Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on ‘The Circuit of Guilty Time’)

“The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.” ― American-Canadian crime fiction writer Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Doomsters (1958)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on Parents and Children Out of Sync)

“People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody's living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn't make too much sense, and it isn't working too well.” — American-Canadian crime fiction writer Ross Macdonald (1916-1983), The Far Side of the Dollar (1965)

Beginning in the late 1950s, watching in horror with writer wife Margaret Millar the psychological difficulties experienced by their only child, Macdonald returned obsessively to the theme of generational conflict in his novels featuring Lew Archer.

Starting off as more or less a cynical private eye in the mold of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Archer grew increasingly introspective and sensitive as he solved cases involving the mutual wounds inflicted on the older and younger generations.

Macdonald’s work can be regarded as a time capsule for the “generation gap” that became a catchphrase of the Sixties. 

But in certain ways, the dilemma he described in the above quote remains, just shifting—and perhaps increasing—because of its move to the digital realm, where traumas are more transparent and exploitable than they were in the early postwar period.

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on the Physical and Moral Environment of Southern California)

“There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.” ― American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Drowning Pool (1950)

I can think of at least two American detective movies of the 1970s whose producers made a fatal mistake: taking their protagonist out of the setting that, in their original source, functioned almost as a character in its own right. One of these films was the 1978 remake of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which transplanted hero Philip Marlowe from the “mean streets” of Los Angeles and Hollywood all the way to London.

Something not quite as dramatic, but ultimately just as fatal, occurred with The Drowning Pool, when Hollywood made a second film featuring Ross Macdonald’s answer to Chandler’s hard-boiled but decent private eye, Lew Archer (renamed for the big screen Lew Harper). Paul Newman (pictured) played the character again, as he had done in Harper in 1965.

But, for some reason I don’t know and can’t imagine, the film’s creative team decided to set the movie in Louisiana rather than in Southern California, where Archer/Harper functioned as a probing conscience. It was a terrible choice. This film was nowhere near as good as its predecessor, and—perhaps thankfully—Newman never played the role again.

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on a Dangerous Youthful Passion)

"There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn't be, arson committed by children playing with matches." ― American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Instant Enemy (1968)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on the Cost of Money)

“ ‘What did the old man want?’

‘Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.’

‘But not you, eh?’ Her voice was sardonic.

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Money costs too much.’”―American mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Goodbye Look (1963)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on a Dangerous Character)

"A tall man in a wide-brimmed black hat emerged from the dark room. He was as thin as death. His face had a coffin look, skin drawn over high sharp cheekbones, blue down-dragging mouth. His pale glistening eyes were on me, and so was his black gun.” ― American detective novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Way Some People Die (1951)

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, as a Private Eye Thinks of Danger)

“I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.”― Mystery novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Moving Target (1949)

I was first exposed to Ross Macdonald and his most famous character, private eye Lew Archer, indirectly: through the Paul Newman film Harper. 

(The actor—pictured here, of course—in a bit of superstition, decided that a name with the letter “H” might work best, like his prior hits The Hustler and Hud, so the character was re-christened “Harper” for the movies. Amazingly, it worked at the box office once again.)

I thought the character was impossibly cool—flip and gutsy, and I couldn’t wait to see how he sounded on paper. When I finally did get around to Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, it was the later ones that I read first, where the author (and the character) plumbed the haunted lives of families in postwar Southern California—people with untold material prosperity but deep, empty emotional poverty. In the telling, Archer is considerably more thoughtful and introspective than his cinema embodiment.

A couple of years ago, I finally got around to reading the novel that inspired Harper, The Moving Target. Reluctantly, I had to agree with another one of my favorite mystery novelists, Raymond Chandler, that Lew Archer in this case seemed like a knockoff of his own hard-boiled, wisecracking, but incorruptible private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Nevertheless, I remain grateful to Harper for introducing me to the work of Macdonald—and to the novelist himself for showing how an author can move past an undoubted influence in forging his own unique themes, styles and characterization.

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on a Woman With Style)

"She had the kind of style that didn't go on with her make-up, and she was about my age. As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him, the women he likes are getting older, too. The trouble is that most of them are married." ― Ross Macdonald, The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962)