“She spoke with the foolish wisdom of a woman who had no feeling for men and would always make the wrong decisions about them.”
The Goodbye Look, the fifteenth novel in the Lew Archer series, finds this tenacious PI hired by John Truttwell, a lawyer, to investigate a burglary that occurred at a friend and neighbour’s house. The Chalmers were on a “long weekend in Palm Springs,” when someone broke into their home and stole just one item: a gold box from a safe in the study.
Mr and Mrs Chalmers don’t want to involve the police, and obviously since the burglary was targeted to just one item, an insider job, or at the least an informed burglar are both strong possibilities. Mrs Chalmers is an odd one–she wants to make sure that Archer won’t “march off to the authorities and tell them all about it.”
The stolen box was supposedly a gift given to Mr. Chalmers’ mother by “an admirer.” And the box, according to Mrs. Chalmers, contains letters written by her husband, Larry, to his mother during the war. So in other words, the contents of the box has sentimental value. The box itself is an item of value.
Lew Archer always seems to stumble into dysfunctional families (this seems to endorse his bachelor life), so add the Chalmers to that list. Nicholas Chalmer, who is in his early 20s, has been under psychiatric care for “emotional problems.” Nicholas is missing according to his fiancee, John Truttwell’s daughter Betty, and Betty insists that something has changed with Nick lately. He’d been meeting an older woman, a Mrs Trask. Recently Betty saw Nick, Mrs Trask and another man at a restaurant.
Curiouser and curiouser, Betty’s mother is an unsolved murder victim. She was run down right in front of her home during yet another burglary at the Chalmers house more than 2 decades earlier. How is the burglary tied to that unsolved murder?
In this novel, Archer is very much the lone wolf:
“The life is its own reward,” I countered. “I like to move into people’s lives and then move out again. Living with one set of people in one place used to bore me.”
And as usual, he encounters women who’ve gone off the rails:
“She also had a quality that bothered me, a certain doubt and dimness about the eyes, as if she had lost her way a long time ago.”
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