“It’s all one case.”
That’s how private detective Lew Archer sums up his investigation into three seemingly unrelated murders near the climax of The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Ross Macdonald’s 1962 classic California crime novel. Those four words would long outlive the book. Today, they are as closely associated with Archer and his creator as any the author wrote.
Archer explained his theory in stark existential terms: “The past is the key to the present. People start out young on the road to becoming murderers. They start out equally young on the road to becoming victims. When the two roads intersect, you have a violent crime.” Identifying the links between the past and the present enabled Archer to draw the fine line between guilt and innocence. Ross Macdonald was a master at bringing those connections to life. In Macdonald’s world, no violent crime takes place in a vacuum; every act of violence has roots in the past; and the integrity of the justice system depends on understanding those connections.
With a wave of recent publications, Macdonald, who passed away in 1983, is undergoing a renaissance, thanks in large part to the publication of a three-volume curation of his crime fiction canon, edited by Macdonald’s indefatigable biographer, Tom Nolan, and released by the venerable Library of America.
The Macdonald revival comes at a propitious moment. With more than 6.7 million people currently under correctional supervision in the United States, a debate is raging about the fundamental equities of the criminal justice system. The conversation is more heated today than at any time since the 1960s, the era when Macdonald wrote his best works.
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Macdonald’s singular vision of the fragile qualities of justice and mercy was a hard-earned one. In 1959, Macdonald’s daughter Linda Millar disappeared from her dormitory at a private college and became the subject of a high-profile missing persons case. This effect of this incident on Macdonald is documented in Karen Huston Karydes’s study of the era’s crime canon, Hard-Boiled Anxiety. Karydes examines the roots of the anxieties that throb throughout Macdonald’s novels, as well as those of his partners in the holy trinity of hard-boiled crime, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
Linda Millar was a troubled child. A few years before her disappearance, at sixteen, she had been the driver in a notorious Santa Barbara hit-and-run accident that left a teenage boy dead, Linda in a psychiatric correctional facility and the Millar family, both Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) and his wife, the talented and successful mystery novelist, Margaret Millar, in shambles.
When Linda went missing, local law enforcement showed no interest in searching for a lost girl that they considered “damaged goods.” Macdonald conducted the search for Linda on his own. He enlisted the help of a husband-wife private detective team, whom he had consulted for research purposes in the past, and together they crisscrossed California and Nevada over the course of eight sleepless days and nights before finding Linda in Reno, Nevada shacked up with an older, married man.
Linda was physically safe, but emotionally traumatized. After the ordeal she was admitted into the UCLA Medical Center for extended treatment. Linda struggled with her health for the remainder of the decade, and died unexpectedly in her sleep in November 1970 at the age of 31.
The trauma of the search for Linda also devastated Macdonald. He was hospitalized for severe mental exhaustion. After leaving the hospital, he began an in-depth program of serious psychiatric counseling that would alter the course of his fiction and the course of American crime fiction.
From 1960 on, Macdonald’s crime novels would become increasingly personal and his hero, Lew Archer, would become as much a crusading shrink as a private detective, searching for the root causes of violence, looking to understand, rather than solve, crime. In Macdonald’s world, every parent-child relationship is a trap from which there is no escape, every violent crime has roots in the family and every authority figure is complicit. The blood that stains the pages of the Archer novels propels the plots; it also traces the tracks left by the broken parents and damaged children that populate the books.
From 1960 on, Macdonald’s crime novels would become increasingly personal and his hero, Lew Archer, would become as much a crusading shrink as a private detective.Nowhere is Macdonald’s evolving vision of crime and society so evident as in the three novels that make up the middle set of the Library of America collection: The Zebra Striped Hearse, The Chill, and The Far Side of the Dollar. Together, these novels represent some of Macdonald’s finest, and most overlooked, work. During this time, the author was working from a place of vast and enduring pain.
The setting for all three novels, written in rapid succession immediately after the family crisis, is Southern California in the early 1960s. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a wealthy couple hires Archer to investigate an artist who has run away with their college-age daughter. The search leads Archer from a hard-drinking expat community on the Pacific coast of Mexico to a run down artist colony on the shores of Lake Tahoe. The Chill, set in the fictional resort community of Pacific Point, begins with a young groom hiring Archer to find his new bride, Dolly, who has disappeared during their honeymoon. To find Dolly, Archer must solve the decades old crime that motivated her disappearance. The plot moves in two directions with Archer describing himself as a “ghost from the present haunting bloody moments in the past.” In The Far Side of the Dollar, Archer is hired to find Tom Hillman, a teenager escaped from an elite reform school in search of his suspected birth mother. The chase leads to Los Angeles and the fading stars and empty sets of “Television City.” To find Tom, Archer must solve the riddle of the boy’s birth, because “everything is connected to everything else, the problem is finding the connections.”
All three novels reflect the author’s traumatic search for Linda. When Archer observes in The Far Side Of the Dollar that severe depression and mental exhaustion were “like a sickness, it will pass,” we know that was a truth that Macdonald knew from personal experience. Archer speaks for the author again when he observes in The Chill, “Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.”
Macdonald would punish himself for the rest of his life for the tragedies that befell his daughter. And in his fiction, he would fashion a knight-errant whose task, again and again, was to find wayward children.
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Due to the similarity of the plot-lines, the Archer books have drawn the criticism that each book “feels like a Ross Macdonald novel.” In an interview with Rolling Stone writer Paul Nelson, Macdonald answered the charge by embracing it; declaring that he looks at the Archer novels collectively, rather than individually, and that the expression “it’s all one case,” actually “reflects my feeling that we are all members of a single body to degrees that we have no idea, except in moments of what might be called revelation.”
Macdonald added, “I think it’s literally true—we live or die together.”
Paul Nelson’s series of interviews with Macdonald were conducted for a planned 1970s Rolling Stone profile. They are the most exhaustive—and intensive—Macdonald ever gave. The interviews have long been “lost;” archived for decades and available only to scholars with permission of the Millar estate. Nelson’s planned profile of Macdonald was also lost; it fell apart when Macdonald refused to answer any questions about his daughter, Linda.
Thankfully, Paul Nelson’s biographer, Kevin Avery, has collected the Nelson/Macdonald interviews in a volume published recently by San Francisco’s Fantagraphics entitled, appropriately enough, “It’s All One Case.” The Nelson/Macdonald interviews, deftly compiled and edited by Avery, are worth the price of admission for anyone seriously interested in the inner workings of crime fiction. By packaging the interviews together with a vast trove of Macdonald memorabilia, including lurid pulp fiction paperback book covers, candid photographs, both public and private, and historical news articles, Avery and Fantagraphics have taken the project to another level, producing a time capsule and treasure box for pulp-fiction fans.
Not surprisingly, the writer who emerges from the Nelson interviews is articulate and thoughtful. We learn that Macdonald was also ambitious, not so much for himself as for his writing; he tells Nelson that he felt compelled to elevate the detective novel genre to the level of literature.
Macdonald was also ambitious, not so much for himself as for his writing.In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karydes draws this compulsion out, explaining that Macdonald was drawing from the core elements of Greek tragedy to fashion his intricate plots that invariably depict what Freud referred to ironically as the “family romance”—parent versus child. Macdonald described time as a “closed circuit” and believed that the cycle of human folly, suffering and tragedy kept replaying itself generation after generation. The circuit can only be broken by confronting the roots of the cycle within the depths of the human psyche.
That may have been a jarring message to the Baby Boomers that Macdonald writes about in the novels of the early 1960s. It may be just as jarring today. Americans are especially good at looking forward, not backwards. The Baby Boomers were looking ahead to the dream of overturning the world their parents had built. The same could be said about today’s youth, marching in our streets. They are looking ahead, and dreaming of fundamentally changing the world built by their parents.
Every generation wants to see itself as unique, free from the chains of the past. According to Macdonald, this view is an illusion; no one can escape the past. As Archer observes:
“Generation after generation had to start from scratch and learn the world over again. It changed so rapidly that children couldn’t learn from their parents or parents from their children. The generations were like alien tribes islanded in time.”
In The Far Side of the Dollar, Archer solves the mystery of Tom Hillman’s birth and reunites him with his family. But the past still threatens the present and the book ends with an unexpected death in the Hillman family; echoing Macdonald’s own tortured experience with his daughter Linda.
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In the late 1960’s, Macdonald would expand his plots beyond the confines of the family drama, with Archer confronting the greed and civic corruption that caused massive oil spills off the Santa Barbara coast, and firestorms in the Santa Ynez foothills. By the end of the decade, Macdonald’s books were bestsellers. In 1971, The Underground Man would reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller List after a gushing notice from Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty. Despite his public success, his daughter Linda’s quiet and unexplained death in 1970 left her father with the private heartbreak of a lost child mystery that neither he nor his hero, Lew Archer, could solve.
Archer’s last appearance in print was in 1976 and Macdonald faded from the scene soon after behind the mists of oncoming Alzheimer’s. But the influence of the hard-boiled hero as a private eye/shrink plumbing the depths of tragic family mysteries has been profound. Robert Towne’s Oscar winning screenplay for 1974’s neo-noir film, Chinatown and its claustrophobic vision that no one—not even Jack Nicholson or Faye Dunaway—can escape his or her family or past could have been lifted directly from a Macdonald novel. Santa Barbara’s Sue Grafton, paid homage to Macdonald by adopting Santa Teresa as her stand-in for Santa Barbara for her long-running Kinsey Millhone series. Michael Connelly remarked that when he moved his hero Harry Bosch from the police force to private investigator in 2016’s The Wrong Side of Goodbye, the setting for the novel was his homage to Macdonald. And although Nik Pizzolatto’s celebrated HBO series, True Detective, converted the private detective as avenging shrink to Mathew McConaughy’s avenging cop/philosopher, Rust Chole, the resemblance to Archer is unmistakable. Chole’s philosophy that “time is a flat circle,” and that violent tragedies endlessly repeat themselves inside “a locked room,” parallels Archer’s belief that “time is a closed circuit.”
If indeed time is a closed circuit, then Archer is fresh for reclamation today by a new generation of readers. No doubt the generations born since 1976, including the generation marching in our streets today and facing what has come to be known as “the era of mass incarceration,” could use the services of a knight-errant like Lew Archer.
MacDonald poured the trauma of his life into his Archer books because he wanted to communicate with an audience of readers about justice, mercy and compassion. “We live or die together,” he told Paul Nelson. His books illustrate that message. Everyone shares in the guilt for the justice system’s failings, and everyone shares in the responsibility for fixing what is broken. Ross Macdonald’s novels survive because they are more than mystery stories. He used his novels to dramatize the search for common ground between the people enmeshed in the justice system, whether as victim, perpetrator or witness. Those who are willing to fight to find every inch of common ground—those willing to follow Archer’s example—may yet be able to solve the mystery of justice in the United States.
After all, Archer would tell us “it’s all one case.”
