The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald

The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald

 

published 1971

 

When reading Ross Macdonald I like to identify a sentence or two I feel could come from any/many of his books – nearly always the closing of a chapter. This time the sentences are the final lines of Chapter 1:

Half-way down [the stairs] I paused and leaned on the handrail and told myself that I was descending into trouble: a pretty young woman with a likeable boy and a wandering husband. A hot wind was blowing in my face.

Series protagonist Lew Archer is getting involved with the people who live downstairs, and obviously no good is going to come of it. But that’s how he rolls…

This entry is unexpectedly colliding with real life – a key element is wild brush fires in California, which is happening in real life to a momentous extent as I write.

It feels strange to be reading about events 50 years ago: people in danger, houses about to be destroyed, who will leave and who will stay.

And as this is a crime novel: what might be uncovered. The fire here is in Santa Teresa – a fictional town, but one that Sue Grafton borrowed from Macdonald for her Kinsey Milhone alphabet books.

There’s a young mother, worried about her son – his father has taken him to see his grandmother, and this is in prime burning territory. The mother, Jean, asks Lew Archer for help.

I opened the door. Her hair was up, and she had on a short stylish multicolored dress and white textured stockings. There was blue shadow on her eyelids and carmine lipstick on her mouth.

 

One of the things that always interests me in US crime novels is that a description of a person often includes an estimate of their weight – in this case this is an ordinary person talking, not even a police officer or PI:

‘She’s a good-looking blonde girl, about my height, five foot six. Nice figure. Perhaps she weighs 115 pounds or so. Her eyes are a shade of blue.

I absolutely cannot imagine any UK book character giving an idea of weight in figures – partly because it would sound ridiculous: ‘she’s around 8 stone 3 pounds’. Perhaps the new ideas about fat-shaming will end this feature.

There is also the usual evidence regarding that much-vaunted idea that there is no class-consciousness or snobbery in the USA. Exhibit A from the family matriarch:

‘The Armisteads are nouveaux riches from down south – not my kind of people.’

Shortly afterwards the same woman has this to say about her daughter-in-law (who is not, btw, an Armistead):

‘I never did think that their marriage would last.’

‘Why?’

‘Jean is an intelligent girl but she comes from an entirely different class.’

 

Macdonald writes in a memorable and dramatic way:

All I could see at first were the narrow shafts of sunlight that came through the holes in the blind drawn over the window. They were thrust across the room like the swords of a magician probing a basket to demonstrate that his partner had disappeared

And later this

By the time I got to them, the station wagon was turning in the entrance to Haven Road, its headlights swiping like long paintbrushes at the tree trunks.

The vision of life in southern California is always compelling.

A wayward daughter:

Everything was going along smoothly. She’d been accepted at UCLA and she was on a good summer program – tennis and diving lessons and conversational French.

This girl’s room:

The bedroom furniture, ivory with gold trim, was matched by stereo and television sets and a girl’s work desk with a white telephone.

Then there’s a grape-stake fence – I had to look that up but it’s not particularly exciting

And another moment:

Beside the pool a woman with black hair and gleaming copper-colored legs was sitting in a long chair which concealed the rest of her. A portable radio on a table beside her was talking to her

 

In one way it’s the usual stuff: very readable, missing people, very sad. And with the fires and environmental concerns:

He belonged to a generation whose elders had been poisoned, like the pelicans, with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.

This refers back to an earlier comment:

‘Did you see the pelicans at Dunes Bay? They can’t have any more young ones, did you know that? Their bodies are poisoned with DDT, and it makes their eggs all break.’

-And I could imagine it coming over as bathetic or a hammered home metaphor, but instead it is bleak and touching.

And, weirdly, the book reminded me of the Meat Loaf/Jim Steinman song Lost Boys and Golden Girls, which could be the title for many a Ross Macdonald book, and very much this one. He was a great writer, one of the best.

Colourful young women from the Vivat Tumbler

Pool picture is from the Florida Memories collection.

Fire picture from the US National Archives, 1973