The Archer Files
Reading Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer Novels
In between heavier books, I like to dip into genre fiction as a kind of palate cleanser- something for sitting at the airport or a subway ride. One series I keep coming back to is Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels. Archer is a hard-nosed Southern California detective in the Philip Marlowe vein- though as I’ve been reading more mystery novels, it occurs to me that every P.I. is essentially Marlowe moved to another time and place.
I tend to prefer MacDonald’s later novels, when things start to feel a little weirder-stories that involve some combination of runaway heiresses, families with dirty secrets, and some Manson-esque cult tucked away in the hills. At first Archer starts out pretty stiff- but as the series of 18 novels progresses, his character becomes more world-weary and empathetic- a great lens to explore all the odd characters that pop-up in the novels.
You may recognize Archer from the Paul Newman films Harper and its (more interesting) sequel The Drowning Pool. Newman plays him as “Harper” rather than Archer- supposedly he believed his movies did better at the box office if his character’s name started with an H, though I kind of suspect it was more a licensing issue than some superstition.
What first drew me in were the covers- especially the cinematic ‘70s collage editions painted by Mitchell Hooks. The nice thing is you can walk into almost any used bookstore in the country and find a couple Archer novels, usually with some great artwork, and you can more or less jump into the series anywhere. If you watch The Drowning Pool first, Newman’s take on Archer sticks in your head in a good way and makes the reading even more fun. Put Neil Young’s Doom Trilogy on and dig in.
