Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Mysteries

The angry man Preface by Tom Nolan

Written in the middle 1950s, "The Angry Man" shows Ross Macdonald working with great assurance: a pro-and-a-half by now, and on the brink of even better things.

The first sentence pulls the reader immediately into Archer's narrative, and into his would-be client's nightmare. Throughout the text, the writer's technique is deft, his humor nicely wry, his symbolism striking.

Note thwarted Jerry, who neglects his pretty Zinnia to cultivate inhuman blossoms — only to end sprawled amongst those blooms, "a fine funeral display."

Note the contrast between the psychiatric social worker (Mr. Parish, a secular priest) in his shabby office, helping the needy and the truly sick ("my family") — and the Beverly Hills psychiatrist in his glossy quarters, catering to the neuroses of the idle rich.

Note the artful foreshadowings ("I can't turn the police on him… They'd shoot him down like a dog") that are also psychological clues, and that make second readings of Macdonald works uniquely rewarding.

Nelson Algren was an author important to Millar/Macdonald in the 1940s and '50s. The Ivory Grin (built from "Strangers in Town") was written under the influence of Algren works like The Man with the Golden Arm. The penultimate paragraph of "The Angry Man" may sound an echo of an Algren short story Ken Millar much admired, one where the hapless victim insists he was only going out to buy "A Bottle of Milk for Mother."

In "The Angry Man," Archer learns from Mr. Parish a little about how to see beyond a simplistic, good-and-bad worldview. In The Doomsters (which grew from this novelette), the detective — propelled by events in the author's own life — would learn a good deal more.

The Doomsters would prove a milestone on the road of Ross Macdonald's mature vision, a road he was already well along when he penned "The Angry Man."

Looking back in 1976 on the life of the fictional private eye who first came to the page pseudonymously as Joe Rogers in 1945, Ross Macdonald judged: "Archer just wasn't as well done as Spade or Marlowe. It took him a while to develop into anything substantial. The real change in him, I think, occurred in The Doomsters; he became a man who was not so much trying to find the criminal as understand him. He became more of a representative of man rather than just a detective who finds things out."{" 'Archer just wasn't as well done' ": Clifford A. Ridley, "Yes, Most of My Chronicles Are Chronicles of Misfortune," National Observer, July 31, 1976.}