The Ivory Grin by Ross Macdonald

The Ivory Grin by Ross Macdonald

(also known as Marked for Murder)

published 1952

 

 

Regular blog readers will know that I've been reading a lot by this author lately, because of my joining my friend Sergio Angelini for one of his Tipping my Fedora podcasts. Al the deets are here:

Tipping my Fedora – Ross Macdonald

 

This one was a surprise. In the podcast, Sergio and I have a take on Macdonald’s career, which is that the great years start with the 1959 Galton Case.  That's where he really gets into his stride, and goes on to produce his masterpieces. But The Ivory Grin, a good few years earlier, is sticking in my mind, it really has a lot to offer the discerning reader (yes I mean you, CiB person)

The book has a classic, but excellent, setup: a rich woman comes to hire Lew Archer to find her maid, who has gone missing with some of her jewellery. You don’t need to be a crime expert to know nothing is going to be that simple, but off he goes to look for her. The maid, Lucy, is black, and race relations feature in the book, grazing past from time to time: the small town he visits is very much divided on race lines. He finds her, he talks to people, and then suddenly, quite shockingly, someone is dead.

This is Una, the woman Archer is employed by:

I found her waiting at the door of my office. She was a stocky woman of less than medium height, wearing a blue slack suit over a blue turtleneck sweater, and a blue mink stole that failed to soften her outlines. Her face was squarish and deeply tanned, its boyish quality confirmed by dark hair cut short at the nape.

Impossible to find a picture of such clothes - it is actually, I suspect, meant to be something that sounds not right? You can find pant suits, and you can find furs, from 1952, but not together. However the image sticks in your mind, and it is showing something about the character: she is rich, transgressive and odd. (I was struck that if there were to be a film, Shirley MacLaine or Shelley Winters would be perfect casting.)

The missing maid is wearing

“A black-and-white checkered sharkskin suit. That’s how I know it was her. I gave her the suit a couple of months ago. She altered it for herself.”

Later the employer appears again:

Una appeared in front of it suddenly like a figure in a dream. A marijuana dream. She had on leopard-spotted slacks and a yellow silk shirt.

It’s a very complex plot indeed, but not hard to follow, and packed with incident. The small town where Archer finds Lucy is beautifully realized, very convincingly drawn.

This is the kind of sentence I love in Macdonald:

I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.

And this description of another woman:

Her eyes were the color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room. I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her…

Later a young man is being questioned about his driving Lucy around, including taking her to her motel:

“Did you go in [ie into the motel room]?”

“No, sir. I didn’t go in.”

 “Why not?... You could have gone in.”

“I didn’t want to. She didn’t want me to.”

The immediate thought is that there is a moral/respectability reason for this, but I was wrong:

“Lucy was passing, wasn’t she?”

“What if she was? There is no law against passing in this state.”

“Passing” means she is a light-skinned African American pretending she is white: she doesn’t want her darker boyfriend to arouse suspicions. For more on this see Nella Larsen’s haunting book Passing.

There is an awful moment in the book where the suspect in a murder is handcuffed to the corpse of the victim – it’s not clear if this is meant to be a normal situation.

Archer visits a railway hotel:

Four men were playing contract at a card table near the front window. They had the still faces and satisfied hands of veteran railroaders growing old on schedule.

Now, in a post  last year I talked about coming upon a cache of pictures of US railroads in the mid-20^th century, and wrote about how much I loved them. This one shows railway workers playing cards, and though it is Indiana, and there are five of them, and some of them are quite young, and the whole incident is highly tangential to the Archer book – well I obviously had to use it. Photo by Jack Delano, 1943, from the Library of Congress.

There is a plot point #spoilernotspoiler very similar to one in the Jacqueline Susann Trash Classic, Valley of the Dolls.

On meeting a character a second time in an unexpected place, Archer says this:

The back of my neck began to itch where the bitch goddess coincidence had bitten me before.

Well, any regular reader of the Archer books will be thinking his neck must be out in hives: the stories are remarkably full of coincidences, and there are no two cases that can’t be connected in some way. This is not a complaint, mind you, it’s endearing to see how Macdonald brings it about so often and so satisfyingly…

More clothes than often in these books: a black knitted turban is a valuable clue, 

and there are also a gold lame coat, top pic,  and a yellow dress with gold buttons.

 

 Definitely recommended - a haunting crime book.

White and black checked suit, NYPL