Archer in Jeopardy: The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, & The Instant Enemy

Lew Archer #7, 10, 14

by Ross Macdonald

Brings together three of the acclaimed mystery writer's Lew Archer novels--The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy--three winners with the incomparable Macdonald touch

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Noir

757 pages, Hardcover

First published September 12, 1979

About the author

Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.

Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.

In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.

He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.

Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.

Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.

Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.

Reviews

[RetroHound · Rating 4 out of 5]

Includes three novels, The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy.

[Donald]

“The Doomsters” - The Hallman family: father and mother dead under dubious circumstances, one son shot, the second being hunted. Probably my least favorite story in the series so far, but I did like learning more about Archer at the end. “I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.” “The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.”
“… that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.”

"The Zebra Striped Hearse" - To begin, I started reading this book right after I came back from Lake Tahoe, and I was tickled to find that LT figured so prominently in this story! And what a story! More twists and turns than the I-50! MacDonald gives us at least four possible killers, with several characters acting suspicious, and seemingly has three on the hook until the end! I had no idea who done it! AND, that ol' zebra-striped hearse driving about through it all! No one is really a good guy in his, other than Lew Archer - the Blackwells, Damis, Campion, - they all kind of suck. And LOTS of mysteries - who is the baby's father? why did this person marry that person? what is that guy's real name? And, of course, who killed who?! Join Archer in his investigation in L.A., L.T., the O.C., and down in Mexico. It's a very good read!

"The Instant Enemy" - From Davy’s list of “Don’ts”

10. Don’t get mad and be an instant enemy.

A good-paced read, that left me very confused at the end. I could not keep track of who was the parent of whom and how they were all related! Even when Archer breaks it down, my head was just spinning! But, lots of good quotes, like:

“This case was opening, not like a door or even a grave, certainly not like a rose or any flower, but opening like an old sad blonde with darkness at her core.”
“I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells.”
“The man was in the maze; the maze was in the man.”
“I’d let some daylight into the case, all right. But the main effect had been to change the color of the daylight.”
“There is a kind of economy in life. You don’t spend more than you have, or say more than you know, or throw your weight around more than necessary.”
Great last sentence:
“It drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, the potheads and the acid heads, draft dodgers and dollar chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins.”