The Goodbye Look by Ross MacDonald

published 1969

 

 

Maybe with Ross Macdonald the thing is that they ARE all the same, but that’s what’s good about them? You know what to expect. 

‘Fog still lay in a gray drift across the foot of the town’ 

is the final line of one chapter, and you feel could have been moved to many another chapter throughout this book and his others. The same features turn up - lost mothers and daughters, intricate family/friend relationships, everyone turning out to be connected. Here we have families living across the street from each other, and some pretty horrible happenings, past and present, leading to what we would now call severe mental health issues. Cozy it is not. And the words that critics always use about the books - elegaic, atmospheric, haunting – are as true as ever. They are beautiful books, and MacDonald is a tremendous writer. There is a dream-like quality to them, though the dream is not a pretty one. These days I am surprised to find that if I want to read about a Southern Californian private eye (and, of course, I do) then it will be Macdonald and Archer rather than old favourites Chandler and Marlowe. To me these books have stood the test of time more convincingly than Raymond Chandler – and I never thought I’d be saying that.

The title of the book comes as  Lew Archer is questioning a witness:

‘…They had a funny look on both their faces. As if they really wanted to kill each other and be killed.’

I knew that goodbye look. I had seen it in the war, and too many times since the war.

Although the books are very much of their time in some areas, MacDonald has very good women characters: varied and interesting, good and bad. You would strongly feel that he was someone who really likes women, not always true of all his contemporary writers. Here is the determined student Betty:

I was beginning to understand the girl, and the more I understood the better I liked her. She had a serviceability that I had noticed before in widowers’ daughters.

Then there is the beautiful Irene, the doctor’s wife Moira (yes!) with the lost romance, and the excellent Mrs Shepherd in her ‘staid gray dress and a multicoloured Mexican apron’.

There is a mesmerising description of Archer and others watching home movies of a pool party some years before, connecting up all these people in happier times.

The projector whirred. Its quiet shotgun blast of light filled the screen with images. A large rectangular pool with a diving board and a slide reflected a blue old-fashioned sky. A young blonde girl with a mature figure and an immature face climbed onto the diving board. She waved at the camera, bounced excessively, and did a comic dive with her legs apart and kicking like a frog’s. She came up with a mouthful of water and spurted it at the camera. [The next person] on the diving board… walked to the end of it gravely, as if the eye of the camera was judging her. The black rubber helmet in which her hair was hidden made her look oddly archaic. She stood for quite a while with the camera on her, not once returning its stare. Then she bounced and did a swan dive, cutting the water without much splash. It wasn’t until she disappeared from sight that I realized how beautiful she had been. The camera caught her coming up, and she smiled and turned onto her back directly under it.

 

The book is full of such marvellous writing – like this about the MacGuffin of the lost chest full of secrets:

I was beginning to sense that the theft of the box was just a physical accident of the case. Any magic it possessed, black or white or gold, was soaked up from the people who handled it.

The plot was full of surprises and unexpected moments, and though I couldn’t always seem to keep all the different generations of the people in the book straight in my head,  that didn’t seem to matter. A highly recommended, excellent book.

Top picture shows Gloria Vanderbilt (talking of lost mothers and daughters) taken by Toni Frissell in 1966, from the Library of Congress. She could represent most of the women in the book.

A pool party in Florida in the 1950s.