Three Novels of the Early 1960s: The Zebra-Striped Hearse / The Chill / The Far Side of the Dollar

Lew Archer #10–12

by Ross Macdonald, Tom Nolan (Editor)

In 1949 Kenneth Millar, then writing as John Macdonald, published his first novel featuring private detective Lew Archer, inaugurating what The New York Times would call “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” By the early 1960s Millar’s nom de plume had changed and the series had evolved steadily toward new levels of emotional depth and structural ingenuity. The name Ross Macdonald had become a byword for a new standard in crime fiction.

The three novels collected in this volume represent for many readers the summit of Macdonald’s art. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). The intricate carpentry of their plotting is matched by their passion and imaginative sweep.

Each of these books reflects Macdonald’s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the complete and utter personal disaster” of marriage to a troubled drifter sends Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity.

In The Chill, perhaps Macdonald’s most perfectly accomplished novel, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” Macdonald relentlessly strips away his characters’ denials and delusions to reveal a core of violently twisted emotion.

Another hunt for a missing person—this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school—provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald’s friend Eudora Welty considered “securely among your strongest and best ones . . . a beauty that just gets better.” The book’s cunningly constructed puzzles work intricate variations on the bonds between parent and child, uncovering multiple layers of deception and distortion along the way to the stunning revelations: “Everything is connected with everything else. The problem is to find the connections.”

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, American, Crime, Literature, Noir

792 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2016

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

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished The Far Side of the Dollar- Ross Macdonald always helps me out of a reading funk. His contempt for people who use money to erase or change the past.. his fascination with the scrambling effects of inherited trauma (and the way that trauma finds a way of entering a family’s genetic code).. his understated poetic sensibility. Absolute master.

Each of the three books in this volume are in my top ten detective novels of all time. Indispensable stuff!

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good mystery novels by the observant Ross Macdonald. Smart, laconic, with complicated, well motivated plots.

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of these three cases lean pretty hard on broken families, but if anybody had a right to lean so hard, Mr. Millar did. My favorite is the devastating "Far Side of the Dollar."

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably MacDonald’s best collection of novels. Each one is very well done, and each one has its own unique strengths. If you’re going to start reading MacDonald, I’d start with this set.

The Zebra-Striped Hearse *** – Although it starts a bit slow, this is an engrossing read that carries the reader into the sordid lives of the dysfunctional Blackwell family.

Whereas in a Chandler or Hammett novel, the detective is always ahead of the reader, putting together the clues in clever ways that are revealed at the end, the reader of this novel is taken along with Archer through his gumshoeing – following him up and down North America as he follows one clue after another. For the most part, the reader and Archer discover clues and solve the mystery at about the same time.

The book is an interesting commentary on the generational differences. (It should be noted that all of MacDonald’s mysteries are about dysfunctional families.) Much is made of the age differences between the characters. In some places, the generational differences are walls that keep people from understanding each other. In other places, the generational differences are crossed – often to a tragic end – or people try to appear a different age (usually younger) than they really are. (In some ways, this may be the WWII generation coming to terms with old age and death like the baby boomers now.) MacDonald (and Archer), though, is sympathetic to all the characters and their situations.

There’s also much in the novel about trying to achieve dreams – and failing. And living with yourself after failing. Most of the characters feel that something is missing from or unsatisfying in the American dream, and there is much struggling for them to “find themselves.”

MacDonald attempts to have a surprise ending, but it’s not as effective as, say, The Chill or The Galton Case. But after the first couple dozen pages, the novel carries away the reader in a tangled mystery.

If you could only read one MacDonald book, I’d start with The Chill or The Galton Case. But if you enjoy mysteries, this is a very good read.

A couple notes:
- I love the name of the book, however, the zebra-striped hearse plays a very small role in the plot of the novel. I guess it represents the generational differences emphasized throughout.
- Why does Blackwell hire Archer in the first place? Doesn’t he (Blackwell) know who Campion/Simpson/Damis is at the beginning? It's Archer's hiring that brings down the entire Blackwell family. (07/17)


The Chill *** – I couldn’t stop reading this once I opened it. The detective, Archer, is not quite as interesting or quirky as Chandler’s Marlowe or Hammett’s Spade. (However, he’s not as capricious as Marlowe can be.) But he’s just as dogged as he searches for the missing bride in this mystery.

The plot is excellently crafted with a chilling twist at the end. As I saw one person describe it, the answer is in front of your face (and Archer’s face) most of the novel but it isn’t clear until the last several pages. The plot is very complicated, but I never felt swamped by a confusing mix of events, people and motives. MacDonald/Archer takes a methodical approach to unravelling a complicated (and surprising) mystery.

It does have its holes. Why does the murderer call his/her victims before murdering them? It doesn’t make a lot of sense. And in the end, does Helen Haggerty’s murder really have anything to do with a mystery in her past? Wasn’t she really murdered because of an incorrect assumption by the murderer (unaware of Helen’s past)? Also, there are a few red herrings the writer/detective sends you down for little reason.

All that said, this is one of the best detective novels I’ve read and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys that genre. Although the writing and atmospherics (and sheer strangeness) are not quite up to the best of Hammett, Caspary or Chandler, this is an entertaining read. (08/16)

The Far Side of the Dollar *** -- This is extremely well written. In my opinion, it displays Macdonald’s best writing. There is fascinating bird imagery showing up throughout the novel that should be looked into more.

The mystery plot, however, clunks along a bit. Other than Archer, the characters are a bit flat. There certainly some lively and unusual people, but the key players don’t quite gel for me.

While I think this is the best written novel, I’d probably refer people to The Chill to get started. Overall, it is stronger. But this is a close second. (06/23)

[James Varney · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read Macdonald the more I like him. These Archer novels are terrific.

Some notes here on "The Zebra-Striped Hearse." Outstanding. Top-notch writing with all the careful plots and hard-boiled details the best of the genre can offer. All Lew Archer books start off like a rocket - you are just right into it, and it's sometimes hard to believe how much Macdonald (and Archer) pack into just a few days, plot-wise.

Lovely touch at the beginning of Ch. 7 as Archer flies into San Francisco: "It was clear late twilight when the jet dropped down over the Peninsula. The lights of its cities were scattered like a broken necklace along the dark rim of the Bay. At its tip stood San Francisco, remote and brilliant as a city of the mind, hawsered to reality by her two great bridges - if Marin and Berkeley were reality."

Later, as Archer is examining some crime scene photos, he observes of the room where the murder victim lay (supposedly killed by an artist suspect): "unframed canvases on the plasterboard walls, like other broken windows revealing a weirdly devastated outside world."

That pain - it's not outright cynicism with Archer; Macdonald has more depth than Chandler - is laced through the books. Indeed, it is almost as if it's a bit of philosophy Macdonald used to sustain him through his rough early years growing up in Canada when Archer tells someone. "The horrors will pass. Tragedy is like a sickness, and it passes."
But there are still the genre touches. At one point, Archer needs a shave and he takes an electric razor a colleague offers: "I took it into the washroom and shaved myself. All I uncovered was the same old trouble-prone face."

There is humor, too. For instance, Archer comes into the Citrus Junction PD one night and encounters a singularly unhelpful slouch on the duty desk. Archer hopes to see a sergeant there, and tells the wiseacre dolt the sergeant would like to see him, Archer, too. The cop says he'll take his name.

"'S. Holmes.'
He reinserted the toothpick in his mouth and wrote haltingly on a scratch pad. I said: 'The S stands for Sherlock.'
He looked up from his laborious pencil work. The old crystal set he was using for a brain received a faint and far-off signal he was being ribbed.
'What did you say your name was?'
'Sherlock.'
'That supposed to be funny? Ha, ha,' he said.
I started over: 'My name is Archer, and Leonard will want to see me. When are you expecting him back?'
'When he gets here.'
'Oh, thanks.'
'You're welcome.' He tore up the paper he had been writing on and a let the pieces flutter down onto the counter between us.
'Can you give me Leonard's home address?'
'Sure I can. But you're the great detective. Find it for yourself.'
Archer the wit. Archer the public relations wizard. I took my keen sense of humor and social expertise for a walk down the corridor...."

Then a lovely bit when, one evening, Archer comes searching for a young crew of beach bums (who cruise spots in the zebra-striped hearse). "The striped hearse was standing empty among other cars off the highway above Zuma. I parked behind it and went down to the beach to search for its owner. Bonfires were scattered along the shore, like the bivouacs of nomad tribes or nuclear war survivors. The tide was high and the breakers loomed up marbled black and fell white out of the oceanic darkness."

Some notes here on "The Chill" and "The Far Side of the Dollar." These Archer novels just get better and better. Macdonald has eclipsed Chandler with me, and it's easy to see how Macdonald simply has more empathy and is less cynical toward his characters than Chandler. The legendary gumshoe, Lew Archer, lives up to his advanced billing.

Some notes on "The Chill," which is superb. Funny line here:
"Me he treated the way cops always treated me, with occupational suspicion. They suspected me of the misdemeanor of doing my own thinking."

Nice writing touch after he knocks on a door. "Slowly, like bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side."

There are touches in Macdonald that throw light on the seachanges that have happened in America since he wrote. "The Chill" is 1963, and Archer says "I do know most non-professional killers aren't criminal types." At another point, Archer is keeping an eye on two women in a restaurant across the street. He's at a cigar stand, which not only sells books but has one he buys on "ancient Greek philosophy." Incredible. When you think of the bloodshed in American cities over the past half-century, and the idea that a cigar stand would also sell books, let alone one on ancient Greek philosophy....the mind boggles.

You see elements of Macdonald's own life woven into the story. Archer talks of "cases which opened up gradually like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past." At another moment, he "caught a glimpse of myself in the clouded mirror beside the deer-horn hatrack. I looked liked a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past."

That "deer-horn hatrack" is another telling detail. Archer, Marlowe and some of the other famous private eyes are always noticing furniture, the prints on the wall, drapes - all these things that not only tell you how smart the private eye is, but how they are reading whichever character they are about to interact with. At another approach, Archer describes: "Behind the Arizona fieldstone front of the house a tenor and a soprano were singing a heartbreaking duet from La Boheme." Who notices a "deer-horn hatrack" anymore? Who even has one in their house? "Arizona fieldstone?" These sorts of details clearly resonated with contemporary audiences in ways they don't now. You never see stuff like that with Harry Bosch, for instance, but it's fun to read!

On "The Far Side of the Dollar"
Like all Archer novels, it takes off like a shot - Macdonald just has the reader (and Archer) galloping from the get-go, and it's remarkable how much happens in the first 24 hours. In fact, many of these plots take place in just a couple of days.

There's no question Macdonald is going for it all more in "The Far Side of the Dollar" than the previous Archer novels. This one has layers, and not to get chesty but I had most of this one figured out. Yet despite having most of the key angles, I missed on the killer! The weather is a factor - Archer loves to paint a quick snapshot of the weather and, very cinematic, how it reflects his mood and thoughts. There's a presumption about Archer in "The Far Side of the Dollar" that I hadn't seen before. As always, however, Macdonald always writes with genuine empathy for almost all his characters - even his bad guys (most of them) aren't black-and-white. "Shadows within shadows," as Archer would say.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another fun collection of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels from the Library of America. There are three in this volume: “The Zebra-Striped Hearse”, “The Chill” and “The Far Side of the Dollar”. Both Ross and Lew are a bit older. Psychology and character exploration are more subtle. The stories seem more contemporary than the last volume, though there are details that place them in time. In these stories, men still wear hats and World War II has been a big part of the characters’ lives.

The meat of the stories is the detective work. These are procedurals as well as mysteries, with Archer doing a lot of leg work. He chases down a lot of leads and asks a lot of people a lot of questions. If you are like me, you may find yourself flipping back some pages to remind yourself of a character, what they said and how they are connected.

“The Zebra-Striped Hearse” gave me a few flip back moments. A few suspects are dangled, but some are obvious decoys. About two thirds in, I was pretty sure who had committed the murders, though there are twists and turns along the way.

“The Chill” is not as straightforward. Archer’s certainty that two murders separated by years were connected came pretty early on. It wasn’t as clear to me. Archer’s cognitive jump seemed just a bit convenient. Still, the writing drew me in and even managed quite a surprise at the end.

“The Far Side of the Dollar” may have more twists. For most of the story, it is about a kidnapping case. Murder enters again, this time not until near the end. One thing that troubled me a bit is a pretty big coincidence at the center of the plot. Two characters from different times and places in Archer’s life turn out to have a strong connection. Maybe if it had unfolded in a different way, I might have been more accepting. As it is, it seems conspicuous. There are more surprises at the end and again, as with the other two, I was immersed all the way through.

The 754 pages of story zoom by and leave me wanting more. Of course, there is more and I look forward to Library of America collecting it. As is usual with the LOA volumes, the author’s biological chronology and story notes follow the novels.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read "The Far Side of the Dollar" decades ago and liked it. It still held up, although "The Zebra-Striped Hearse" might be my favorite in this volume. It is a close thing.

All three of these novels were very good. They grab your interest from the start, even if Archer is just walking around talking to people and nothing overtly sinister has happened yet.

After you are hooked by Macdonald, you find yourself reading chapter after chapter as the mystery comes into view. The reader, like Archer, feels a need to get to the bottom of things.

What struck me while reading this volume, is how much World War II shapes the mysteries. There are men who are embittered by the war experience, men who feel they failed during the war, people who can't get wartime flings out of their minds. I had never really thought of this aspect of the private eye novel before.

Highly recommended.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty dope detective shit, recommended if you are into pursuing clues.

[Brian Thornton · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacDonald at his peak. Some of the best crime fiction ever written. Lew Archer is one of the stand-characters of all time. Truly iconic.

[Andrew Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Manchette, my new favorite mystery/thriller writer I've discovered this year!

[Chris Wise · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a fan of well-crafted mystery novels, and have not read Ross MacDonald, now is the time to start. He moved the entire genre forward with his Archer novels. This is a selection of three of his best and we can thank the Library for this edition.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another sterling collection from an author who's rapidly become one of my favorite mystery writers.
LOA can release more of his works and I won't be unhappy about it.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three more excellent novels from the greatest series of American detective stories. Please, please, Library of America, publish more collections of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels.

[Timothy]

The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962)
***** The Chill (1964)
***** The Far Side of the Dollar (1965)

[Mills College Library]

Fiction M135t 2016