The Way Some People Die

Lew Archer #3

by Ross Macdonald

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Noir, Hard Boiled, Detective, Mystery Thriller

245 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1951

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

No sooner had Ross McDonald produced his first classic Archer novel ("The Drowning Pool"), steeped in ancient sins and family wounds, than he turned around and fashioned a completely conventional but equally effective private eye novel, filled with wandering daughters, vicious gunsels, flamboyant crime bosses, femme fatales, and Lew Archer too, thoroughly at home in the hard boiled environment.

The novel also contains some incidental cameos: a vibrant, garrulous old man on a porch, an alcoholic Hollywood actor too pretty and spineless for movies or life, the accomplished career woman who knows him and still loves him, and a divorced middle-aged woman on the rebound from a second marriage contracted days ago in Reno. Each of these characters is memorable and moving, giving us the sense of a rich, varied world beyond the lies and the gunfire.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

The man behind me reminded my right kidney of his gun. He had an office down the hall. Sometimes he was even in it. The dead girl didn’t look dead enough. It was depressing not to be able to hit him again. This was the fifth time. My second marriage lasted sixteen days. She gave me the twice over. I picked up his gun and put it in my pocket. I explained again. I leaned into an easy left and he went down hard enough. He half-lowered thick lids over his bulging eyeballs and the sharp pink point of his tongue lasted sixteen days. I explained again for the sixth time. Speed knew Johnny who was McCoy’s first wife’s pusher. But he didn’t know he knew him. That was where I came in. The gun was empty when I took it away. It wriggled like a worm. I’m glad I didn’t kill you, Archer, she said. That made two of us. The body behind the door was a problem. Her passionate mouth behind the door was the other problem. You’re losing your looks, I said. I explained for the seventh time. She didn’t like me, the cops didn’t like me, the mob didn’t like me, I didn’t like me. The thin girl the fat guy. I couldn’t make the connection. Dowser was Mosquito’s source. That was obvious. I dragged him to a sitting position. He wasn’t co-operative. I persuaded him for ten minutes, then I got tired. I explained for the eleventh time.

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes Lew Archer books attractive to me? Is it the vivid and precise descriptions of the people and locations (with a touch of irony)? Is it the fast developing plot? Is it the personality of the somewhat cynical but kind-hearted Lew Archer himself? Because we see all the events in the book through his eyes and he is the observer whose social commentary we can certainly trust.
I do not know exactly why I like these books - the magic of the author's literary talent is hard to define and explain.

[D. Pow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read this guy before today and that makes me sad. This is some of the finest crime fiction I've ever read and I wish I'd been reading him the last twenty years. It makes me sad that Ross Macdonald is practically forgotten now while crime-writers who couldn't carry his metaphorical jock strap are getting six figure Hollywood deals.

This book is crammed with murderous weirdos, sexy dames and gumshoe palaver. It's all delivered in a gorgeously lush, but never overdone, poetic style that makes Chandler and Hammett look like hacks. It's got sweaty, sun-kissed Southern California Ambience to spare but also has precise meditations imbedded under the surface of it's sure plotting that lay it out cold what it's like to be a thinking human being under duress(read: just fucking breathing at all) in 20th Century America.

File under: Classic. File under: Fuck all the Francophile baboons and ball-less Nietzsche reading navel-gazers who think that Genre can't rise to the station of true Literature, true art. This book is both heart-breaking and beautiful and is as entertaining as popular art can be. Not to be missed. Essential.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

"So far I was getting nowhere, but I felt good. I had the kind of excitement, more prophetic than tea-leaves, that lifts you when anything may happen and probably will." -- P.I. Lew Archer, on page 30

I'm glad the now-venerable fictional private investigator was feeling that excitement when beginning his latest case, because for much of this story - it's the third book out of approximately twenty or so - it was sort of a deadly dull affair to me. Starting with the classic hardboiled detective trope of being hired to find a missing young woman, the events curiously plodded along (even as Archer dutifully traveled up and down the California coastline to the seedy parts of various towns) with a plot twist or two which may strain an experienced reader's credulity. So I was disappointed by The Way Some People Die - especially since I often like author Macdonald's Archer-centric novels, although more so the later entries - but I suppose not every book in a long-running series is going to be a winner.

[Kiekiat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 2nd Ross Macdonald novel I've read. He's been on my "wish list" for years because I had read Hammett and Chandler and Lawrence Block and Patricia Highsmith, et al. Macdonald was usually highly-touted as part of the holy trinity, along with Hammett and Chandler. He also had/has his detractors who don't appreciate a private dick pondering Zeno and Parmenides. Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer, is, so far, a curious fellow. A former cop who was canned via the machinations of a fellow officer because he refused to go on the take, Archer comes across as a cerebral guy with a code of honor he lives by. He is not a charismatic figure, exactly, but more of a "get the job done" sort of sleuth who is not afraid to put himself in harm's way. Occasionally he offers deep insights about life and the nature of humanity that seem more like something Socrates would utter than an obscure private detective.

Macdonald (and Chandler) are both lauded for limning the seedy underbelly of Southern California and capturing its essence, to the degree such a thing is possible. The implication, similar to Nathaniel West's DAY OF THE LOCUST, is that while California may offer ample sunshine and beauty and interesting things to do, beneath its glossy veneer and Hollywood allure lies a crusty underbelly of mobsters and various ne'er-do-wells and con-artists of every stripe. I think the credit both writers get for their portrayals of the seamier side of Southern California is a bit overblown. A writer who cannot conjure up a sense of the place he's writing about probably shouldn't be published. Chandler and Macdonald were both quite familiar with the area and the notion that this supposed paradise has a seedy underbelly seems pretty obvious and not at all surprising or perspicacious.

By nature, I am not an "either-or" sort of person. I liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for example. So far, I'm liking Lew Archer as I get to "know" him and can appreciate that he goes about a case in a different, albeit not better, way than Chandler's Philip Marlowe. I have read that Chandler hated Macdonald and his novels and I don't know enough about this, yet, to know if this was due to a feeling that Macdonald was defaming the genre with his more cerebral detective or had some sort of personal animus against him?

THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE seems a pretty straightforward case compared to the first book of Macdonald's that I read (The Chill). That said, THE WAY SOME PEOPLE die has a sinuous and twisty plot and things are never what they seem. I'm getting the feeling that this "things are never what they seem" is a leitmotif running through all of Macdonald's books. Time will tell! The book is well-written with a smooth flow and the story's strength and weakness lies in the many characters that populate the book. Some of these characters are well-defined and some are integral but peripheral. Macdonald's plots are far "twistier" than Chandler's, but both writers seemed to share a dim view of humanity. Macdonald writes with an experienced cop's kind of wisdom about the potential in most people to commit heinous acts. Macdonald, to his credit, balances this potential by presenting a potpourri of characters, some power-grabbing and evil and some on the side of "right," however jaded they might have become. Some are in-between--but many of them are complex and not easily pigeonholed as either good or bad. I'll continue through Macdonald's oeuvre and perhaps submit further reviews determining if my initial views are correct or in need of alteration.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had a post-midnight feeling. My tongue was already furred with the dregs of a long bad evening. A criminal catechism ran on like a screechy record in my head. What? Blood. Where? There. When? Then. Why? Who knows. Who? Him. They. She. It. Us. Especially us.

That world-weary, cynical voiceover from the private gumshoe, providing us with a running commentary on the hero’s journey into the underworld. It gets me every time.
This third Lew Archer book couldn’t have a more classic opening gambit: the detective walks into a slightly rundown private house where an elderly woman asks him to find a missing person. If that missing person happens to be an alluring young woman with a fierce personality, all the better for us readers.

"Men have been after her since high school, like flies to honey. She’s a good girl, Mr. Archer, I know how good. But I was a handsome girl myself when I was young and I saw the pitfalls of the flesh. I want to know what has happened to my daughter.”

Somehow, it’s never a question of money with these tough-as-nails, street-wise, down on their luck sleuths. Unlike today, when it seems to me most of the plots are about gratuitous violence, revenge or ‘take-the-money-and-run’ heists, guys like Lew Archer are always in the game initially because something in the call for help pulls at their empathy strings. Later, when some crook or murderer tries to hoodwink or threaten them, it becomes personal, but personal in the sense of a quest for truth and justice, not for getting even.

I’m speaking in general terms here, because I don’t want to spoil the many surprises that wait for Lew Archer as he sets out from Los Angeles to San Francisco, down to Palm Springs and then to a ghost town in the middle of the desert called ‘The Oasis’.
This is the best episode so far for me in this series, and the good news is that you can start reading here because all of them, and there are more than twenty Lew Archer books published over several decades, are written as stand-alone cases.

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I watched the dim arid tundra sweeping by, dotted with cactus and gray sage like the ghosts of vegetation. “It looks like a sea floor. I like a sea floor with water over it, it’s more interesting.”
“It’s funny you should say that. The Gulf of California reached almost to here at one time.”

Ross MacDonald is as good at creating atmosphere as he is at internal monologues, quick repartee and social commentary. Maybe he is not as flashy as Chandler or Hammett, but his style feels mature, in control, powerful and even passionate, when the detective gets angry.

A teen-aged girl with heroin in her veins was the stuff bad dreams were made of.

Yes, from a simple missing person investigation, the case drops Archer in the middle of a drug deal gone bad. The death count starts to rise, while the elusive Galley / Galatea refuses to be pinned down, even after the detective manages to track her down.

It’s Ruth, the underage prostitute that Archer interrogates for clues, that pulled at my own heart strings even more powerfully than the troubles of the slippery Galley.

“They’ll taper you off.”
“How do you know, have you had it?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about. It turns you inside out. I was down on the beach last night and every time a wave slapped the sand it hit me like an earthquake, the end of the world. I lay back and looked straight up and there wasn’t any sky. Nothing but yellow specks in my eyes, and the black. I felt the beach slanting down under me and I slid off in the black. It’s funny, it felt as if I was falling into myself, I was hollow like a well and falling down me.”

Which brings me back to my earlier comment about motivations, back to that Raymond Chandler essay about the shopworn knight who must go down the mean streets of the night city [ "down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean... He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it." . Lew Archer is one of the best examples of this standard portrait that defined the genre. Here he is in his own words:

“I like to pretend I’m God. But I don’t really fool myself. It takes a murderer to believe it about himself. Personally, I’m just another fruit fly. If I don’t care what happens to fruit flies, what is there to care about? And if I don’t care, who will? It makes no difference to the stars.”

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I had several other bookmarks, about the use of dialogue, about how MacDonald ends the story in the very same place where it began, among the furniture in Mrs. Lawrence’s sitting room. , about the portrait of the ‘femme-fatale’ in classic hard-boiled novels. But none of them feels as good as that closing remark from the detective/justiciary, or as free of spoiler alerts.
With this third book, the whole Lew Archer series has climbed several places up in my list of priorities for unfinished series I’m hoping to continue reading, even as I feel overwhelmed by the constantly rising Mount TBR.

[Mohammed Abdikhader Firdhiye · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this novel is the best of the first three because Archer himself was the most interesting part of the novel. The detective story was calm,extremely well written. It was not predictable or tried too hard to be smart like some other PI stories. Archer didnt go from a wild scene to another. He just chased down the evidence with alot of legwork, smart thinking.

The most impressive part of the novel was how Ross Macdonald wrote intelligently about issues outside the PI story. Archer registered everything he saw around him and had frank comments about what he saw. He met alot of people in different classes. That he also thought about more important things than catching a killer made it a more rewarding read.

Lew Archer grew in my eyes from just another cool hardboiled PI hero to a more compelling character on his own. The first two books he was just another cool PI hero that was not ranked in the top in my fav PI heroes list.

[Carla Remy · Rating 4 out of 5]

10/2019

From 1951.
Archer takes a case searching for a missing woman. He finds her, then goes above and beyond, investigating a knot of drugs, boxing, boats and mobsters. And one extra bloody murder. A satisfying mystery, as is usual with Macdonald. To be honest, I did guess who the killer was, but the book was still satisfying.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first Ross MacDonald novel and another "why, oh why, have I never read this author?" There is a plot, and it's good, but the level of writing sets this apart, and above, most crime writers. There is crime noir style here, but one could never argue this is "style over substance" like a few of Hammett's works. Ross MacDonald just gets it right all around, especially the characters. Yes, we have many low-life Southern Californians here, but having lived in Southern California, many of these characters felt like they were just on the cusp of bottoming out: I think I had a few of these as neighbors and Archer has a bit of sympathy for them. Then again, we do have those characters who have hit rock bottom: Archer gets the really bad guys (or someone else does) in a plot that never for a moment lets up. And now, on to another Macdonald/Archer: The Barbarous Coast is already here on my 'to read' shelf at home.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stand out point of the first five books in the Lew Archer series, loaded with hot dialogue, fantastic descriptive passages, an interesting and twisty central mystery and the moment when Lew becomes his own man and not just a caricature written in homage to Hammett and Chandler.

This little passage happens very early in proceedings and is a great example of the kind of level MacDonald is at throughout, reaching something approaching a noir poetry at times, "the giving and receiving of money, its demand and its refusal, were Dowser's basic form of communication with other people. That and the threat, the blow, the inflicting of fear and pain."

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge Ross MacDonald fan and Lew Archer is one of my favorite private detectives.

In this mystery a woman asks Archer to find her daughter. The daughter works as a nurse but has run off with one of the patients.

This takes Lew on a trail of underworld crime, drugs, gang wars and a good surprise ending.

If you like mysteries, this one is sterling.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ross Macdonald has been hailed as the heir to Chandler and Hammett. He wrote in all 18 Lew Archer novels, the name of Macdonals's PI being in part a tribute to Sam Spade's partner. This is a 1951 Lew
Archer story that spans some 245 pages.
Archer, an ex-cop, works as a solo private op. This time he arrives at a house that didn't look like it had any money in it or ever would a again. Mrs Samuel Lawrence wants to hire Archer to find her daughter,
Galley, who has disappeared. Galley was fascinating to men. One look at her picture and Archer knew he'd never forget her face. Galley, a nurse by profession, has gotten mixed up with hoods, dope dealers,
and murder. Archer almost takes the fall for a few dead bodies as he chases this
case from the sea to desert and from Hollywood Boulevard to the Golden Gate Bridge. A well written hardboiled tale if there ever was one.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid entry in the series, if slightly less than engrossing than some of the other Archer books. The plot is a bit contrived, as if, perhaps, Macdonald had elected to attempt to make the storyline more compelling when it just wasn't.

A distressed mother, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence, hires Archer to locate her "man crazy" daughter, Galatea who has disappeared with a no-good hoodlum. Of course, such a straightforward task will soon become increasingly serpentine, with Archer following one lead after another in an effort to rescue what he thinks is a misguided young woman. To say much more about the action will spoil the plot, but know that the author has a twist or two in store for the reader. Discerning the true culprit might be easier than it should for some, but on balance, the reveal is still satisfying.

A solid three star novel from Mr. Macdonald, but frankly, less than his best.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fifty A Day And Expenses

At the outset of "The Way Some People Die" (1951), private detective Lew Archer is invited to a run-down old rooming house in Santa Monica, California where a widow in her fifties, Mrs. Lawrence, wants help in locating her apparently missing daughter. The daughter, Gallie, 24, is a registered nurse who, according to her mother, has always radiated sexuality and been irresistible to men. Mrs. Lawrence had last heard from Gallie three months earlier, in a Christmas card mailed from San Francisco.

Archer is skeptical about the case. After all, a beautiful 24 year old woman has her own life to live. He advises Mrs. Lawrence to call the police missing persons bureau if she is worried but that he would reluctantly spend a day on the case for "fifty a day and expenses." Mrs. Lawrence unhesitatingly forks over the money.

So begins what proves to be a "violent and twisted journey" through the criminal world of southern California. Before the story is over, five men will be dead, victims of greed and lust. The tangled story centers on a heroin gang which is shown at all its seedy levels from its leaders to its goons. The story also shows the victims of heroin, which Archer finds to be the worst and most cruel of all addictions.

The novel is replete with violence, greed, double-crossing, and shifts of identities. The head of the drug gang is a butter-milk drinking thug named Dowson. Some of the shifty low-life participants have appropriate nicknames such as Mosquito.

Things are not what they seem in the story as Archer takes the reader through the painstakingly described landscape of Southern California. It is a world of pinball hustles, failed actors, dingy bars and piano players, marinas, hospitals, lonely rooms and lonely people, tawdry wrestling exhibitions, heroin addicts and pushers, and more. The plot eventually shakes itself out. But the main interest of the story lies in its characters, descriptions of place, and Lew Archer's terse but sharp reflections on what he sees.

"The Way Some People Die" is the third of what eventually became a seventeen novel series of crime novels by Ross Macdonald (1915 -- 1983) with the enigmatic Lew Archer as the central character. Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym for Kenneth Millar. Many readers have come to regard the Lew Archer novels as classics in crime fiction. The Library of America has published eleven of the novels in three volumes in its prestigious series of American literary classics. This is the first novel included in the LOA compilation of four Lew Archer novels from the 1950s. According to the LOA, Macdonald said of this novel in comparison to its predecessors that it was "a more human book than either of the others, more original, not so slick, and a truer picture of our very messed-up society."

This is a dark story full of violence and corruption which reflects upon the loneliness and greed that the author finds not far below the surface in American life. I was moved by the book. I am looking forward to reading the remaining three novels in the 1950s LOA compilation.

Robin Friedman

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's 1952, Hot Cakes. This thing called H---you know, horse; smack; skag; junk; the spike; flea powder; in my neighborhood we call it The Albino Chili Powder---it's rampant. Lowlifes seem to be waxing lowlifes over it. Because that's what lowlifes do. This old bag that's stuffier than a turkey's worth of Stouffer's calls in Archer to find her daughter. Chick's got an awesome name: Galatea. Galley for short. Because of her I named my daughter Kinesthesia---Kitchenette for short---but that's a whole different story. Galley's gone and her mom fears she's taken up with the wrong crowd because that's what bad girls do. Turns out she's married to a mob guy named Tarantine. No, his first name isn't Quontin, but close enough. Let's call him Joe. A lot of people are after Joe. There's a cat named Dowser who wants Archer to find him and Galley, too. There's a pusher named Speed. That's how deterministic an amoral universe is. The only thing better would be a whore named Arounda World. But never mind: they're all after the money that bubbles up from the Intravenous Alka Seltzer.

So if you're counting this is No. 3 in the series. A nice departure from the corrupt family. A lot of sociology of crime here. The way it eats you up from the inside out until there's nothing left but a short rib that not even Lone Star Steak House would bother to serve. Feel free to make an ethnic point of it, too, if you want. Lots of tension between the Irish and the Itals (and I don't mean the Italics). Archer's sorta curious what gives people the rots but at the end of the day there's too many bodies to bury to get philosophical. Some people die from drinking too much sea water, others get their melons aerated. Doesn't matter how you die; it's the way what counts. If you're suckered into it by somebody whose evil you didn't take seriously, well, you're a sap. Because death loves a sucker.

Personally, I'm partial to Ruth. Sweet screwed-up waif with veins like a Mississippi back road. Some will say this one slips a tad too close to over-the-top. Only so many gimps and gimcracks and the next thing you know Kim Doubleday is telling you you're hammier than Jimmy Cagney. It's a tough line to find. Kinda like the line between good and evil.

Should be noted the title gets riffed on by Willeford years later with The Way We Die Now. Anything with Die in it's probably gonna be good, unless it's Die Hard or Die in Clean Underwear. Personally, I think I'll write one called Guess Who's Coming to Die Now...

As soon as I get off the Albino Chili Powder.

[Aditya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book in this consistently improving series that had me completely convinced that Macdonald deserved all the high praise that came his way. The casual misogyny and a tendency to audition for the title of 'budget Chandler' that The Moving Target (Archer #1) kept demonstrating is gone. Macdonald is much more of his own man in The Way Some People Die.

The metaphors most reminiscent of Chandler's style are still here but they are not being thrown around aimlessly like darts coming out of a drunk's hand in the basement of a forgotten bar. Archer at the start of the series was not sure of who he was. Did he posess Marlowe's morals or was he just a heel being shoehorned into the role of a protagonist ala Spade? He tried to have the best of both worlds and came across as generic tough guy whose whole persona was a genre convention rather than a real character. It was still entertaining but very much by the numbers. The Drowning Pool (Archer#2) improved him but he is much more real here. He shows a lot more sympathy and concern and had stopped talking like he had a contractual obligation to only deal in witty repartee. The clever dialogue, the lifeblood of any noir is still present but just like the metaphors they are used judiciously. They are used to support the narrative like they should be instead of basking in the glory of how clever they are.

The plot is where Macdonald shines the brightest - intelligent, twisted and completely devoid of coincidences that often plagued Chandler. The deeper I went into the story, the more rotten the characters and more vapid the haunts that Archer visits became. Macdonald has nailed down the atmosphere of utter moral decay and the lone detective struggling to find solutions to stop the rot.

The characters even the ones that show up for a chapter or two (like the young heroin addict that breaks your heart) are memorable but the best of the bunch are the ones that noir had made immortal. The femme fatale who wraps men around her fingers and throws them in the path of incoming bullets while keeping the schmucks convinced that it was their choice to jump. The gangster whose attempts at sophistication are as ridiculous as fresh makeup on a long dead corpse.

Chandler at his peak flowed more effortlessly but that is only the complaint I can raise against The Way Some People Die. 4.5/5 but because there were enough passages here with imagery vivid enough for me to come back and read it again, I will bump it up to 5 stars. Rating - 5/5.

[F.R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a cracking mystery tale, full of great prose, cracking dialogue and memorable characters. Actually I’ll do better than that, every character in ‘The way Some People Die’ feels real and rounded, as if they could stride out of this book and carry a whole novel by themselves. It actually makes me feel bad about the innumerable thrillers I’ve read which just make do with stock, cardboard characters – like eating tofu when you know there’s steak in the world.

Archer is hired to locate a missing daughter and soon finds himself involved with gangsters, drugs and murder. Okay that bare description of it may not make it sound overly exciting, but the base materials of any detective novels are much the same – it’s what the author does with them that matters. The author here is Ross MacDonald and this book sees him at his best. And MacDonald at his best deserves to stand with Chandler in the pantheon of America crime fiction.

Right from the off this is brilliant, here is the opening sentence:

"The house was in Santa Monica on a cross street between the boulevards, within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea."

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick!
What means "chorybantic"?
Trick question ...an apparent typo in my edition.
The word is actually "corybantic" --- meaning "wild; frenzied" as in:

Five or six revelers, all of them women, and hard cases by their looks, were standing around the piano in a chorybantic circle, moving various members in approximate time to the music.

Many times in this book I had to stop and look up certain words that I'd never before encountered in years of reading all types of fiction and non-fiction.
Macdonald has one of the richest vocabularies in the annals of detective fiction. He rivals Poe or Conan Doyle in the use of obscure words used perfectly.

Macdonald's forte is plotting and narrative -at least in this, his third Lew Archer novel.
However, at times his dialogue can seem a bit forced and unbelievable. Now, I've read hardboiled detective novels in paperback and hardback and in pulp magazines all my life and in so doing, I've come across some wacky, antiquated and just plain lost-to-time slang and lingo but no one can hold a candle to Ross Macdonald when it comes to odd exchanges between characters.

The following exchange between Archer and two policemen (in my perhaps misguided opinion) is rich in outlandishness and tomfoolery:

"Archer?" one of them said. "Mr. Lew Archer?"

"You have me. Hearthstone of the Death Squad, I presume." I was running short of elan. "Accompanied by Deathstone of the Hearth Squad. Where's Squadstone of the Death Hearth?"

"I'm Sergeant Fern," said First Policeman. "This is Sergeant Tolliver."

"Pronounced Taliaferro, no doubt."

Second Policeman said: "It's pretty late to be making corny jokes, isn't it, Mr. Archer?"

"Bloody late. Can't this wait until morning?"

"Lieutenant Gary said to bring you in whenever you showed. He wants to talk to you now."

Hearthstone of the Death Squad is a reference to an Old Time Radio Show character that aired on CBS from 1951-1952 alternating with The CBS Mystery Theatre.
The rest is ancient Greek to me.

Now, maybe I'm just being picky because none of the dialogue Macdonald writes is as dopey as what you'd find in a Mickey Spillane "Mike Hammer" novel but sometimes the dialogue gets a mite clunky.

But the writing and the plots and the plot-twists are just perfect. Especially the narrative.

The long black car rode heavily and fast. My companion sat in one corner of the back seat with his gun on his knee. I sat in the other corner and thought of a brigadier I'd known in Colon during the war. His hobby was hunting sharks in the open sea, with no equipment but a mask and a knife. I used to run his speedboat for him sometimes. Nobody on his staff could figure out why he did it. I asked him about it one day when he nearly got himself killed and I had to go in after him. He said that it gave him background for dealing with human beings. He was a very shy man for a general.

Archer is hired by a little old lady of modest means to find her beautiful daughter ...a perfect girl, and drop-dead gorgeous. A simple job for Archer. But soon he's elbow deep in murderous companions, dope fiends, and round-heeled women.
It's every bit as good as the first two entries but the last third of this novel is better than both of the previous entries combined. There are some ingenious twists in the plot I never saw pulling up the drive.

I enjoyed myself and I think you would, too.
Highly Recommended.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

During my college years, I once went an antique bookstore in Copenhagen to look for bargains, as soon as I saw it was having a sale. Saw a ton of Ross Macdonald's novels about the philosophical private detective Lew Archer and his journeys through the darker sides of post-WW2 California, and bought as many as I could carry. (approximately just over half of the ones Macdonald wrote) They have since become my personal gold standard for the 1930's-1950's American hardboiled detective novel genre, my two favourites so far being ”The Way Some People Die” and ”Find a Victim”.

”The Way Some People Die” starts with a middle-aged suburban woman hiring Archer to track down her daughter, who ran off with a hotrod-driving juvenile delinquent of the type Tom Wolfe got famous writing about. This assignment leads Archer on the trail of a heroin smuggling ring, resulting in some of my favourite writing I have ever encountered from Macdonald. An eerie chapter set in a ghost town somewhere in the Southwestern US stands out in particular. "The Way Some People Die" also makes an interesting compare-and-contrast experience with Wm. Burroughs' ”Junky” which provides similar condensed documentary-level insight into 1950's drug culture but from a very different perspective.

All of this, of course, builds up to a convoluted climax with a dizzying number of fake identities being exposed and criminal conspirators double-crossing each other. The closest point of comparison I can think of is Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories with an important difference: The characters in Hammett's books all know that their society is a mess, whereas Macdonald did the entire ”rotten underside of a society that appears prosperous and happy on the surface” contrast better than almost every other author I have seen go for that theme.

Macdonald's authorial voice helps, his signature style being an odd combination of sarcastic quipping and introverted melancholy. That requires a high level of writing finesse to pull off in a satisfying manner at all, let alone as well as Macdonald does here which perfectly fits the overall theme here. I believe TV Tropes calls this atmosphere a ”Crapsaccharine World”.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

Bottom line: ”The Way Some People Die” is among my favourite detective novels I've ever read up there with Dashiell Hammett's ”The Glass Key”, Jim Crumley's ”The Last Good Kiss” and Peter Høeg's ”Smilla's Sense of Snow”. If the above description of the plot and writing style sounds appealing, you should read it as quickly as possible.

[Joe Nicholl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ross Macdonald is my favorite author...hands down. His Lew Archer series is the best in P.I. crime-fiction imho. Yes Macdonald pinched & borrowed from Chandler, but who hasn't...and Macdonald took the genre to new literary heights. This is the fourth or fifth time I've read The Way Some Some People Die (1951) and like all of the Archers it was as fresh as the first reading. I would put The Way Some Some People Die near the top of the early novels along with The Ivory Grin. It's way better the the previous book, The Drowning Pool (why Paul Newman ever made a film of this novel I'll never figure out...he had many more, better, Archers to choose from...). The Way Some Some People Die is exciting, lot's of action & angst, travels through-out California, the usual complicated & layered plot that keeps you on your mental toes...a strong conclusion (although a bit on the verbal side)...just a real good early Archer. In fact, after the top tier Macdonalds, the "Classics", those being The Zebra Striped Hearse, Black Money, The Galton Case, and Sleeping Beauty...I would put The Way Some People Die in a strong second tier along with The Chill, The Ivory Grin, and the very underrated The Wycherly Woman...-I wanted to mention...this reading I pictured the lead female character, Galley, as a Gene Tierney from Leave Her To Heaven...a cool, beautiful brunette, smart, sometimes sassy, can win you over in 30 seconds, and beneath it all bat-f--k-crazy Ha!...-Yeah, The Way Some Some People Die is a strong early Archer...I recommend it and rate it 4 outa 5 Stars....-I also wanted to mention...about five years ago I read all the Archers in the order they were written...I started with The Moving Target and finished with The Blue Hammer....it took a little over a year. I would read an Archer, then read five other books, then hit another Archer, and so on...It was probably the best reading experience I've ever had...you might want to do the same...I'm now going back and reading my favorites...Yeah, Ross Macdonald is a great writer.

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nursery Crimes

The Way Some People Die, published in 1951, was Ross Macdonald’s thirda Lew Archer novel, and my first. It wasn’t Macdonald’s last Lew Archer novel, and it won’t be mine. Once again, it was one of those fine editions from the Library of America, the ones with the ribbon page marker, that attracted me towards a writer I had never read anything by before, and once again, it worked out well.

In The Way Some People Die, private investigator Lew Archer is hired by a certain Mrs. Lawrence to find her daughter Galatea, “Galley”, Tarantine, who works as a hospital nurse and has always been her mother’s pride and joy. What seems to be another simple missing person case, so much so that Archer at first does not want to have anything to do with it, soon develops into a journey into the darkness of heroin trafficking as well as into the even deeper darkness of the soul of a woman who seems to thrive on the notions other people, including her own mother, have of her. As the mythical Galatea, the femme fatale in this hardboiled thriller, is all beauty without but little humanity within.

Like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, has a special gift of painting with language and of indulging in rough-and-ready repartee. His next novel I am going to read will have me keep a slip of paper and a pen ready to gleam some of the poetical or witty passages that come up because they are certainly worth it.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike the recent Thompson book The Grifters (set in the same time period and locations) which I found a bit too Dostoevsky-like, Ross MacDonald delivers well crafted, excellently plotted novels that leave one little to doubt as to the skill of this author. Many a writer of mystery/crime novels have MacDonald on their favorites reading list (I researched this, and in fact came to MacDonald because of this).

Unlike Burke who brings a certain sense of literature to his Robicheaux novels, MacDonald's Lew Archer series are straight-forward, hard boiled mystery/detective novels all the way. Just when you think you could use a little dialogue, MacDonald delivers. Just when you think you know what'll happen next, MacDonald dispels everything you thought you knew. Just when you think you could use a bit more exposition, MacDonald delivers finely honed sentences that make the novel come alive in your mind. The pacing of his style is superb, timed just right, delivering punch bowls of satisfaction to sip from.

Lew Archer is a curious private eye, seeming to shun involvement with women though he is attracted to them which leaves tension in the minds of the reader. Women often are the culprits in his novels and Archer seems to have a sixth sense about them, providing both comfort and a hefty dose of suspicion where it comes to dealing with the dames. He has a good relationship with the various police forces (Arches used to be a cop), often teaming up with law enforcement and so unlike the traditional rivalry between the private eye and the police in other detective novels. Lew Archer delivers justice, every time for both the private citizens and the police forces with whom he works.

I highly recommend reading the Lew Archer series. And for those reading this review...if you've read this review, you've read all the Lew Archer reviews.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic noir novel featuring Lew Archer. MacDonald is a masterful writer every bit as good as Chandler. The dialogue in this one practically crackles, and the characters are not to be forgotten. They just don't write them like this anymore. If you like your private eyes hard-boiled and tough, this one is for you. Highly recommended.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Lew Archer more than a decade and half ago, in a hardcover collection named "Archer at Large", followed by the Crippen and Landru 'rediscovery' of 'The Archer Files'. He had appeared to be one of those rare knights going down the mean street in search of truth & justice.
I had liked him.
And then, befitting the hardboiled way of life depicted in all those classics, I had gone past him. But I didn't forget him.
I couldn't forget him.
Finally, after a looooong time, I rekindled our mutual acquaintance, and fell in love with the writing of Ross Macdonald once again.
What was the story about?
A worried mother hires Archer to find out her daughter. She is not coming home. She is not writing letters for several months.
And malicious rumours abound regarding the company she keeps.
Archer considers the whole thing dubious, and goes ahead merely to shake his client off by showing that he had tried.
Then things start happening. Interesting people come to the picture. Archer gets beaten physically. Nobody tells the truth.
Murder takes place.
Amidst all these tumultuous churning of human pain and misery, Archer keeps his torch burning, looking for truth, and justice.
He finds truth. But justice?
Nah! It's all about the way some people die.

If you love mystery, this is a must-read. If you like a human drama being narrated with savagery & love, but in exquisite English, this is a must-read again.
Highly Recommended.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hallmarks of a good PI:

1. Has been disillusioned by past experiences in either the police force or the military (double points if he's been disillusioned by both).

2. Experiences hot flashes at the thought of meting out Justice (with a capital J), is wholly and unrepentently self-righteous, and yet can see more shades of gray than a color-blind sketch artist.

3. Speaks "Privatese," a language almost entirely composed of overblown similes and metaphors, and peppered with Class A reparte and banter. It's a fluke of the dialect--the more dangerous the situation, the snappier the speaker's dialog.

4. Has friends in very low *and* very high places.

5. Is a sucker for several classes of female: a woman in a tight dress and tall heels, a young girlchild who's hard up with no place to go, and someone's downtrodden mama.

6. But not such a sucker to forget that all women are the source of every good man's problems. Devious, lying, succubi--all of them.

7. Is equally equipped to take and give harsh beatings.

8. Is on nobody's side but his own.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The love child of Raymond Chandler… pulp fiction at its finest.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, there's not much of a mystery here other than bringing some details into focus. Oh, there are Chandler-like plot convolutions, but Lew always keeps his on the ball, peeling away the lies, correcting his assumptions, identifying the necessary pieces to the puzzle. Anyone who is moderately read in the genre is going to spot the real killer early on. What makes this novel special is the atmosphere, vivid characters, and snappy dialogue. Cracking wise in a Macdonald novel always sounds more authentic. Published in 1951 The Way Some People Die must have been quite a shocker. Heroin, murders, mobsters, sex, and none of it too polished. Rough and raw and California mean. Lew is hired by a mother to find her missing daughter (and wild child), who may have ran off with a small time gangster. That's probably all you need to know.

[Ron Chicaferro · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read a Ross Macdonald Lew Archer novel. This story is exciting and will keep you tied to the book. The Lew Archer character is terrific - after all, Paul Newman played him in a couple of movies. Archer is a former cop, and his training is very evident. This story is about stolen money and heroin. It's not for the faint hearted. There are people killed and Archer has trouble keeping up with who the players are. And you will be amazed at how some people die!

[La Lectora · Rating 2 out of 5]

La historia no es interesante ni original , la trama es muy liosa, hay demasiados personajes, las descripciones y ambientaciones son largas y la escritura, aunque buena, tiene bastantes menos párrafos que llamen la atención que los libros anteriores…Lo mejor el humor cínico del protagonista y el final inesperado pero el resto ni intriga ni entretiene.