Hallman, innocent
victim, who is being rolled into a wire basket: "He had a
leg wound, at least one chest wound, and one wound in the
abdomen. That was bad, but not so finally had as it would
have been in the days before antibiotics" (p. 149). In

The Way_Some People Die (1951), a scene from Raymond
Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (1940), in which murderess
Velma Grayle shoots her Old boyfriend, Moose Malloy, is

repeated:

Mario came into the doorway and leaned there for an
instant with one raised hand gripping the frame. His
chin had been smashed by something heavier than a
fist. BlOOd coursed down his neck into the black hair
that curled over his open shirt collar. There was
death in his face. I wasn't sure he could see until
he advanced on Galley. His smashed mouth blew a bub—
ble in which the room hung upside down, tiny and blood
colored.

She yelped once like a dog and fired point-blank. The
slug spun Mario on his heels and flung him bodily
against the wall. He pushed himself away from the
wall with his hands and turned tO face her. She fired
again, the black gun jumping like a toad. Still her
white hands held it firm, and her white devoted face
was watching us both.

Mario doubled forward and sank tO his knees. The
indestructible man crawled toward the woman, leaking
blood like black Oil on her rug. Her third shot
drilled the bandaged top Of his head, and finished
Mario. Still she was not content. Standing over him
she pumped three bullets into his back as fast as she
could fire (p. 174).

In the same novel, two other bodies are discovered. Actor

Keith Dalling lies in a pOOl Of his own blOOd which "covered

151

the floor from wall to wall. . . . At first glance I couldn't
make out the hole through which the blood had wasted.
Leaning over, I saw the puncture in the far slope Of his
neck and the powder burns on his collar. He was dressed as
I had seen him in Palm Springs, and he made a handsome
corpse. Any mortician would have been proud Of Dalling"
(p. 48). Gangster Joe Tarantine's body, reclaimed from

the ocean, "had been roughly used by the sea. . . . There
was white sand in the curled black hair and white sand on
the eyeballs. I peered into the gaping mouth. It was
packed with wet brown sand" (p. 158).

Sadism is almost nonexistent in Kenneth Millar's
novels. Lew Archer takes nO pleasure at all in violence,
except perhaps the dubious pleasure Of winning a fight
(a rare occurrence, however, since Archer usually is the
one knocked out). The murderers in the series are not
sadists, they dO not enjoy their murders. Killing, for
them, is not a pleasure, it is a psychological necessity,
almost at times a religious act Of passion, the enactment
of their own black mass. Thus, when Gilley kills Mario,
her face is described as "devoted," and when it is over,
she sits in a chair, "her closed eyelids tremorless as
carved ivory, her mouth closed and still" (p. 174).

In The Drowning POOl (1950), young Cathy Slocum,

 

‘Who has murdered her grandmother, tells Archer, "I felt as

i.f I'd sold my soul tO the devil, even before it

152

happened. . . . (p. 214). When Archer asks multi-murderess
Harriet Blackwell to tell him about the killings in The
Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962), she replies, "I tried to tell
the priest. My Spanish wasn't good enough. But you're no
priest" (p. 216). And after she confesses to Archer, "Her
arms fell limp at her sides. Her eyes went sleepy" (p. 217).
Elaine Hillman in The Far Side Of the Dollar (1965),
crucifies herself with her knitting needles, sighing "like

a woman in passion" (p. 218). Etta Marburg, in The Instant

 

hhehy (1968), pats the head Of her son and conspirator in
murder, but "She didn't reach out to touch or comfort him.
She sat looking down at him in the way I imagine the damned
look down, with pity and terror only for themselves, into
lower circles than their own" (p. 200). And Mrs. Snow,

murderer of Leo Broadhurst in The Underground Man (1971),

 

kills out Of a wild religious fanaticism: "He deserved tO
die. He was a wicked man, a cheat and a fornicator." TO
Archer, "Her violence and malice appeared to her as emana-
tions from the external world" (p. 248).

What sets Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe apart from
Travis McGee is that their sense Of justice for the victim
also includes compassion for the villain. Thus Marlowe
takes pity on mentally deranged Carmen Sternwood in The

Big Sleep, and permits Eileen Wade time tO commit cuicide

 

in The Long Goodbye, Archer's compassion, however, is

 

demonstrated even more directly. He is father, priest

153

and therapist to the murderers, quietly listening to their
private nightmares, Offering them advice, giving them
physical comfort, hearing their confessions:

"I don't want any Of your phony sympathy. People
always want to be paid for it. What do you want
from me? Sex? Money? Or just tO see me suffer?"

I didn't know how tO answer her.

"Or do you simply want tO hear me say it? Listen then,
I'm a murderer. I murdered four people."

She sat and looked at the faded flowers in the wall-
paper. I thought that it was a place where dreams
could grow rank without much competition from the
actual.

"What did you want, Mildred?" (The Doomsters, 1958,
p. 156).

 

Dr. Fredric Wertham, in his book, A Sign for Cain:

 

 

An Exploration Of Human Violence (New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1966), states:

Modern literature is rich in sadism. That is also
rationalized on pseudoclinical grounds. But the
belief--Often voiced-~that representation Of sadistic
scenes prevents the execution Of sadistic acts in life
is superstition, not science. Fantasies in artistic
form gain power over people. What authors who describe
profusely the infliction Of pain really give their
readers has been put into words by one Of the charac-
ters in a Mickey Spillane novel: "True violence isn't
the deed itself. It's the contemplation and enjoyment
Of the deed." Some writers savor sadism, then call
their treatment Of the subject scientific. But their
approach is more culinary than clinical (p. 348).

What Wertham ignores is the role Of the detective.
It is the detective's response tO the violence and sadism
that he encounters in his daily routine that colors and

flavors the response Of the reader. For it is through the

154

eyes of Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Travis McGee that
we witness the violence. And their reactions to it become
our own reactions. Their contexts become our contexts.
Philip Marlowe's response to it is to recognize the harsh
reality Of violence, tO come tO grips with it, tO conquer
it, and then to try to forget it with alcohol and chess.
Lew Archer not only wants tO see justice done, but he
makes an attempt tO understand the reasons behind the
violence. And although Travis McGee takes pleasure in
victory over the villains, we remain, with him, sick.
Neither McGee nor his readers gleefully participate in the
horrible ends that his victims and villains meet.

Wertham would like tO do away with all violent
literature. But violence and sadism in fiction are only
mirroring the violence and sadism in life. Detective
novels, with their necessary abundance Of brutality, are
one Of the most moralistic forms Of fiction: gOOd must
always triumph over evil, and it must triumph again and
again and again. The back-cover blurb Of Kenneth Millar's

The Doomstehey summarizes the detectives' involvement with

 

violence: "My job is to be tough because I have to be tough
to do my job, but as I followed the killer's trail Of blood,

I could feel my stomach begin to turn. . . ."

CHAPTER VI

WHERE HAVE ALL THE VALUES GONE: THE PRIVATE

EYE'S VISION OF AMERICA

There's an anti-pollution message being shown on
television these day's that's quite effective. An aging
American Indian who closely resembles the one on the Old
Buffalo nickel paddles his canoe along a river bank. The
going is rather difficult because the river is filled with
muck Of all kinds; bottles, rusty cans, dead fish. finally
the Indian docks his craft and climbs ashore. On land he
silently surveys the ruin. Trees have been replaced by
industrial smokestacks, wildlife by Mustangs, Mavericks
and Cougars with V—8 engines, quiet trails by screaming
super-highways. As he stands on the brink Of modern
civilization, one Of the animal-autos zooms past and a
human arm flings garbage out the window. The waste lands
at the Indian's feet, spattering him. He remains silent,
and his weathered face discloses nothing. But as the
camera moves in, one tear falls and mutely makes its way
down the crevices Of the Old Indian's cheek.

I never cried over polluted cities. As a matter

Of fact, I hardly noticed the pollution. Super-highways

155

w I .ll 1' II] 1" '1 I‘ll till" i) Illlllullll. ill-I .Illll‘llll] Ill...‘
I“ III

156

were inventions that I took for granted, and the only time
I reacted to them was when they were under construction and
I was forced to detour; then I became angry and frustrated.
Garbage was something the trashman collected at regular
intervals, and unless a strike was underway, I really
wasn't concerned about those tin cans and glass bottles
that kept building up. If the sound level of a rock band
in a local bar was tOO loud for my ears, I left. If
traffic noise was tOO much for me as I drove through the
rush hour, I simply blotted it out by rolling up the
windows and turning on the car radio. You see, I'm used
to all this: I'm part and parcel Of modern industrial
America. Why, then, was I so affected by that Old Indian
and his single tear?

Perhaps we should look at the character of the
American Indian for the answer. The profile Of the Indian
on the Buffalo nickel, like the one in the advertisement,
represents the noble savage, a romantic figure who silently
stalks through forests, who lives quietly beside clear waters,
and who is a lover Of animals and nature. He is a gentle
man whose thoughts turn inward; he masks his sufferings.

We know he is an outsider, and that his ways are
different from ours. He is a stranger in our midst and
we feel a little uncomfortable when he is in our presence.
Our discomfort arises from our guilt at what we have done

to this man and to his people: we have tortured him, slain

157

him, burnnd his villages and taken his land. We have done
all this to him and yet he endures, even in a television
message, a silent stoic commentator on the result of our
lust for power, land, and machines.

I Like the American Indian, the hard-boiled detective
is also a stranger in our midst. A marginal man with one
foot in the old West and the other in the twentieth century,
he stands apart from the rest of American society and views
the ruins. Since the detective novels are narrated by him,
we as readers (just as we are viewers with the Indian) see
the world through his eyes. The detective's eyes are dry,
but he drowns his sorrow in whiskey. Yet unlike the American
Indian, the detective does not remain silent. He tells us
what is wrong, and sometimes even shows where it all began.

John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Kenneth
Millar criticize everything from popular music to popular
sex. Nothing is too sacred for them to attack, perhaps
because nothing is too sacred for Americans to destroy.
Total destruction, however, is not their goal; they do not
raze our cities and run to the suburbs. Instead, they
remain in the eye of the hurricane and engage in an often
futile effort to rebuild, to offer solutions.

The decadence, frustration and joylessness of
modern society, with which Lew Archer, Travis McGee and
Philip Marlowe are in daily contact, is not an urban

phenomenon. It also exists in suburban Santa Theresa,

158

Idle Valley, Bay City and Ft. Lauderdale. Disillusion has
extended its tentacles as far north as Ontario and as far
south as Fexico City.

It's a pretty dismal picture of American society
that these writers develop for us and we might very well
ask why. After all, isn't the detective novel, like most
pOpular fiction, "escape" reading, something the average
person peruses on vacations, between airplane connections,
or before he retires for the night? Why don't they just
give us a good blood and guts story and leave it at that?

Would these questions be leveled at Ernest Hemingway?

Might someone suggest to him, for instance, that A Farewell

 

to Arms could really be a great war story if it wasn't
cluttered with statements about chaos and false values?
cu'that Shakespeare's Hamlet is deficient as a story of
intrigue because of that philosophizing about being and
not being? It's doubtful. We expect a world view from
"established" writers like Shakespeare, Hemingway, Joyce
and Lawrence, but when it comes to detective novelists we
prefer that they remain in a closet. What do they have to
offer, anyway? The fact that the world views of Chandler,
Millar and MacDonald are closely linked to Ernest Heming-
way‘s is of little consequence. They come under that most
distasteful of categories, "popular," a word associated with
transient and faddish, and as such, must not be taken

seriously.

159

Strangely enough, as evidenced merely by the sales

of their books, the American public does not have an adverse

reaction to detective novelists. Furthermore, the vast

majority of detective novels used both in and as background

for this dissertation were contributed by scholars in the
English department at Michigan State University: students

of Samuel Johnson, John Milton, and William Shakespeare.

I also discovered detective novel enthusiasts among philoso-

phers, sociologists, lawyers, anthropologists, linguists,
librarians, and criminologists. Of course these people
comprise a very small part of the total population, but
their devotion to the detective novel helps to dispel the
myth that popular fiction is read and enjoyed only by the
great unwashed masses.

Yet in at least one way the detective novel is
indeed escape reading. In identifying with the detective
we flee our routine lives and become heroes. We enter
worlds into which we would not otherwise dare to intrude:
the mansions of the rich, the dens of devils. We are
energized by fistfights, gunfights and all-night vigils,
although our usual nine-to-five day leaves us enervated.
We might be submissive to our spouses at home, or to our

colleagues and superiors at the office, but as Philip

Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Travis McGee we stand up to every-

body.

160

There exists a paradox here, however. Since we
view the world through the detectives' eyes, we also become
outsiders. As outsiders, it is not we who contribute to
pollution in our tedious and frustrating journey home from
the office. It is They. Our lives are full; we aren't
the lonely, alienated men in gray flannel suits with empty
routinized existences. They are. Our children don't grow
up to take heroin and LSD, they don't run away from home.
Or if they do, it's certainly not our fault. It is They
who are guilty, They who are to be pitied--not we. We are
like the cameraeladen, sunglassed Americans in Mexico who
complain to each other that the place is over-run with
tourists.

It is John D. MacDonald who at once both provides
the reader with the easiest escape route from confronting
his own value system, and makes him feel guilty if he does
not confront it. The Travis McGee series is filled with
lengthy passages of social criticism. McGee enters a
situation, any situation, and immediately comments upon
it, as in this examination of higher education in A Purple

Place for Dying (1964):

 

Education is something which should be apart from the
necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefore.
It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured
and guided study of the history of man's reiteration
of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today

the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no
one around with any interest in answering the question,
so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind
which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school
concept (p. 40).

161

The passage, which runs almost two full pages in
its entirety, has little to do with the plot of the novel,
other than the fact that some of the action takes place on
a college campus. Thus, one can easily skip the passage
(and almost every other lengthy passage in the series)
without losing much of the story line. However, one begins
to feel guilty if he does this. First, some of MacDonald's
finest writing is missed if these passages are overlooked.
Second, one gets a further insight into Travis McGee and
his values. Third, when one continually ignores these
passages after having acquainted himself with others, he
begins to feel uneasy and to question himself about why
he is ignoring them. The answer, of course, is that he's
trying to shun self-recognition, to avoid seeing himself
and many of his own attitudes and actions demeaned by the
hero he so much desires to resemble.

MacDonald is a guilt-maker. We read his passages
and although we occasionally chuckle, we are vaguely aware
that the people he's talking about are us. For instance,
anyone who has succumbed to the T.V. syndrome can recognize
himself here:

Ironsides retires to a chicken farm. Marshall Dillon
shoots himself in the leg, trying to outdraw the hard
case from Tombstone. The hatchet bounces back off the
tree and cuts down tall Dan'l Boone. The American
living room becomes silent. The people look at each
other, puzzled, coming out of the sweet, long, hazy

years of automated imagination.

"Where'd all the heroes go, Andy?"

162

"Maybe, honey, they went where all the others went,
along time ago.‘ Way off someplace. Tarzan and Sir
Galahad and Robin Hood. Ben Casey and Cap'n Ahab

and The Shadow and Peter Rabbit. Went off and joined
them.”

"But what are we going to do, Andy? What are we going
to do?"

"Maybe . . . talk some. Think about things."

"Talk about what? Think about what? I'm scared, Andy."
But there's no problem really, because after the

screens go dark and silent, all the tapes of the

watchers selfdestruct in five seconds (The Long
Lavender Look, 1970, p. 96).

 

However, MacDonald doesn‘t confine himself to
attacks upon his readers and their values. He strikes out
at everything, at those big and little happenings in our
lives that make living just a trifle unbearable. A Deadly

Shade of Gold (1965), for example, is chock full of annoy-

 

ances. In this novel McGee comments on the following:
anti-communism (Castro); anti-fascism; organized religion
(he's against it); homosexuals (they're cute annoyances);
city pollution; college education (it's too technological);
phony liberals; the new beer can (he turns it upside down
and uses a can opener); and the Ft. Lauderdale coeds (enjoy
them now, at a distance, for tomorrow they'll turn to fat).
McGee's overall socio-critical stance can be seen

in his statement on beer cans:

I always buy the brands with the pull tabs. You stare

at the tabs, think deep thoughts about progress,

advertising, modern living, cultural advances, and

then turn the can upside down and open it with an
Opener. It is a ceremonial kind of freedom (p. 6).

163

Other kinds of freedom are having a phone which one can
turn off at will, so only outgoing calls can be made, and
throwing out mail without looking to see who it's from
("the ultimate test").

McGee desires a return to the past, and harbors
inside himself a deep sense of nostagia and old-fashioned
morality. He rebels against modern society and its inven-
tions which he sees as eventually consuming man--man the
consumed, rather than the consumer. Just as violence takes
on a nightmarish quality for Lew Archer, modern technology
becomes a science fiction nightmare for Travis McGee:

PeOple hate their cars. Daddy doesn't come proudly
home with the new one any more, and the family doesn't
come racing out yelling WOW, and the neighbors don't
come over to admire it. . . . They may be named after
predators, or primitive emotions, or astronomical
objects, but in essence they are a big shiny sink down
which the money swirls. . . . They give you a good
chance of dying quick, and a better chance of months
of agony of torn flesh, smashed guts and splintered
bones. . . . Their billions of tons of excreted
pollutants wither the leaves on the trees and sicken
the livestock. We hate our cars, Detroit. . . . We
buy them reluctantly and try to make them last, and
they are not friendly machines anymore. They are
expensive, murderous junk, and they manage to look
glassily contemptuous of the people who own them

(Pale Gray for Guilt, 1968, p. 15).

His protests against industry, progress and adver-
tising, however, are futile ones. He cries out and no one
hears him except the reader. His rebellions seem impotent:
turning the beer can upside down is not going to deter the

manufacturers from putting tabs on beer cans. His gestures

164

are largely symbolic and he recognizes them as such: "It
is a ceremonial kind of freedom."

MacDonald is more effective as a social critic
when his grievances involve offenses against human beings
rather than the offensiveness of machines. Noreen Walker
in Darker Than Amber (1966) is a black University of
Michigan graduate who works as a Florida maid in order to
conceal her militant activities as a regional director of
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). She is portrayed
sympathetically because she's "what you might call a
militant Optimist. I believe that the people of good of
both races are going to get it worked out" (p. 90). She is

quite bitter, but the reason for her bitterness is justified:

In this state, my friend, a nigger convicted of killing
a nigger gets an average three years. A nigger who
rapes a nigger is seldom even tried, unless the girl
happens to be twelve years old or less. Santa Claus
and Jesus are white men, Mr. McGee, and the little
girls' dolls and the little boys' toy soldiers have
white faces. My boys are two and a half and four.

What am I doing to their lives if I let them grow up
here? . . . I don't want white friends. I don't want
to socialize. You know how white people look to me?
The way albinos look to you. I don't want to integrate.
I just don't want to feel segregated. We're after

our share of the power structure of this civilization,
Mr. McGee, because when we get it, a crime will merit
the same punishment whether the victim is black or
white, and the hoods will get the same share of
municipal services based on zoning, not color. And

a good man will be thought a credit to the human race
(p. 96).

Noreen Walker's stance is a semi-radical one. She
wants change, but talks about it occurring in the future.

And she wants to work within the System. She is acceptable

165

because she is educated, speaks white English, is attrac-
tive, is a mother, wants equal opportunity but doesn't wish
to socialize with whites, and finally, to add a note of
tragedy, is a widow whose husband died of cancer (not in
jail or in a race riot). Furthermore, McGee's views of
racial problems in America temper any threat to the reader
that Noreen Walker's militantism might make:

They say Now, knowing that only fifteen percent of
Negro America is responsible enough to handle the
realities of Now, and that, in the hard core South,
perhaps seventy percent of the whites are willing to
accept the obligations of Now. . . . My intolerance
is simply McGee-type. If they were people around
colored green or bright blue, I would have a continual
primitive awareness of the difference between us, way
down on that watchful animal level which is a caveman
heritage. But I would cherish the ones who came
through as solid folk, and avoid the slobs and fools
and bores as diligently as I avoid white slobs and
fools and bores (p. 93).

McGee's statements are also tempered in The Girl in

 

the Plain Brown Wrapper (1968). In this novel he also be-
friends a black maid who is more intelligent than she
appears. McGee makes a hard-hitting statement about racism
and wishy-washy liberalism, but in the end reverts to arm—

chair liberalism himself:

And if the black man demands that Big Uncle take care
of him in the style the hucksters render so desirable,
then it's a sideways return to slavery. Whitey wants
law and order, meaning a head-knocker like Alabama
George. No black is going to grieve about some nice
sweet dedicated uprejudiced liberal being yanked out
of his Buick and beaten to death, because there have
been a great many hard-working blacks beaten to death
too. . . . And so, Mrs. Lorette Walker, no solutions
for me or thee, not from your leaders be they passive
or militant, nor from the politicians or the liberals

166

or the head-knockers or the educators. No answer but
time (p. 153).

The result of McGee's philosophizing is that the
reader is moved, but not offended. If he lives in the South,
he can tell himself that it is thirty percent of the "hard
core South" which is racist. He is not being asked to
riot, march, or even to write a letter to his congressman.
He is simply asked to understand.

This kind of social criticism is of the liberal
middle class America cocktail party variety. It is
appealing to middle-aged whites who wish to be "in" with—
out seeming too far out. The only ones who would take issue
with McGee, who would not view him as everybody‘s under-
standing friend, are "Freedom Now" young blacks and whites.
For McGee is a patient man; he's a talker, not a doer, a
loner, not a joiner.

That MacDonald writes for the white middle-class,
middle-aged, is also evidenced in his comment on modern

music in Pale Gray for Guilt:

 

Of course it is music, styled to accompany teen-age
fertility rites, and thus is as far out of my range

as "Rockabye Baby." FM radio was a great product when
it was servicing a fringe area of the great American
market. But it has turned into a commercial success,
so they have denigrated the sound, and they have
mickey-moused the stereo and you really have to search
that dial to find something that isn't either folk
hoke, rickiticky rock, or the saccharine they pump
into elevators, bus stations and Howard Johnsons

(p. 6).

This is not the Now generation Speaking, it is the Then

generation complaining. Although the prose is better than

167

that of most idle conversations on the subject, it is still
just idle talk and idle daydreaming.

What is implicit in all of MacDonald's social
criticism is a longing for order and simplicity and a life
unadorned by the trappings of modern conveniences. There
is a wistfulness to his criticism as McGee lambastes American

lifestyles:

They yearn for security, but all they can have is what
they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of
them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style
and adornment. . . . They have been taught that if

you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular,
the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge
plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for
dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of

the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsi-
cal romance--with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson
dialogue (pp. 101-102, The Deep Blue Good-by).

McGee wants to return to a time that perhaps never
existed--a time when man was not entangled in his society;
a time before machines and computers and gray flannel suits
‘and commuters; a time when you were on a first-name basis
with everyone in town; a time when you could choose your
friends and trust your fellow man--or woman.

Travis McGee is the wish-fulfillment of all those
who would wish to escape the problems and pains and com-
plexities of modern life. Because he has escaped. He can
loaf on the Busted Flush, fish and keep her in trim, drive

his vintage Rolls Royce when and where he wishes. He has

neither family nor bills. He is attractive, and has all

168

the voluptuous women he wants. He reads a lot, likes to
play chess, and chooses his friends as he wishes.

Yet he also functions effectively in society when
he needs to. He has money, enjoys traveling, knows how
to dress for all occasions. He knows what wine goes with
what course, and while he likes a good steak, he enjoys
any good food. He has the best of both worlds and can
operate well in each.

Philip Marlowe, on the other hand, is a tired,
though cocky detective. Unlike Travis McGee, who Speaks
directly to the reader and often assumes that he shares the
same views—-"We hate our cars, Detroit"--Marlowe's social
criticisms are either private observations or witty repar-
tees. Thus, none of Marlowe's insights are as passion-
filled as those of Travis McGee. Rather, they are tough,
terse and cynical.

Philip Marlowe, at first reading, seems detached
as an observer of human nature:

All I knew about the people was that they were a
Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that
she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective
who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and

never carried more than one gun. And I knew she was
the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper
Murdock who had made a lot of money helping out the
community, and got his photograph in the Pasadena
paper every year on his anniversary, with the years

of his birth and death underneath, and the legend:
His Life Was His Service (The High Window, 1942, p. 1).

 

Yet after reading the passage above we know what the

detective thinks of women who pretend that there is no

169

dirt in their lives by hiring a "clean private detective,"
and old philanthropists who get rich from the community
they are ostensibly serving.
There are no sacred cows for Philip Marlowe. He

is too worn out, too disillusioned with life to care about
what he says or to whom he says it. The most vicious
attacks are made upon the rich, often those by whom Marlowe
is employed. Of Carmen Sternwood, Colonel Sternwood's
daughter in The Big Sleep (1939), Marlowe says, "A pretty,
spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very,
very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To
hell with the rich. They make me sick" (p. 58). In The
High Window, Marlowe's identification with the underdog and
his disdain of the wealthy is combined. He wishes to enter
Idle Valley, a wealthy Los Angeles suburb seething underneath
with gambling syndicates, but is stopped by a special
policeman who must first call in to make certain Marlowe
is expected:

I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special

badge pinned to his shirt. "And they call this a

democracy," I said.

He looked behind him and then spat on the ground and

put a hand on the sill of the car door. "Maybe you

got company," he said. "I know a fellow belonged to

the John Reed Club. . . ."

"Tovarich," I said.

"The trouble with revolutions," he said, "is that they
get in the hands of the wrong people."

"Check," I said.

170

"On the other hand," he said, "could they be any
wronger than the bunch of rich phonies that live
around here?"

"Maybe you'll be living in here yourself someday,"
I said.

He spat again. "I wouldn't live in here if they paid
me fifty thousand a year and let me sleep in chiffon
pajamas with a string of matched pearls around my
neck."

"I'd hate to make you the offer," I said (p. 103).

It is at once evident that Marlowe understands that
the man's hatred of the wealthy is founded in resentment
and envy. If the policeman could afford it, he would cer-
tainly live in Idle Valley, contrary to his vehement
protestations.

Idle Valley, now devoid of gambling casinos, appears

again as a target for criticism in The Long Goodbye (1954):

 

Across the lake there was a blue haze against the
hills. The ocean breeze had begun to filter through
the low mountains to the west. It wiped the air
clean and it wiped away just enough of the heat.

Idle Valley was having a perfect summer. Somebody
had planned it that way. Paradise Incorporated, and
also Highly Restricted. Only the nicest people.
Absolutely no Central Europeans. Just the cream, the
top drawer crowd; the lovely, lovely people. Like
the Lorings and the Wades. Pure gold (p. 218).

If Idle Valley is Sodom for the wealthy, Bay City
is Sodom for the middle class. Like Idle Valley, Raymond

Chandler also uses Bay City in two novels, Farewell, My

 

Lovely (1940), and The LadyAin the Lake (1943). In the

 

earlier novel, Bay City is comparable to Dashiell Hammett's
Personville (Poisonville, as it is called by the Continental

Op) in Red Harvest. It is a city controlled by a corrupt

 

171

police department managed by Chief John Wax, who in turn
is controlled by a gambling syndicate. Phony healers,
marijuana pushers, brutal police and a hospital which
fronts for escaped convicts make up the employment Oppor—
tunities in Bay City. In this novel, Marlowe, with the
aid of Los Angeles' Lieutenant Randall and Red Norgaard,
a Bay City policeman dismissed from the force for being
too honest, seems to clean up the city.

Yet only three years later, in The Lady in the Lake,

 

Marlowe is back in Bay City, and nothing seems to have
changed. He has been beaten up and framed by two of the
city's finest and has been thrown in jail:

It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor
of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall.
Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there
and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably
think so. . . . I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-
fifth Street. It was a nice street. She liked Bay
City.

She wouldn't think about the Mexican and Negro slums
stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old
interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along
the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little
dance halls on the pike, and marijuana joints. . . .
(p. 156).
Bay City is basically unchanged. The gangsters have beaten
the charges against them, and the strangely honest police
captain can only apologize for his men.
One of the major pleasures one derives from reading

Chandler's series is Philip Marlowe's cynical sense of

humor. Much of Marlowe's criticism is centered around

172

Los Angeles and Hollywood, a plastic world in which every-
one is expected to play a role. There is no such thing as
a self in Hollywood, except that which exists on celluloid,
in detective pulps, and later in the series, on television.

In The Big Sleep, for example, Marlowe tells his employer,

 

Colonel Sternwood, that "I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo
Vance.1 I don't expect to go over ground the police have
covered and pick upia broken pen point and build a case from

it" (p. 197). Vance is again mentioned in Farewell, My

 

Lovely when Marlowe's girlfriend, Ann Riordan, pokes fun

at him by suggesting that someday he can solve the murders

by "sitting at the head of a long table, telling all about

it, little by little, with your charming light smile and

a phony English accent like Philo Vance" (p. 239).
Villains play their parts straight out of Little

Caesar and Public Enemy. In The Big Sleep, gangster Joe

 

 

Brody directs Marlowe to "Just come forward about two yards.
You might grab a little air while you're doing that."
Marlowe silently observes that "His voice was the elabo-
rately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures
have made them all like that" (p. 72).

The police too play roles. In The Little Sister

 

(1949), Marlowe's informant tells him:

 

lPhilo Vance, the creation of "8.8. Van Dine,"

(Willard Huntington Wright) was the first mail order
detective. He was tall, good-looking, lofty in manner,
and enjoyed using foreign phrases and multi-syllabic words.

173

"Steelgrave was under glass all that week.
nection at all.

pulp magazines."

No con-
Your cop friend has been reading

"They all do," I said. "That's why they talk so
11011th (p. 104) o

The pulp image of the detective as it appears in

Philo Vance stories in the first novel, is criticized by

Marlowe in The LongyGoodbye. However, now the pulp is on

television:

The action took place in a clothes closet and the
faces were tired and overfamiliar and not beautiful.
The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn't have
used. The dick had a colored house boy for comic

relief. He didn't need it, he was plenty comical
all by himself (pp. 86-7).

Marlowe's sympathy for and identification with the

t>;]_ack man is implied in the above statement. Unlike Travis

bi<::Gee, however, his respect is individual and is not shown

:L1:1 long passages which describe causes and cures. In

E’Eagrewell, My Lovelerarlowe's contempt for policeman Nulty
i_ss. evidenced when Nulty complains that all he ever gets to
cover are "dinge killings." The murders of blacks are
:irnqportant to no one, and are rarely investigated.2 In
:Elaee High Window, Marlowe spends some time with a plaster

k>Jwack jockey which sits on the Murdocks' lawn. The jockey

kDecomes symbolic of the patience and endurance of both the

b lack man and the detective:

\

The policeman as a target of social criticism is
IECJIe fully discussed earlier in this dissertation. See
e Law: The Trouble With Cops Is . "

174

At the end of the walk, on a concrete block, there
was a little painted Negro in white riding breeches
and a green jacket and a red cap. He was holding a
whip, and there was an iron hitching ring in the
block at his feet. He looked a little sad, as if

he had been waiting there a long time and was getting
discouraged. I went over and patted his head while

I was waiting for somebody to come to the door. . . .
"Brother," I said, "you and me both" (pp. 1-2).

The Long Goodbye_introduces the black intellectual.

Amos is the Lorings' chauffeur.3 At the end of the novel,

 

he and Marlowe have a brief exchange which demonstrates
their mutual understanding:
"May I ask Mr. Marlowe a question?"
"Certainly, Amos."
"'I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the
bottoms of my trousers rolled.‘ What does that mean,
Mr. Marlowe?"
"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."
He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.‘ Here's another one. 'In the room the
women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.‘ Does

that suggest anything to you, sir?"

"Yeah--it suggests to me that the guy didn't know
very much about women."

"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire
T.S. Eliot very much."

"Did you say 'nonetheless'?"
"Why, yes I did, Mr. Marlowe. Is that incorrect?"

"No, but don't say it in front of a millionaire.
He might think you were giving him the hotfoot."

He smiled sadly. "I shouldn't dream of it" (p. 313).
3It is interesting to observe that black intellectu-

als as portrayed both by Raymond Chandler and John D. Mac-
Donald must mask their intellectualism in menial positions.

175

The institution that comes most frequently under
attack is America in the guise of Hollywood. In Playback
(1958), Chandler's last novel, Marlowe describes Esmeralda,
his ideal town:

. . . it had no false fronts, no cheesy billboards,
no drive-in hamburger joints, no cigar counters or
poolrooms, and no street corner toughs to hang
around in front of them. . . . Not everybody in
Esmeralda was prosperous, not everybody drove a
Cadillac, a Jaguar or a Riley, but the percentage

of obviously prosperous living was very high, and
the stores that sold luxury goods were as neat and
expensive-looking as those in Beverly Hills and far
less flashy. There was another small difference too.
In Esmeralda what was old was also clean and sometimes
quaint. In other small towns what is old is just
shabby (p. 42).

In contrast, Hollywood is a world of gaudy and clashing
values:

We curved through the bright mile or two of the Strip,
past the antique shops with famous screen names on
them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient
pewter . . . past the handsome modernistic buildings
in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talk-
ing money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn't
belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses
and drum majorettes' shakos and nothing below the

hips but glazed kid Hessian boots. . . . (Farewell,

My Lovely, p. 120).

 

Finally, with just one line in The Lady in the Lake,

 

Marlowe sums up his microcosm for America: "Everything's
for sale in California" (p. 31).

Kenneth Millar's Lew Archer strikes a happy medium
between Travis McGee's purple passion of criticism and
Philip Marlowe's tough semi-aloofness. A devoted environ-

mentalist, Millar manages to weave his message into his

176

stories in his two most recent novels, The Underground Man

 

(1971), and Sleeping Beauty (1973). In the former, a
ranging forest fire destroys hundreds of acres of woodland.
The fire was started by a dead man's cigarillo, drOpped
next to the grave of his murdered father. The fire consumes
the land and at the same time lays bare the past as Archer,
in its heat, begins a search for a missing boy, two missing
teenagers, and the solution to an old and a new murder.

In Sleeping Beauty, haunted Laurel Lennox Russo, heiress

 

to an oil company, disappears after an oil-slicked grebe
dies in her arms.
Lew Archer's concern with nature and with man's

indifference to it is found in his first novel, The Moving

 

Target (1949). As he drives into Santa Theresa, Archer
watches men and women move in and out of shops and office
buildings: "Nobody looked at the mountains standing above
the town, but the mountains were there, making them all
look silly" (p. 12). It is in these mountains that the
fire blazes twenty-two years later, and the people are
now certainly aware of them as the fire threatens and
destroys their homes: the revenge of nature on an indif—
ferent human universe.

In The Drowning Pool (1950), Archer tells us that
although They had "bull-dozed super-highways through the
mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth,

and built an urban wilderness in the desert," They

177

"couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into
it, but it couldn't be tainted (p. 21). He further observes
that he could smell "the source of the money when I slid
down into the valley on the other side. It stank like
rotten eggs." The source is the oil wells "from.which
the sulphur gas rose [and] crowded the slopes on both
sides of the town. . . ." The wells had made the town grow
enormously, "like a tumor" (p. 22). Twenty-three years
later, the ocean is found to be as vulnerable as the red—
woods in Sleeping Beauty. From a plane, the offshore oil
platform looks "like the metal handle of a dagger that had
stabbed the world and made it spill black blood," and
Archer asks his Mexican flight steward, "what had happened
to the ocean" (p. l).

Archer's identification with nature is again

demonstrated in The Galton Case (1959), this time in a

 

humorous vein. As he tours Mrs. Galton's home he observes
the paintings that hang on the wall. "Ancestor-worship
art," he thinks, "portraits of Spanish dons, ladies in
hoop skirts with bare monolithic bosoms. . . . The one I
liked best depicted a group of top-hatted tycoons watching
a bulldog-faced tycoon hammer a gold spike into a railroad
tie. There was a buffalo in the background looking sullen"
(p. 9).

Of the three detectives Lew Archer may be the one

most closely identifiable with the American Indian

178

described at the beginning of this chapter. Both share a
concern for wildlife and a horror of what man's technology

has done to it and to himself. In The Far Side of the

 

Dollar (1965), Archer, looking for evidence in an auto-
mobile junkyard, muses that "Somebody with an eye for
detail should make a study of automobile graveyards .
the way they study the ruins and potsherds of vanished
civilizations. It could provide a clue as to why our
civilization is vanishing" (p. 43).

Ecology, however, is only one of Kenneth Millar's
concerns. It is something in which he deeply believes,
though, and he joined picket lines in California in 1971
to protest the Pacific Point oil-spill disaster. Another
concern is the youth of America, the misguided and the
misunderstood.

Millar's empathy with both children and teenagers
is related to his own lost childhood. His parents sepa-
rated when he was three years old and Millar and his ailing,
impoverished mother traveled through Canada, living off
the good will of relatives. The search for a missing
father is a major theme in Millar's works, and is its most

autobiographical in Meet Me at the Morgue, an early novel

 

not in the Lew Archer series.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Lew Archer so
identifies with the young and that the young identify

and open tiemselves to him, often to the chagrin of their

179

parents. Archer himself is known to have come up the hard
way. In The Doomsters (1958) he states that had it not
been for a tough but understanding policeman he would have
become a criminal.
In The Way Some People Die (1952), we meet Ronnie,
a minor character who dreams of being a top-notch prize-
fighter. As Archer gazes down "sightlessly into [Ronnie's]
empty hazel eyes," he generalizes about him:
There were thousands like him in my ten-thousand-square-
mile beat: boys who had lost their futures, their
parents and themselves in the shallow jerry-built
streets of the coastal cities; boys with hot-rod
bowels, comic-book imaginations, daring that grew
up too late for one war, too early for another (p. 102).
It is doubtful, however, that Ronnie can ever be
saved. Perhaps if Archer had time he could relate to him,
but Ronnie, in this novel is just one of many people who
must be interviewed. Archer thinks to himself that although
Ronnie may become a good "fighting machine" for a few years,
in the end he will probably "drop back onto the ghetto
corner with the brains scrambled in his skull" (p. 17).
Archer's attempts to save the young are often
thwarted. Sometimes he arrives in their lives too late to
do any good. Such is the case with Davy Spanner in Tee
Instant Enemy_(l968), a novel which weaves together the
search for Davy's father with murder, parents whose private

problems make it almost impossible for them to relate to

their children, and the Hollywood drug scene.

180

Archer is, himself, the instant enemy, simply
because he is an adult in the "don't-trust-anybody-over-
thirty" world of the late 1960's. "I was weary of the war
of the generations, the charges and counter charges, the
escalations and negotiations, the endless talk across the
bargaining table," he sighs at the beginning of the novel
(p. 4). Yet he quickly becomes involved as he hunts for
a missing seventeen-year-old girl, Sandy Sebastian, and her
young, emotionally disturbed boyfriend, Davy, "son of a
migrant laborer, orphaned at three or four and institution-
alized, then taken by foster parents; a violent dropout
from high school, a wandering teen-ager, car thief, jail
graduate, candidate for more advanced felonies, possibly
somewhat crazy in the head" (p. 57).

The teenagers' charge that adults are not to be
trusted is proven valid. Davy is shot to death by the
guidance counselor with whom he has sought refuge. Sandy
has been repeatedly raped by two men, one of them her
father's friend. But it is Archer to whom Sandy finally
reveals her gruesome tale.

Sometimes adults have to be trusted, and perhaps
it is easier to trust Archer because he is not a parent
himself, and therefore does not give ultimatums or pull
rank. Furthermore, unlike most parents, he admits his
mistakes in relating to teenagers, apologizes to them,

and listens. This is the case in The Far Side of the

 

181

Dollar (1965), a novel in which teenager Tommy Hillman goes
in search of his missing father only to discover that the
one with whom he has been living is the real one after all,
and has only been missing in spirit. Archer finally tells
Tommy, "I sometimes think children should be anonymous"
(p. 189).
Archer's quiet conversation with Tommy, however,
is made possible only because earlier, the detective had
admitted his own mistake. On finding Tommy, he had threat-
ened him with force, with handcuffs, in order to make the
boy stay with him. Tommy retorts, "Fuzzl":
The jeering word came strangely from him, like a
foreign word he was trying to make his own. It
bothered me. Boys, like men, have to belong to some-
thing. Tom had felt betrayed by one world, the plush
deceptive world of Ralph Hillman, with schools like
Laguna Perdida on the underside of the weave. He had
plunged blindly into another world, and now he had
lost that. His mind must be desperate for a place to
rest, I thought, and I wasn't doing much of a job of
providing one (p. 183).

In The Underground Man little Ronny Broadhurst

 

rejects his own father in favor of Lew Archer who has been
helping him feed birds: "'I want to stay with the man.‘
He took hold of my belt and stood with his head down, his
face hidden from all adults" (p. 3). When Ronny is "kid-
napped" by teenagers Susan Crandall and Jerry Kilpatrick,
Archer finds them and talks them back into a world of
relative sanity: "I hoped it was over. I hoped that

Ronny's life wouldn't turn back toward his father's death

182

as his father's life had turned, in a narrowing circle. I
wished thu boy a benign failure of memory" (p. 249). Unlike
adults, Archer never criticizes the young. They are the
innocents, the victims of their parents.

If Lew Archer may be read as the new Dr. Spock
for parents of teenagers, it is because he is non-judgmental.
He may disapprove of the actions of adults, but he under-
stands with a moving compassion that we are all at the
same time guilty and guiltless. His unwillingness to
condemn is also reflected in areas other than parent—teenager

relations. Of man's greed he says in The Moving Target,

 

"You can't blame money for what it does to people. The
evil is in people, and money is the peg they hang it on.
They go wild for money when they've lost their other values"
(p. 182).

There is a sadness in Archer when he speaks about
the rich. They are lonely, alienated, tarnished people.

Watching them at a country club dance in Black Money (1965),

 

he observes that "they gave you the impression of a party
that had been going on too long, till the music and the
dancers were worn as thin as the husks of insects after
spiders had eaten them" (p. 70). Money, both to those who
possess it and dream of it may seem to "confer spiritual
grace" (p. 9), but it is the corrupter of people, and its
value often makes those who possess it valueless: "She

looked like a woman who had stopped believing almost

183

everything except the numbers on bills, the price tags on
clothes and people" (p. 77).

If Archer is tender toward the decadent rich, he
is tersely critical of bigots. It is the Mexican for
Archer, rather than the black who is the victim of preju-

dice in most of the tales. In Black Money, for example, a

 

landlady tells Archer:

I know a Mex when I see one. If you ask me he was
probably a wetback, and that's why he lied. He didn't
want the Immigration to put him on a bus and send him
home. . . . He was all right, in his place. But he
was too uppity. . . . He told me he was going to come
back. Come back in a Rolls Royce with a million
dollars and marry a girl from Montevista. That was
uppity. I told him he should stick to his own kind
(pp. 140-41).

In contrast to Travis McGee, Archer's replies are quick and
to the point. Knowing that he can do nothing to alter their
stupidity he does not lecture, and he reserves any clever
asides for the reader:

"What happened to Nopal Valley?"

"It was ruined, absolutely ruined. Great hordes of

low-class people, Mexicans and dirty oil crews, came

in from gosh knows where, and simply blighted the

town. We can't let it happen here."

"Absolutely not," I said with a phoniness she had no

ear to catch. "QUinto must remain a natural beauty"
(The Drowning Pool, p. 10).

 

And once again, in The Way Some People Die:

 

. . . what she saw in this guy that worked for
Speed--I wouldn't trust a Mexican or Italian, they
have no respect for women."

I was getting a little tired of her opinions, and she
was repeating herself. I got out of my chair and
stood up. "Thanks very much, Miss Graham" (p. 9).

184

John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Kenneth
Millar use their social criticism more to inform than to
change. As readers, the detectives' opinions on race,
religion, politics, and American society serve more to give
us information about the characters of the detectives than
to change our own views. Just as our appreciation of
Sherlock Holmes is heightened by Dr. Watson's information
concerning the sleuth's habits (his cocaine addiction,
his violin playing, the Persian slipper in which he stores
his tobacco), so our enjoyment of Travis McGee, Philip
Marlowe and Lew Archer is increased by learning about where
they stand. And if we stand with them, so much the better.

There is a difference, however, between the
ratiocinative and the hard-boiled detective. In reading
Holmes or M. Dupin we find very little social criticism.
We may find that Holmes views Italians as "hot blooded"
or passionate, and Jews as shrewd and cunning, but these
observations are made only to enlighten us as to the motive
or possible future actions of a subject. This is true,
because the ratiocinative detective story adheres to a
strict formula. Little action or dialogue is permitted that
does not in some way bear a direct relation to the solution
of a particular problem. Although not unpleasant, one must
submit to a feeling of confinement in the ratiocinative
tale, as if with the detective, he too is experiencing the

unraveling of the mystery through a microscope.

185

The hard-boiled story, on the other hand, is more
panoramic, more cinematic in scope. The formula is such
that it provides for action beyond the limitations of the
immediate puzzle. Often, the solution becomes subservient
to other side developments in the case. Thus, the relation-
ship between Philip Marlowe and Eileen Wade and Linda Loring
is more interesting to us than Terry Lennox's disappearance
in The Long Goodbye, and for some time certainly seems more
significant to the detective. The outcome of the Chookie

deul-Arthur Wilkinson love affair in Bright Orange for the

 

Shroud is at least equal to our concern for a just end for
Boone Waxwell. And Lew Archer's search for Tommy Hillman

and his confrontation with a former lover momentarily woos
us away from our need to know who killed Tommy's mother in

The Far Side of the Dollar.

 

The setting of the two types of fiction is also
different. The ratiocinative story is often a manor
mystery as well as a mystery of manners. Little is known
about the world outside that of the detective's quarters
or the home in which a murder has been committed. The
detective himself is a remote figure, and one can only
wonder how it is that he understands so much about human

nature.

 

4Sherlock Holmes, we learn in "The Adventure of
the Empty House," has been traveling for the past three
years, but what did he do before this, besides read books
and write monographs?

186

The action detective, however, is a man very much
in tune with the world around him. He is not an aesthetic
like Sherlock Holmes, nor a flamboyant nobleman like
Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Whimsey. He is a man of the
people, a working man with an office outside his home,
and is very much a part of them. He is separated from
them only because he was once with them; he has shared in
their wars and their football games, their fights and their
follies.

The action detective depends on brawn and legwork
as well as brains to solve a crime. The modern murder
touches on more lives than the Victorian one, and it is
necessary for the private eye to leave his chambers and
become involved in those lives. Gone is the quiet,
cloistered world which we like to believe existed prior
to World War I. The Great War demonstrated to the detective
as well as to the rest of the world that isolationism was
no longer feasible.

The ratiocinative story still exists and thrives
today. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (who learns all about
people by studying those in her town of St. Mary's Mead)
and Monsieur Hercule Poirot, are still fascinating figures.
Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn and Margery Allingham's
Campion have their devoted followers. Peter Whimsey
remains whimsical. Yet even when these stories are set

in the present, we read them with the same sense of

187

nostalgia that we read Sherlock Holmes. Even as we turn
the pages the paper seems to yellow and crumble in our
fingers, and we almost expect a pressed and faded tearose
to slip from between the leaves.

This is not true of the hard-boiled school, how-
ever. The stories of Raymond Chandler are still crisp
and immediate. Philip Marlowe's insights into American
life remain relevant and fresh. There are no flowers in
a Lew Archer or Travis McGee novel; the blush is no longer
on the American Beauty rose. These three detectives, with
their wise-cracking, philosophical, passionate, and some-
times condemning views of our society refuse to retreat
into the past. They remain as alive for us as they were
thirty years ago, because they keep their hands on the
pulse of modern civilization. However much it twists and
thrashes, is vicious and cruel and helpless and maybe even
hopeless, the hard-boiled detective holds on with a tenacity

that defies time.

CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

At a recent meeting of the Mystery Writers of
America, Hillary Waugh, the fraternity's president, stated
that "Many authors continue to Operate along the lines of
the classic detective story, but the horizons [Of the form]
have expanded enormously.“ He further remarked that
"Writers are really seeking to write much more serious
pieces of work, and there's an increasing trend toward
authenticity."l There is certainly truth to Waugh's
observation. Compulsion, In Cold Blood, and more recently,
The French Connection, are three well-known examples of
authenticity in crime fiction. It seems, in fact, that
the detective, like so many other small businessmen, could
easily be replaced by a machine. We ask the computer a
question--"Who killed Roger Ackroyd?"--and push a button.
Presto! The solution to another crime.

The character of the detective, too, may be

changing. In The Chicken in the Airshaft by Steve Franklin,

 

Eric Pace, "New Trends are Emerging in Mystery
Fiction. Who's Doing It?" The New York Times.(Tuesday,
November 28, 1972), first page of second section.

 

188

189

the hero is a tender-hearted Puerto Rican social worker.

Joe Gore's Dead Skip features a detective who is a collection

 

agent, Harry Kemelman's detective is Rabbi David Small who
oversleeps on Fridays, but finds time between briths and
Bar Mitzvahs to solve crimes, and Joseph Hanson is a
writer whose detective is a homosexual. NO wonder Jacques
Barzun laments that the new phenomenon is a "sign of
exhaustion of the form," and adds that "you now have to
have a retired hemiplegic plumber before you can have a
so-called interesting hero."

Yet the traditional formula both in the ratiocina-
tive and hardboiled genres still thrives. Agatha Christie
recently published her eighty-second novel and her mysteries
have sold over three hundred and fifty million copies in
paper and hardcover in the United States alone. That's
popularity. Kenneth Millar's new Lew Archer novel,

Sleeping Beauty, was released by Alfred A. Knopf in April,

 

1973. In addition, many of the Archer novels (as well as
Millar's earlier mystery fiction), have been reissued in

paperback and hardcover editions. His novel The Moving

 

Target, the first Archer novel, was made into the successful
movie, Harper, starring Paul Newman (Newman was on a lucky

streak of "H" movies-~The Hustler, Hud, and Hombre--hence,

 

the change in the hero's name). The same is true for
Raymond Chandler, whose entire Philip Marlowe series has

been reprinted with artistic covers by Ballantine. That

190

The Long Coodpye was just made into a movie, starring

 

Elliot Gould as Marlowe, attests to Chandler's endurance.
And John D. MacDonald, a paperback originals author, is
having his novels reissued in hardcover. If the demand
for these authors was not evident, publishing houses would
never spend money on them.

Furthermore, the arrival of popular culture
studies as a valid scholarly endeavour has contributed to
the growing interest, discovery, and rediscovery of
mystery writers of all genres. Courses dealing with the
mystery form are currently being offered at several major
universities. Papers discussing a variety of aspects of
the detective novel and its origins have been presented
for the past three years at meetings of the Popular Culture
Association. Even the traditional Modern Language Associa-
tion has recognized popular culture; at the December, 1973,~
meeting there will be a special popular culture session.

The detective form is not, I think, showing signs
of exhaustion. One factor that is so appealing about the
hardboiled formula is that it is a relatively free one and
contains within it possibilities for all kinds of variations
on the tough hero. Yes, even a homosexual detective can be
tough. I do not, therefore, mourn with Professor Barzun
the death of the genre. It seems to me that he's planning
the funeral when there's been no death. Of course there

will be silly gimmicks used in the form; there always have

191

been, and they can be found everywhere. It is up to the
reader to decide what he wants, and usually he is an

excellent critic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

192

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Batten, Jack. "Who Will Wear the Sacred Trenchcoat for
Canada? Who, in Fact, Will Stand on Guard?: A
Sour Look at What Passes for Crime Fiction in Our
Midst." Saturday Night. Toronto: January, 1973,
pp. 28-30.

Blumenthal, Monica D., Robert L. Kahn, et a1. Justifying
Violence: Attitudes of American Men. Ann Arbor:
Institute for Social Research, University of
Michigan, 1972.

 

Bruccoli, Matthew J., comp. Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald:
A Checklist. Detroit: 1972.

 

 

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1939.

 

. Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1940.

 

. Finger Man and Other Stories. New York: Avon
Book Co., 1946.

. The High Window. New York: Alfred A. KnOpf,
1942.

 

. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1943.

 

__. The Little Sister. New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1949.

 

. The Long Goodpye. New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1954.

 

. Playback. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
. Red Wind. New York: World Publishing Co., 1946.

. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: 1950.Mw

193

194

Durham, Philip. Down These Mean Streets A Man Must GO:
Raymond Chandler‘s Knight. Chapel Hill: 1966?

Goldman, William. Review of The Goodpye Look by Ross
Macdonald. The New York Times Book Review, June 1,
1969.

 

 

Goulart, Ron T., ed. The Hardboiled Dicks. New York:
1946.

 

Hammett, Dashiell. The Adventures Of Sam Spade. New York:
World Publishing Co., 1945.

 

. The Dain Curse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1929.

 

The Glass Key. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.

. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1930.

 

Red Harvest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.

 

. The Thin Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.

 

Hartman, Geoffrey. "The Mystery of Mysteries." Review of
The Under Ground Man by Ross Macdonald. The New
York Review of Book_. May 18, 1972, p. 31.

Haycraft, Howard. The Art of the Mystery Story. New
York: 1946.

 

. Murder for Pleasure. New York: 1941.

 

LaCour, Tage, and Morgensen, Harald. The Murder Book:
An Illustrated History Of the Detective Story.
New York: Herder and Herder, 1971.

 

MacDonald, John D. Bright Orange for the Shroud.
Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965.

 

. Darker Than Amber. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett
Gold Medal, 1966.

. A Deadly Shade of Gold. Greenwich, Conn.:
Fawcett GOld Medal, 1965.

 

The Deep Blue Good-By. Greenwich, Conn.:
Fawcett Gold Medal, 1964.

195

Dress Her in Indigo.
1969.

Gold Medal,

 

The Girl inppe Plain Brown Wrepper.
Fawcett GOld'Medal, I968.

Conn.:

The Long Lavender Look.
Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970.

 

Nightmare in Pink.
1964.

Gold Medal,

 

One Fearful Yellow Eye.
Fawcett Gold Medal, l966:

 

. Pale Grayyfor Guilt.
Gold Medal, 1968.

 

Greenwich, Conn.:

Greenwich, Conn.:

Greenwich,Conn.:

A Purple Place for Dying.

Fawcett

Greenwich,

Greenwich, Conn.:

Fawcett

Greenwich, Conn.:

Fawcett

Greenwich, Conn:

 

Fawcett Gdld Medal, 1964.

The Quick Red Fox.
1964.

Gold Medal,

 

Greenwich, Conn.:

A Tan and Sandy Silence.

Fawcett

Greenwich, Conn.:

 

Fawcett Gold Medal, 1971.

Macdonald, Ross [Kenneth Millar].
New York:

 

 

 

 

 

Alfred A. Knopf,

The Barbarous Coast.
1956.

 

 

 

. Black Money. New York: Alfred A. KnOpf, 1966.
. Blue City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.
. The Chill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.
. The Doomsters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958.
. The Drowning Pool. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1950.

The Far Side of the Dollar. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1965.
196§he Ferguson Affair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

Find a Victim.

 

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Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

196

. The Galton Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1959.

 

. The Goodbye Look. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1969.

 

. The Instant Enemy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1968.

 

. The Ivopy Grin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952.

 

. Meet Me At The Morgue. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1953.

 

. The Moving Target. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1949.

. The Name is Archer. New York: Bantam Books,
1955.

 

. Sleeping Beauty. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1973.

 

. The Three Roads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1948.

 

. The Underground Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
197lT'

 

. The Way Some Pegple Die. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1951.

 

. The Wycherly Woman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1961.

 

. The Zebra-Striped Hearse. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1962.

 

Madden, David, ed. Tough Ggy Writers of the Thirties.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illindis
University Press, 1968. °

 

Millar, Kenneth. The Dark Tunnel. New York: Dodd, Mead
and Co., Inc., 1943.

 

Moffatt, Len, and Moffatt, June, compl. The JDM Master
Checklist: A Bibliogrephy of the Published Writings
of John D. MacDonald. Downey, Calif.: 1969.

 

 

197

Nevins, Francis M., Jr., ed. The Mystery Writer's Art.
Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green UniverSity
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Nye, Russel B. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts
in America. New York: 1970.

 

 

Pace, Eric. "New Trends are Emerging in Mystery Fiction.
Who's Doing It?" The New York Times, Tuesday,
November 28, 1972, Part 2, p.‘l2

 

Sokolov, Raymond; Zimmerman, Diane; and Reilly, Trish.
"Ross Macdonald--Master of Mystery." Newsweek,

Spillane, Mickey. I, The Jury. New York: E. P. Dutton
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. Me, Hood! New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
Inc., 1963.

. The Tough Guys. New York: Signet, 1969.

 

Welty, Eudora. Review of The Underground Man by Ross
Macdonald. The New York Times Book Review,
February 14, 1971.

 

 

Wertham, Fredric, M. D. A Sign for Cain: An Exploration
of Human Violence. New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1962.

 

 

 

 

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