“You can’t blame money for what it does to people, the evil is in people and money is the peg they hang it on.”
Southern California millionaire, Ralph Sampson may be loaded, but he’s hanging out with all the wrong people. PI Lew Archer is hired by Sampson’s disaffected, much younger second wife to find her husband. Not that Mrs. Sampson really cares what Ralph is doing or who he’s with, just as long as he’s not giving away any more money. In spite of a crippling injury, Mrs. Sampson expects to outlive her husband and intends to inherit the whole enchilada.
There was a wheelchair standing beside her but she didn’t look like an invalid. She was very lean and brown, tanned so dark, her flesh seemed hard. Her hair was bleached, curled tightly on her narrow head like blobs of whipped cream. Her age was as hard to tell as a figure carved from mahogany.
According to Mrs. Sampson, her errant husband is “not missing exactly, just gone off by himself.” She wants to know where Ralph is and who he’s with. On the eccentric side, Ralph has gone off on a bender before. Ralph’s sexually precocious daughter, Miranda, is very concerned about her father, but she’s still got time to dangle herself in front of Ralph’s hunky pilot, Alan. Meanwhile, Ralph’s lawyer and family friend Albert Graves is desperately in love with Miranda. It would be a somewhat incongruous match due to their tremendous age gap, and Albert knows he’s outgunned by Alan.
Archer takes the case, noting that Ralph may not even be ‘missing’ or in danger. It’s thought that Ralph may be in Los Angeles, and according to Albert Graves, Los Angeles “isn’t safe for an elderly lush.” Graves notes that Mrs. Sampson has “dominant motives like greed and vanity,” but he’s there more to give Miranda his support and keep an eye on his rival, Alan. The search takes Archer to Los Angeles, seedy clubs, and a religious retreat run by a corrupt guru. Mingling with Hollywood has-beens, Archer finds himself getting an aging actress drunk. He despises himself for it; it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. Ross Macdonald is an incredibly descriptive writer, a master of inventive similes, and in this novel, he creates the tawdry, cheap glamour of the low side of Hollywood. Archer is a man we want to hang out with. Who could refuse to ride shotgun?
“I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain, definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions. And talking too much.“
“Don’t stop.”
“I’m fouled up, why should I foul you up?”
“I am already. And I don’t understand what you said.“
“I’ll take it from the beginning. When I went into police work in 1935, I believed that evil was a quality some people were born with, like a harelip. A cop’s job was to find those people and put them away. But evil isn’t so simple. Everybody has it in him and whether it comes out in his actions depends on a number of things: environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece of bad luck, a wrong friend. The trouble is a cop has to go on judging people by rule of thumb and acting on the judgment.”
“Do you judge people?”
“Everybody I meet. The graduates of the police schools make a big thing of scientific detection, and that has its place, but most of my work is watching people and judging them.”
“And you find evil in everybody?”
“Just about. Either I’m getting sharper or people are getting worse. And that could be. War and inflation always raise a crop of stinkers, and a lot of them have settled in California.”
That quote–the motives behind evil actions–is certainly true here. Archer is a marvelous creation, a terrific narrator: world weary and sardonic, the nature of his cases takes into the very heart of toxic, twisted family relationships. He’s seen a lot, and in spite of this, he maintains his humanity–possibly because he maintains his independence. He seems to be self-composed and yet Miranda sniffs, there’s a edge of self-destruction there under the surface, and this emerges as they talk about driving at high speeds.
“Do you drive fast?”
“I’ve done 105 on this road in the caddie.”
The rules of the game we were playing weren’t clear yet. But I felt outplayed. “And what’s your reason.”
“I do it when I’m bored pretend to myself that I’m going to meet something. Something utterly new. Something naked and bright. A moving target in the road.”
His Futile Preoccupations ..... 
‘Toxic, twisted family relationships’ – yes, that’s very much Macdonald’s terrain. I love the Lew Archer novels and am delighted to see you reading this one, the first in the series. (They actually get better over time, so if you liked this one you’ll likely love the follow-on instalments.)
I’ve read The Zebra Striped Hearse and The Drowning Pool (See you reviewed the latter). I read the Zebra first and then thought I’d better go back and start at the beginning.
Excellent, aren’t they?
Philosophical chats about or while (or both) driving fast seem to come up a lot in some good oldies. James Cagney in “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” and Andre Breton’s Nadja come to mind. You could probably find enough of them for a nice coffee table book. The thrill of the automobile…
Now if I could just remember the name of that woman, author, mental patient, drug addict, rich girl , who wrote a great story about racing car drivers and her fascination with them… Barbarian something…? I think she’s being “rediscovered”
I read my last Archer novel earlier in the year – only the short stories left (and rereads). And the non-Archer books! I didn’t read them strictly in order, in fact I read this one quite late in the series by accident. Interesting to go back to the beginning. As they progress, the plots remain important, but more so because they build to awful moments of personal revelation for someone, rather than solutions. I haven’t read any Chandler in a long time, I might get one down and see how I like it post-Macdonald.