The Archer Files

ARCHER IN MEMORY
A Biographical Sketch by Tom Nolan

“You must tell me the story of your life,” a woman he’d just met dared Los Angeles private-detective Lew Archer in 1964, when the L.A. investigator was nearing his personal half-century mark.

“I started out as a romantic,” Archer shot back, “and ended up as a realist.”[3]

He was half-joking, but there was truth in that one-liner. Lew Archer, in the course of a thirty-year professional life, moved away from a Technicolor-vision of himself as a sort of Sunset Strip culture-hero, and into a life-sized portrait, in muted tones, of a much more ordinary man. As a person, though, he grew from a rather brash if self-deprecating wise-guy into a poetically observant and almost religiously empathic human being.

All our knowledge of Lew Archer’s personal history comes from the elegant and elaborately written detective stories of Ross Macdonald, the Santa Barbara, California, author who served as Archer’s authorial amanuensis from 1946 until 1977. Any life-account of Archer is necessarily based on revelations gleaned from these admittedly fictionalized dozen short stories, eighteen novels, and a few other fragments. Out of such scattered facts and hints, though, may be constructed a sort of impressionistic biographical sketch – one which, like a private-detective’s case notes, mixes a few verifiable truths with a fair number of plausible deductions.

—

Lewis A. Archer was born in Long Beach, California, on June 2,[4] probably in the year 1915.

One of his earliest memories was of holding his father’s hand and taking his first wading steps into the Pacific Ocean that he would love to swim in and look at all of his life.[5]

By 1920, Lewis was attending grade school in Oakland, where a favorite treat was the fried-potato chips bought at a nearby lunchroom and eaten out of greasy newspaper wrappings. Cracking walnuts open was another happy childhood memory. And Lewis was fascinated by the stereopticon he found in his mother’s great-aunt’s attic, with the sepia-tinted glimpses it gave of a vanished Union Pacific world.

Except for that brief time in Oakland, young Lew was raised in Long Beach, within walking distance of the waterfront. He said little or nothing in later life about his parents – an indication perhaps of an influence too ordinary to mention, or more likely of memories too painful to reveal.

He was more forthcoming about two other relatives who helped form his personality. One was his uncle Jake, a prize-fighter “who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith, to no decision.”[6] A quarter-century after meeting him, Lew could no longer recall what Uncle Jake looked like, but: “I could remember the smell of him, compounded of bay rum, hair oil, strong clean masculine sweat and good tobacco, and the taste of the dark chocolate cigarettes he bought me the day my father took me to San Francisco for the first time.” Told as an adult that he fought well, Archer boasted: “I was taught by pros.” Uncle Jake was the first of several veteran battlers who’d instruct Lew in the finer points of how to slip a punch, stay on your toes, lead with your left, and throw a combination. But not every Archer saw the value of such training. “My mother never kept [Uncle Jake’s] pictures,” Lew remembered, “because she was ashamed to have a professional fighter in the family.”

Archer’s mother, a Catholic, took him instead to visit his grandmother: the other relative who became a formative figure to him. Very soft-spoken and highly religious, this woman lived in the picturesque old town of Martinez, in Contra Costa County, where she dressed in “crisp black funeral silks”[7] and displayed a piety which embraced both Roman dogma and native superstition (she read tea leaves). On her bedroom wall was a motto she herself had stitched, which reminded: “He is the Silent Listener at Every Conversation.”

Perhaps to please this woman, Lew had been named for Lew Wallace, the soldier-author of the greatly popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.[8] His grandmother, Archer later said, “had marked me for the priesthood, but I…slipped away under the fence.”[9] Nevertheless, the fear of God she instilled in the boy was the beginning of his moral life. His later accounts of Southern California crimes would flicker with Dante-esque glimmers of infernal depths, purgatorial slopes and hovering souls. Archer would learn no Latin in school, but he’d never forget the Latin words of his childhood prayers: Ora pro nobis – pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

So he began to swing like a gymnast between two emotional spheres: the glamorous-seeming world of aggressive action and the sere oasis of spiritual humility. And, perhaps, between his father and his mother.

One family member must have instilled in Lew an early love of stories, for later in life Archer told so many stories so well. A striking characteristic of those tales is their frequent descriptions of people through animal imagery (“He looked at her sideways, swinging his head like a bull.” “She turned on him like a hissing cat.”). Might it be that some relative had the habit of sitting Lew down and making up fables for him in the oral tradition, cloaking real-life people in the guise of animals?

At the same time, the boy’s eyes must have been opened to an awareness of the entire natural world – so alive was he, in every story he helped create, to the trees and plants and birds Southern California displayed in lush profusion. Included in that awareness were the less-beautiful predators – especially rats, of which there must have been no scarcity in the waterfront-adjacent Long Beach neighborhood where Archer grew up. A rat scurries briefly through almost every Lew Archer book, sharp-toothed symbol of a spoiled paradise.

The then-silent movies were a great source of entertainment for Lew as a child. Along with most boys of six, seven, or eight, he loved cowboy pictures at the Saturday-afternoon matinees featuring such heroes as Fred Thompson and Tom Mix; but his favorite serials were the adventures of an English police detective, Inspector Fate of Limehouse,[10] played by the now-forgotten American actor Raymond Campbell.

Certainly Lew learned to read at an early age. The avid reading of books was a habit Archer continued until he died. It makes sense to assume one of the first “grown-up” volumes he tackled was namesake Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, a landmark bestseller that combined theological concerns with high adventure – and which was also, not incidentally, an account of a man falsely accused of plotting murder.

Reading for pleasure was one thing; doing well in school, quite another. There’s no indication that young Lew Archer, much engaged in such physical pursuits as football and track and fishing, was an especially good student. He was intimidated by female teachers, for one thing: “tall women behind desks,” like the vice-principal of Wilson Junior High, “who disapproved of the live bait I used to carry in the thermos bottle in my lunch pail, and other ingenious devices.”[11]

And there were other distractions – such as the enchanting girl he used to follow home from junior high. (“I never did work up enough nerve to ask her for the privilege of carrying her books.”[12])

By the time he reached high school, such distractions had proliferated, even as they stretched farther out of reach: beautiful rich girls in soft wool coats buttoned up to their soft chins, “the girls with oil or gold or free-flowing real-estate money dissolved in their blood like blueing.”[13]

If such girls noticed Lew Archer at all, it was as an object of condescension. Long after leaving Long Beach, he’d recall, he was plagued by a realistic recurring dream:

There were worse fates chasing Lew Archer through adolescence than the prospect of flunking high school. “The teens were my worst time,” he later judged.[15] An irreconcilable rift grew between Lew and the possibly abusive adults closest to him. One day, he remembered decades later (in one of only three printed references ever made to his male parent), with anger stinging his eyes and clenching his fists, “I took the strap away from my father.”[16]

After that, it seems, Lew was on his own – free to cruise the boulevards of Long Beach all night in a model-A Ford “hot-roadster,” to hang around drive-ins, where the air was thick with “the blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease”;[17] to find a “rough and forlorn” excitement in the company of other hot-rodders, the sound of whose cars (“whining, threatening, rising, fading”) “spoke to something deep in my mind which I loved and hated.” And he roamed beyond Long Beach, sharing “joy-rides and brawls with the lost gangs in the endless stucco maze of Los Angeles.”[18]

He learned dubious skills: how to force a Yale lock, how to break into an automobile, how to hot-wire a car’s ignition. A working-class boy at the height of the Depression, an alienated son full of righteous anger, Lew was headed down a bad road. He stole goods, money, and cars. He was, in his own later assessment, “a street boy…gang-fighter, thief, poolroom lawyer…I was a frightened junior-grade hood in Long Beach, kicking the world in the shins because it wouldn’t dance for me.”[19]

Luckily, he was apprehended.

As he revealed in a 1958 work:

Scared out of a life of crime, Archer still had to make a living. And he had to figure out things mostly on his own, for “people started dying” on him – maybe one or both parents, no doubt his grandmother, possibly his uncle Jake. After high school, he took a seasonal job to buy some time and sort out his thoughts; and he found that being a self-sufficient adult might have consolations:

“When I was seventeen I spent a summer working on a dude ranch in the foothills of the Sierra. Toward the end of August, when the air was beginning to sharpen, I found a girl, and before the summer was over we met in the woods. Everything since,” he concluded in the 1960s, “[has] been slightly anticlimactic.”[21]

Back in Long Beach, Lew confronted his options. A big earthquake hit his home town in 1933, when Lew was about eighteen. Maybe it jolted him into college – and right back out of it; Archer’s attempt at higher education “hadn’t worked out.”[22] It’s possible he boxed in some Golden Gloves matches, but professional prizefighting was not for him.

Perhaps blows gotten in the ring, though, jarred loose memories of Inspector Fate of Limehouse, the English copper whose silent-film adventures meant so much to an eight-year-old Lew and who now, oddly or not, came to mind as an inspiration. Might Inspector Fate have merged in Lew’s imagination with the alcoholic Long Beach cop who’d rescued him from a life of crime?

In any case, Lew Archer had a brainstorm. In 1935, at the age of twenty, he applied for a job with the Long Beach police department; and he was hired.

—

As a rookie officer in the middle 1930s, “new to the harness,” Archer had a willing spirit. He was eager to succeed. He worked long hours and showed initiative. His instincts were good, and he was persistent. He earned quick promotion.

But the higher he rose in the ranks, the less he approved of how things worked. “The police mind likes simple, obvious patterns,” is how Archer put it later[24] (how different this would be from the mind of the private investigator!). A likely suspect became, for cops, the only suspect. Archer saw men, in Long Beach and in L.A., railroaded on skimpy or circumstantial evidence – sometimes all the way into the gas chamber.

And his superiors didn’t like complaints. Archer’s job seemed to have as much to do with preserving the status quo – in the p.d., as well as in society – as it did with crime-fighting. (Not that civilians were much grateful for the job he did. Archer felt the snobbery of those who didn’t want cops at their parties.) To get ahead on the force, you had to be a bit of a brown-nose; and Archer was still enough of a rebel that he couldn’t stand “podex osculation,” as he’d euphemistically put it.[25]

But that wasn’t the worst part. He ran into dirty politics – on the street and in the office. Often the facts as he knew them didn’t match the official version. And when he reached a certain level in the cop hierarchy, he found he was expected to take a monthly bribe from a certain local honcho.

It was presented as a sort of income supplement: “Look, I know you fellows don’t make enough money…” That was true, and another cause for legitimate complaint – but no excuse for corruption. Archer, the reformed junior-grade hood, was shocked and offended. Soon he was more than that. When he wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut, Schneider had Lew forced out of his job.[26]

In later years, Archer sometimes told people that he’d quit the police out of principle; but the fact was, as he admitted at least once, “I was fired.”[27]

Archer left the Long Beach police after five years, with the rank of detective-sergeant – interestingly, the same rank held by the cop who’d turned Lew’s teenaged life around.

When one door closes, another opens, as some used to say. On this occasion, Lew Archer saw the doors being moved by the hand of his old silent-movie friend Inspector Fate. “When the cops went sour,” Lew later recalled, “the memory of Inspector Fate…helped to pull me out of the Long Beach force.”[28]

Lew could still aspire to the ideals instilled in him by the adventures of that British sleuth in the Long Beach movie house of his youth. Even if he was no longer a policeman, Archer could still be an investigator: a private investigator.

—

“Most private detectives come out of police work,”[29] Archer knew. Private detectives were in the public eye in the late 1930s: as characters in pulp-magazine stories and in motion pictures; and in real life, as protectors of rich or famous people, as lawyers’ investigators, and as auxiliary cops in these years of frequent labor confrontations.

It was through such a dispute on the San Pedro docks in 1937 or ’38, it seems, that Lew Archer – apprenticed, perhaps, to a private investigator named Al Sablacan – first broke into the p.i. game. Longshoremen were consolidating their turf then, and shippers were guarding private property; both sides tussled to work out a system of binding arbitration. It’s not clear what role Archer played in these events, but violence was involved. Later in life, he’d speak of having a bent rib, “where a goon had stamped me back in 1938 on a San Pedro dock.”[30] And at this time, apparently, he took an advanced course in the education begun at the hands of his uncle Jake: “A Finnish sailor on the San Pedro docks…taught me how Baltic knife-fighters blind their opponents,”[31] he said – by slashing them across the forehead so that blood ran into their eyes.

When it was all over, Archer received a Special-Deputy badge from the L.A. sheriff, “for not particularly good conduct.”[32] (Private-eye Archer carried this badge for years, and flashed it whenever he wanted to pretend official cover.) At twenty-four, he was already acquiring a reputation.

—

But the sort of job he was most often given to do, by Sablacan and others, was divorce work – a far cry from the kind of adventurous cases he’d imagined. What would Inspector Fate think of him now? Rather than catching crooks and righting wrongs, Archer for the most part was “peeping on fleabag hotel rooms, untying marital knots, blackmailing blackmailers out of business” – and in general, peering “through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”[33]

At least he could take a sort of pride in completing assignments, and in supporting himself. In his free time (of which he may have had an abundance), he made efforts to fill the large gaps in his formal education. He became an even more ardent reader. Among the many writers whose works he’d show knowledge of, through the years, were Dostoevsky, Capote, James Fenimore Cooper, André Gide, Nelson Algren, Plato, and Dante. (“You’ve read Dante, have you?” a man in the 1960s asked him, in some surprise. “I’ve read at him,” Archer replied.)

Maybe he signed up for extension classes at a nearby college, such as UCLA. Archer acquired some familiarity with the terms and figures of modern psychology (Karen Horney, Rorschach tests, gestalts). He liked paintings and over time showed a considerable knowledge of the visual arts, from the Herculaneum murals to Henry Moore to Henri Matisse. (Lew was especially taken by a Paul Klee work showing a figure in a geometric maze; it seemed symbolic of so many suspects and victims a detective pursued, not to mention the detective himself: “The man was in the maze; the maze was in the man.”[34]) He enjoyed music, in person and on records, especially traditional jazz. Poetry didn’t interest him much – though his own descriptions of people and things were often incisively poetic.

His eventual vocabulary was impressive and contained such autodidactic trophies as corybantic, gauleiter, comitatus, coracle, tetany, and matins. Off and on, he played chess (the autodidact’s game of choice). Sometimes he went to La Jolla or to San Onofre with old buddies, for the surf or to snorkel. Sometimes he bet on the horses at Santa Anita. He still fished. He liked to golf. Most of all, he loved to swim in the Pacific Ocean he’d first waded in with his father in Long Beach, so many years ago.

Here’s how he’d describe the pleasures of such an ocean swim, a few years later:

Such was Lew Archer’s life, with its frustrations and small pleasures, in December of 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II. Like millions of other U.S. males, Archer went into the service – in his case, the Army.

—

Given his background, he thought himself well-suited for Intelligence; and the powers that be agreed. Archer served – mostly in the South Pacific, then briefly in Europe – under a colonel named Peter Colton (who later became the Los Angeles D.A.’s senior investigator). Lew himself earned the rank of lieutenant colonel[37] – which mainly gave him the right, he’d note drily, to take orders from a brigadier general.

In a way, war was a lot like civilian life, lived at a much more intense level. And if he squinted, out there in the South Pacific, Lew Archer could almost see the L.A. jungle. Later he’d tell the story of a brigadier he met in Colon (“a very shy man for a general”), whose hobby was hunting sharks in the open sea with only a mask and a knife: “He said that it gave him background for dealing with human beings.”[38]

War being an extreme condition, Lew acquired extreme memories, even some good ones – including, at an abandoned island staging-point in the far west Pacific, more stars in the brilliantly clear night sky than Archer had ever seen in his life.

Also good to remember was a liberated Paris.

On the far-minus side, there was Okinawa, where Archer was present on the ground during that island’s “green and bloody springtime.” [39] The experience seared itself into his brain. In years to come, when he had cause to fall to his knees and elbows in a combat position, the South Pacific came back to him in a sensory rush: “the odors of burning oil and alcohol…the smells of cordite and flamethrowers and scorched flesh.”[40]

—

There was another singular trauma he took home from the war: the mutual glance of men locked in mortal combat, each seeming as if he wanted both to kill and to be killed. Archer called it “that goodbye look”[41] – and he would see it, too often, in America, after the war.

But such dark thoughts and deeds were far from his mind in the first flush of his return to the States. Archer, now working solo, hung out his shingle as a freelance private eye in late 1944 or early ’45, in an office on the unincorporated Sunset Strip, almost next door to the celebrated Ciro’s night-club and within shouting distance of any number of Hollywood talent agents.

The Santa-Ana-swept L.A. air was heady with the promise of imminent postwar prosperity and pleasure; and Lew Archer had a slick mental Kodachrome picture of himself as a suave new player in that coming world: “the rising young man of mystery,”[42] squiring peroxide-blonde starlets to private beach clubs, reading about his own exploits in the Los Angeles Times and the Herald-Express and the Hollywood Citizen-News…

Then he met Sue.

—

Archer claimed not to trust blonde women, but he was drawn to them – not to the “dumb blondes” who “cluttered up the California landscape”[43] of his late teens, but to blondes with signs of intelligent life behind their pretty eyes. Ash-blondes, with full and tender figures – like the one named Sue, whom he was introduced to (perhaps by mutual friends at an L.A. party) shortly after coming home from Europe.

They must have gone dancing a lot, in the clubs along the Strip or in the hotels on Wilshire. Lew loved to dance, back then. He would have especially liked nestling into Sue for slow numbers like “Sentimental Journey,” a hit in 1944 as sung (with Les Brown’s band) by the young Doris Day, who maybe looked not unlike Sue, with her bewitching gaze of puzzled innocence. “Sentimental Journey” became “their” song. Even twenty years later, Lew couldn’t hear it without feeling a pang of sorrow.

Buoyed on a wave of physical attraction, they soon married. Helped no doubt by the GI Bill, they bought a house: “a two-bedroom stucco cottage on a fifty-foot lot off Olympic,” in West Los Angeles. It was big enough, and quiet.

Big enough for a new bride to feel lonely and neglected in. Quiet enough for loud quarrels, and then for lengthening silences.

When the wave of their first romantic passion receded, they found they really didn’t know each other too well – except it was clear to both that they were quite different people, with not all that much in common.

Sue didn’t like the company Lew kept – the surfing and fishing buddies from his past, the Hollywood types from his present – and, more important, she didn’t like his trade: grubbing around in the gilded gutters of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, consorting with lowlifes from the Strip to Santa Barbara. Lew didn’t much like those parts, either; but despite its seamy aspects, he loved his work – though he couldn’t make it clear to Sue just why or how that should be, or how he could get so caught up in a case he’d sometimes neglect to come home.

It didn’t help that he wasn’t good at talking about what was most important to him – be it the long-smothered sadness of his childhood, or the fresh details of a breaking case, or how much he was still in love with his unhappy young wife.

Sue felt the man she’d married had turned into a stranger, someone she could never reach. When she came home once and he was gone on a surveillance job and she had to leave again, she wrote him a note in which, instead of putting “where,” she Freudian-scribbled “who”: – so worried – wish I knew who you were –

When at home, Lew often did and said all the wrong things, in angry scenes that came echoing back to him during sleepless nights over the years to come:

Sue said she couldn’t stand the life he led, that he gave too much to other people and not enough to her. Lew fought back however he could. Meaner and meaner words were traded. “Eventually the quarrels reached a point,” he’d remember, “where nothing hopeful, and nothing entirely true, was being said.” After that, Sue would just sit and stare at him without blinking, for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. He’d lost his wife in those long silences, Lew later saw.

One day she walked out. A lawyer sent papers: Sue’d filed for divorce in Reno. Soon – sometime in 1948 – Lew was single again.

For the first week, he felt he was “living in a vacuum, without a future or even a past.” Then the past made itself felt, as “an onion taste of grief”[45] that rose without warning at the back of his throat when he was alone in that now-too-big house. For a long time after the divorce, he never went home until sleep was overdue. And for years – maybe forever – he couldn’t even utter Sue’s name without pain.

—

In the first sorrowful, self-pitying months of his separation, Lew spent many alcohol-soaked nights in bars, including the Gilded Galleon, a nautical-motif saloon on his old home turf of Long Beach, far from the Hollywood rat race.

But during the days, Archer threw himself wholeheartedly into the Hollywood whirl. With a mixture of melancholy, bitterness, and ambition, the young Archer did what the older Archer would continue to do for different reasons: he lost himself in his work.

That labor often began with a client meeting in Archer’s second-floor office in a stucco building at 8411½ Sunset Boulevard. “I don’t spend money on front,”[46] Archer warned. His office was nothing much to see.

Up one flight of stairs and down a “rather dingy” corridor, next to a modeling agency catering to a couple generations of “aspiring hopeless girls,” was the door marked “Lew Archer: Private Investigator.”

Inside was a small waiting-room containing a sagging green imitation-leather davenport, a matching green armchair, and a settee too short to stretch out on (though, when exhausted, Lew sometimes napped awkwardly on it, his legs hung over its wooden arm). There was also a wall clock, a table, and a table lamp – with the latter, unbeknownst to visitors, containing a built-in microphone wired to a pair of metal earphones in the next room.

Beyond a door marked “Private” – a door with a panel of translucent one-way glass, through which Archer could view anyone who entered his waiting room – was the inner office, a sanctum only big enough for three chairs: a soft armchair by the window, a straight chair against a partition, and the swivel chair in which Archer sat behind a plain wooden desk with an unpolished top. On the desk were a telephone, a lamp, and a pen set. Out of sight in the desk’s upper right-hand drawer was a .32 automatic.

There was a dented olive-drab filing cabinet, a water cooler, a liquor cabinet, a closet (which held a clean shirt) and a safe. The walls displayed framed mug shots of “killers, embezzlers, bigamists and con men” – hard cases “with unabashed eyes” and “faces you see in bad dreams and too often on waking.”[47]

Visitors competed with the sounds of automobile traffic on the boulevard below. A window with slatted Venetian blinds gave a view of the Sunset Strip’s passing parade: “a bright young crowd of guys and girls buzzing and fluttering in pursuit of happiness and the dollar.”[48]

As a member of that aspiring postwar crowd, Lew Archer – from both professional need and personal vanity – presented a good appearance. Over six feet tall and weighing 190, with a muscular build, dark hair, and blue-gray eyes, he was handsome in a rugged manner, not unlike such movie actors as Paul Newman and (later) Steve McQueen. (“You’re kind of cute,” one ’50s female told him, “in an ugly way, you know.”[49]) He wore clothes well and didn’t mind spending for quality. He had a couple of expensive charcoal-gray suits (worn with a fedora, until hats went out) and an assortment of sports clothes from such fashionable men’s shops as Sy Devore. He favored Scotch walking shoes with iron-shod heels. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, he often carried a holstered .38 special beneath his jacket.

When not worn, that or another gun was locked in the dashboard compartment of his car. The car’s trunk held a locked steel evidence case, secure transport for anything from a cache of seized marijuana to an unearthed skeleton. Also in the car were a briefcase (sometimes carried for show) and a contact microphone useful in overhearing conversations.

Right after the war, Archer bought a sharp-looking light-blue convertible, which he loved like a rider loves his horse. When that car was stolen, then wrecked, Lew got another convertible.

Archer the former hot-rodder fancied he could judge people’s personalities in this car-crazy town by the vehicles they drove, and vice versa. “If I had been asked to guess what kind of car [a certain flamboyant and reckless actor] had,” Lew related in 1951, “I would have said a red or yellow convertible, Chrysler or Buick or De Soto. It was a yellow Buick with red leather seats.”[50] Archer’s own lighter Ford convertible was less showy and more sporty – embodying his own fantasies of conservative glamour, self-sufficiency, and speed: he knew for a fact the Ford had enough juice to “hit the peg” at 100 mph if he needed it to.[51]

By the late 1950s, Lew was driving a green Ford convertible. It too was stolen, then recovered – two years in a row. After that, Archer bought cars less often and kept them longer, while staying loyal to Fords.

He ran a one-man agency. It was cheaper that way, but Lew had other reasons for not hiring assistants: “The squares want security, and the hipsters want a chance to push people around at fifty dollars a day. Neither of which I can give them.”

When necessary, Archer co-opted the help of other private detectives in L.A., San Francisco, or Reno. Some of these ops (Willie Mackey, in the Bay Area; the married Nevada couple, Arnie and Phyllis Walters) became, to some degree, personal friends.

Archer had other professional contacts and colleagues of whom he was more or less fond, including Morris Cramm, legman for a nightlife-columnist; the art critic Manny Meyer; the screenwriter Sammy Swift; the switchboard women at his answering service (with whom he was on a first-name basis); and Hollywood agent Joey Sylvester.

The more Archer moved in Hollywood circles, though – eating at Musso’s, frequenting clubs on the Strip – the less he liked a place and an industry and a state of mind based on meaningless dreams invented for money. He came to feel that evil “hung in [movie] studio air like an odorless gas.”[52]

Archer was a fan of reality, no matter how hard to take. The movie world was a fake from top to bottom; and the fakery, especially when it paid well, was corrupting. As Sammy Swift said, “I used to have talent. I didn’t know what it was worth. I came out here for the kicks, going along with the gag – seven fifty a week for playing word games. Then it turns out that it isn’t a gag. It’s for keeps, it’s your life, the only one you’ve got. And…you’re not inner-directed any more. You’re not yourself.”[53]

Lew Archer struggled to become and remain “himself” in this problematic Southern California milieu. It wasn’t always easy.

Archer didn’t like actors, for instance – didn’t trust their easy way of shifting in and out of alternate realities. But Lew himself had a talent to dissemble, and often he would represent himself as something other than a private investigator. He might say he was an insurance claims adjuster, or a newspaperman, or a freelance reporter for true-crime magazines, or a Hollywood literary agent, or a counselor, or a security man, or a car salesman. If someone wanted to mistake Lew for a policeman, even an undercover cop, he often let them. Once, spooked by a visitor to his office, he denied he was Archer at all and claimed to be Archer’s bookkeeper.

There were other ways to glide around the truth and avoid “the lie direct.” Asked what he did for a living, Archer might answer: “I have an office on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,”[54] or, “I run a small agency in Hollywood,”[55] or, “I represent musicians from time to time. I have an office on the Strip.”[56]

People who tried to guess Archer’s occupation most often thought him a cop. One woman was sure he was a professional athlete. Someone else took him for an undertaker.

Sometimes he pretended to be worse things: a thug, a dope pusher, a potential hitman. He did what he needed to do to get a job done, but he wasn’t happy about some of his deeds: giving reefers to an addict in exchange for information, say.

“I’m playing it as straight as I can,” he told someone who cross-questioned him in the 1950s on the morality of his profession. “…I don’t deny I’ve been tempted to use people, play on their feelings, push them around. Those are the occupational diseases of my job…This is a dirty business I’m in. All I can do is watch myself and keep it as clean as I can.”[57]

He was at especially low ebb regarding his self-image around 1949, after Sue left. One memorable day, he looked in the mirror and tried to give himself an encouraging smile: “The wrinkles formed at the corners of my eyes, the wings of my nose; the lips drew back from the teeth, but there was no smile. All I got was a lean famished look like a coyote’s sneer…If I found the face on a stranger, I wouldn’t trust it.”[58]

Archer continued to scare himself, in one mirror or another, for the rest of his life. He had a disconcerting moment on a case in the early ’50s, when an angry face loomed at him as he entered a strange room: “It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw it was my own face reflected in murky glass…”[59] Here’s another unsettling glimpse Lew got, in a clouded mirror in a dusty room: “I looked like a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.”[60]

Even worse were his mental glimpses of a private eye going about his sometimes seamy business: “I had a sudden evil image of myself: a heavy hunched figure seen from above in the act of tormenting a child who was already tormented. A sense went through me of the appalling ease with which the things you do in a good cause can slip over into bad.”[61]

Lew Archer wanted to stay good while doing good. That seemed hard to achieve, especially in the early years of his career, when most of the work that came his way involved gathering evidence for divorce cases; he sometimes felt like “a jackal,” a “rat behind the walls.”

But as word spread of his discretion, his ethics, and his good results, Lew began to get more interesting assignments.

—

He did work for hotel associations and for insurance companies. He helped district attorney Bert Graves, up in Santa Teresa, put together a few cases. Sometimes he got assignments from Peter Colton, his old Army colonel, in the L.A. D.A.’s office. In the early ’50s, he was hired by the chairman of a legislative committee in Sacramento, to make a report on narcotics distribution in the southern counties, a job that involved taking a significant amount of drugs away from a pusher in South Gate. More than occasionally, Archer’s work brought him into contact with mobsters – “jerks,” he sometimes called them – in California and in Nevada. (“Jerkiness isn’t as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A.,” he told someone in the 1950s. “Which is why they had to build Vegas.”[62])

For such specialized, difficult, often dangerous work, he charged very little – absurdly little, right at the start. Just after V-J Day, Archer was asking a mere twenty dollars a day compensation. A couple years later, he was up to fifty a day plus expenses (or seventy-five, for those who could afford it). Lew continued to earn about three hundred a week (when working) throughout the 1950s.

By 1960, he’d raised his daily rate to a hundred dollars, where it stayed throughout the decade. “Isn’t that quite a lot?” one prospective client asked. “I don’t think so,” Archer said. “Actually it’s just enough to get by on. I don’t work all the time, and I have to maintain an office.”[63]

Archer often asked for a sizable advance – three hundred, five hundred, even a thousand dollars – if a client was well-to-do and Lew would have to lay out money for travel or other expenses. He’d learned from experience that very rich people were the hardest to collect from after the fact.

But he really didn’t want big money. Or rather, he wanted it well enough but wasn’t willing to take what came with it. “Money was never free,” he once noted. “Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.”[64] Another time, he observed: “Money usually has strings attached to it.”[65]

More than once in his career, Archer was offered a fee sizable enough to amount to a bribe: ten thousand, a hundred thousand, even a million dollars. He could be tempted by such an overly generous payment, but he knew better than to accept: “It excited me in a way I didn’t quite like,” he explained on one occasion. “Underlying the excitement was a vague depression, as if I belonged to the check in a way, instead of having it belong to me.”[66] To another “benefactor” bearing a questionable gift, Archer admitted: “I want it very badly…But I can’t take this money…It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them.”[67]

One of Archer’s finest ethical moments came in the late 1960s: after stashing a six-figure check from a compromised client in his office safe, Lew tore up the offending payment and tossed its bits like confetti out the window and onto the heads of the Sunset Strip of fools below.

“We’ll get along better if you stop assuming I can be bought,” the p.i. was able to tell another would-be employer. “It’s been tried by experts.”[68]

Not that Lew didn’t feel a twinge of envy at the sight of an honest private eye making a better-than-average income – like his friend Glenn Scott, a not-for-sale type nonetheless able to support a wife and child in good fashion before retiring to an avocado ranch beyond Malibu. Archer couldn’t begrudge Scott his success, though: “He was one of the few survivors of the Hollywood rat race who knew how to enjoy a little money without hitting other people over the head with it.” (Still, it couldn’t have been much fun for Lew to hear “the old master” tell him, once Scott was out of the game: “You were never a very serious competitor. They went to you when they couldn’t afford me.”[69])

Archer had enough money, he insisted: “Enough to live on.” Anyway: “I don’t do it for the money…I do it because I want to.”[70] Late in life, he pointed out to someone: “I chose this job, or it chose me. There’s a lot of human pain involved in it, but I’m not looking for another job.”[71] And while he would never get rich at it, at least he could set his own standards.

He had great discretion – “A client once told me he could drop a secret into me and never hear it hit bottom”[72] – and he showed his clients much loyalty. “I’ll do what you want me to do,” he promised one, “so long as it’s not illegal and makes some kind of sense.”[73] At the same time, he expected his clients to pay attention to what he said.

“Nobody asked for your advice,” a client once rebuked him; to which he replied: “You did, though, in a way, when you brought me into this case. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”[74]

And he made it clear his integrity was not for sale: “I’m not going to cook up evidence,” he told a client, “or select it to confirm you in your prejudices. I’m willing to investigate…on the understanding that the chips fall where they fall.”[75]

Asked once whose side he was on, Archer replied: “The side of justice when I can find it. When I can’t find it, I’m for the underdog.”[76]

—

It was clear from the start, even when Archer felt most ambivalent about his trade and his own behavior, that he was no ordinary private investigator. He cared deeply about what he did, a job that he saw (at its best) as adding to the sum total of goodness in the world.

“The problem was to love people, try to serve them,” he said, around 1956, “without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.”[77] What other Hollywood private eye would even consider it? Archer’s statement might more predictably have been uttered by a ’50s theological figure such as Thomas Merton or Reinhold Niebuhr (whose works, given his eclectic reading habits, Lew may well have read). Clearly the religious instinct nurtured in Lew Archer by his Catholic mother and grandmother had taken firm root, despite Archer’s decidedly non-priestly profession.

What grieved Archer most was the loss of human life. Lew often wept, in sorrow and in rage, at the sight of a murder victim. “It was anger I felt,” he revealed of one such occurrence, “against the helplessness of the deed, and my own helplessness.”[78]

In the early 1950s, he vented that anger face-to-face in a confrontation with a pathetic sort of killer: “It’s not just the people you’ve killed,” Archer railed at this sad little murderer. “It’s the human idea you’ve been butchering…You can’t stand the human idea…You know it makes you look lousy…”[79]

The human idea was precious to Lew. That was one reason he made other people’s lives his business, he said: “And my passion. And my obsession, too, I guess. I’ve never been able to see much in the world besides the people in it.”[80]

But which people should he care about?

Archer, trained as a cop, had a tendency to see the world as divided into good folks and bad ones – “and everything would be hunky-dory,” as he mockingly put it, “if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.”[81] As he grew older, though, Lew could no longer make do with this simplistic and unrealistic black-and-white picture. Life forced him to acknowledge that the world didn’t work that way. All his experience, intelligence, and emotions moved him toward a more complex awareness: a sort of moral epiphany, which he experienced in the year 1958.

It was triggered by a combination of events surrounding a murder investigation Archer was caught up in (recounted in detail in the Ross Macdonald novel The Doomsters). His case brought Archer into contact with a troubled young man he’d tried a few years earlier to help straighten out, perhaps as a sort of payback for Lew himself having once been put on the straight-and-narrow. This youngster wasn’t as quick a study as young Lew had been, though; and when the juvenile delinquent let him down, grown-up Archer brushed him off.

But, as Lew realized when the fellow reentered his life: “It isn’t possible to brush people off, let alone yourself. They wait for you in time, which is also a closed circuit.” Shamed by his past failure to help, and its awful consequences, Archer said: “I felt like a dog in his vomit.”[82]

Interstitched with this was the culmination of Archer’s current case, which moved Lew to compassion (without denial of culpability) for the events’ ultimate villain. Yes, this murderer was to blame – but so was everyone else in sight of these deadly happenings, including himself: “We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”[83]

This was a startling ethical realization. Once Archer accepted it, he seemed able to view himself, too, in a more forgiving light. And as he grew older, he’d find “the hot breath of vengeance…growing cold in my nostrils.” He’d be less hell-bent on punishing, more concerned “for a kind of economy in life that would help to preserve the things that were worth preserving…[A]ny man, or any woman, was…”[84]

Lew Archer, private detective and never-was seminarian, became (as he would describe another unusual character he’d encounter) “a sort of twisted saint”: as a man called Ruehlmann put it, “a saint with a gun.”[85]

—

He was temperate in his personal vices.

Like many Americans, he smoked cigarettes throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s; then, also like many Americans, he quit, after release of the Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking tobacco smoking to fatal disease.

He drank alcohol, more or less in moderation, all his life. “I like to drink,”[86] he admitted, circa 1968. Brews and potions Lew imbibed over the years included bourbon, Scotch, Scotch and soda, whiskey (Bushmills, Jack Daniel’s), whiskey and water, gin on the rocks, gin and tonic, Benedictine, martinis (at dinner), Gibsons (with an onion, “for lunch”), pink champagne (to celebrate), Black Horse Ale, Guinness Stout, Löwenbräu dark, and plain old beer.

Except for the occasional Palm Springs weekend, he kept his drinking largely in check. But he did seem to use alcohol as a lubricant in social situations – during an evening with friends such as Phyllis and Arnie Walters – and as a way to release his own spirit from the bottle in which he normally kept it stoppered. He knew the price you paid, though, for the use and abuse of alcohol as a sedative or stimulant: “It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.”[87]

Archer drank a good deal of coffee. Once in a great while, he’d have a cup of tea.

He scanned the L.A. Times (where his own name turned up on occasion, if he’d testified in court), with particular attention to the classifieds, “which sometimes tell you more about Los Angeles than the news.”[88]

He kept up his book-reading, and he went to museums. If he got a two- or three-hundred-dollar fee, he might blow it on a weekend fishing trip to La Paz or Mazatlán.

He spent much less on clothes as he got older, and his automobile became just a vehicle.

Around 1965, he toted up his assets: “I had about three hundred dollars in the bank, about two hundred in cash. I owned an equity in the car and some clothes and furniture. My total net worth, after nearly twenty years in the detective business, was in the neighborhood of thirty-five hundred dollars.” Not much to show for all that trouble. On the other hand: “I was doing what I wanted to be doing.”[89]

More and more, he lived to work. That was how he related to people best; that was where he could most be of service.

Once involved with a case, he gave it his all: it consumed his energies and intellect; it virtually became his identity. And he kept with it to the end: “I’m in this case to stay.”

Something Archer excelled at was the seeing and tracing of connections between criminal events in the present and in the past – between a current murder, say, and a similar deed fifteen years earlier.

A large coincidence was often a signal to Lew of such a link between past and present. After having been bitten on the neck a time or two by “the bitch goddess coincidence,” Archer learned to trust his instincts in this regard, and to follow the skein of an unraveling spool of fact all the way back to its distant source.

So often was he vindicated in such efforts that he came to say in the mid-1960s: “I’ve lost my faith in pure coincidence. Everything in life tends to hang together in a pattern.”[90] In his final published account of an investigation, The Blue Hammer (1976), Lew said: “The deeper you go into a series of crimes, or any set of circumstances involving people who know each other, the more connectedness you find.” Time and again, Lew Archer would insist, regarding two or more widely separated mysteries: “It’s all one case.”

And cases, he found, broke in all sorts of different ways. Some opened gradually, along old moral fault lines: “like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past.”[91] Some came together in a sudden rush, constructing themselves “in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.”[92] Some opened with a sort of decayed eroticism: “not like a door or even a grave, certainly not like a rose or any flower, but…like an old sad blonde with darkness at her core.”[93]

That’s when Archer’s possessive streak kicked into higher gear. “A breaking case to a man in my trade,” he revealed, “is like a love affair you can’t stay away from, even if it tears your heart out daily.”[94] His pulse raced, his breath came more quickly; he could feel his heartbeat pounding in his ears at the prospect of an imminent denouement. He had the physical sensations of a man living through an earthquake, and his senses were sharpened to such a pitch that he was open to all sorts of intuitions; he’d have “the sleepless feeling…that you can see around corners, if you want to, and down into the darkness in human beings.”[95] He was like an artist in the final throes of a painting, a mathematician scrawling the final symbols of a long-sought proof, a priest finishing mass. This was his art, his religion, his reason for being.

That was when he was most alive, and most likely to make a crucial discovery. Then too was when he was most vulnerable: to having a case snatched away by a recalcitrant client or an obstreperous cop. “It was a moral hardship for me to walk away from an unclosed case,”[96] he admitted. When such a bitter turn occurred, Archer experienced something like coitus interruptus: “There was a roaring hollowness in my head, a tight sour ball at the bottom of my stomach.”[97]

In extreme instances, not even the opposition of the law or the lack of a paying client deterred him. “You can’t pull me off the case – I guess you know that,” Lew once told an employer (who apparently didn’t know). “It’s my case and I’ll finish it on my own time if I have to.”[98]

And no matter who got in the way. There was danger, to the guilty and to those who stood next to them. When one particular “beautiful terrible mess of a case” was breaking for Archer, he noted of a woman semi-bystander: “Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn’t have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.”[99]

The fact was, as Archer knew, he “sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.”[100]

—

Less and less, in the 1960s, was Lew Archer involved in investigations having to do with organized crime. More and more was he caught up in sorting out the melodramatic and violent catastrophes of what would come to be called “dysfunctional” social units.

The man without a family of his own became counselor and adjudicator to other people’s families – a substitute parent, guiding and protecting the sons and daughters he himself never had.

It made his identification and involvement with cases even more intense. He felt responsible for the kids he sought, for the victims he championed; often he almost felt that he was those people. He took it all quite personally. He took it all to heart.

He wanted to rescue the endangered, to apprehend the guilty, to vindicate the unjustly accused. He wanted to understand the past. He wanted to help.

And many, many, many times – he did.

—

Some time in the 1960s, Lew Archer moved out of his house (the one still haunted by the ghost of his marriage) and into an apartment in a two-story building in West L.A., between Wilshire and Pico, about three and a half miles from Westwood.

His was the second-floor back unit, reached by outside stairs leading to a long roofed gallery. The apartment was sparsely furnished. Living room with an old desk, a black telephone (and, in a locked drawer, a handgun); a light chair, a standing lamp, and a rather worn chesterfield that opened out into a sleeper. Bedroom. Bathroom, with a medicine-cabinet mirror in which Lew could look at “that same old trouble-prone face.”

Wherever he might be at work, whatever the hour, Archer always liked to get back to this apartment before going to sleep. “It’s just about the only continuity in my life,”[101] he said.

There was a garage in the rear, but often he parked his now “not very new” Ford at the curb in front. If the closed apartment was warm and stale, he’d open a window, and maybe a bottle of beer, and sit down in the near darkness of the shabby front room and savor the cool air wafting halfheartedly east from the ocean.

“I lived in a quiet section,” he said, “away from the main freeways. Still I could hear them humming, remote yet intimate, like the humming of my own blood in my veins.”[102]

—

For a time, after moving into the apartment, he had “forgotten how to sleep.”[103] He got a prescription for Nembutal. When he relearned the knack of sleep, he stopped taking the pills.

In the mornings, at breakfast time, half a dozen scrub jays from a magnolia tree next door would swoop down into the grassy yard of Archer’s building or dive-bomb his bedroom windowsill. Lew thought of them as “his” jays, and threw peanuts for them into the yard.

Archer had a special awareness of birds, an attentiveness that went all the way back to the Martinez garden of his devout grandmother, who’d felt birds were among God’s special creatures. If His eye was always on the sparrow, Lew’s was fixed for a lifetime on the scrub jay, the red-winged blackbird, the towhee, the red-shafted flicker, the kinglet, the buzzard, the hawk, the blue heron, the owl.

So Archer would rise in the morning and feed the jays in the apartment-building courtyard. His neighbors thought him a lonely man.

—

Some of his friends felt he’d never gotten over Sue.

She and Lew had tried a few times to reconcile, after their divorce; but that never got much past the first angry or melancholy hour. Sue stayed in Reno (“a city,” Lew once said, “where nothing good had ever happened to me”[104]), remarried, had some kids, and “lived happily ever after” – or so Archer said. After a few years, he no longer bothered to stay in touch – at least not in person. Three-in-the-morning silent dialogues in his head were another matter.

Not that Lew’s life after Sue had been without women. Far from it.

There’d been Mona, for instance, circa 1955, as described by Archer in this ruminative passage from the book The Barbarous Coast:

But right at that instant, Lew got an incoming phone message: saved by the bell. He never mentioned Mona again.

A bit earlier, and a lot more seriously, Archer dated Susanna Drew, a script girl in the story department at Warner’s, whom he met at a Beverly Hills agent’s party. She was ten years his junior:

Archer ran into Susanna ten years later, around 1965, while on a case; and it seemed they might reunite on a permanent basis. But, as with so many of Archer’s liaisons, this one, too, apparently faded away.

Lew for the most part avoided overly available L.A. women: “The easy ones were nearly always trouble: frigid or nympho, schizy or commercial or alcoholic, sometimes all five at once. Their nicely wrapped gifts of themselves often turned out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it.”[106]

There were several other women through the years with whom Archer had fleeting relationships; but for the most part, the females he was drawn to were unlikely candidates for a permanent alliance: women already married, women in emotional mourning, women living in a different city or country.

Was it somehow because of Sue that Archer tended to choose, if only unconsciously, such unpromising lovers?

But Ross Macdonald’s final Lew Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, offered at least the possibility that the private detective’s last years might not be spent alone.

At the start of his investigation into events at the heart of this book, Lew met a youngish newspaper reporter, Betty Jo Siddon – “a level-eyed brunette of about thirty…well-shaped but rather awkward in her movements, as if she weren’t quite at home in the world” – and they became intimate. At book’s end, there was every indication Archer and Betty Jo might remain together, perhaps even marry.

Balance this, though, against Archer’s history of abandoned relationships, and the odds are fifty-fifty Archer let Betty Jo slip away as well…

So whatever happened to Lew Archer? How did he end his days?

Ross Macdonald’s Archer novels stopped in 1976 with The Blue Hammer, a premature conclusion caused by the onset of Macdonald’s eventually diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease. We can only guess at Lew Archer’s ultimate fate.

On the outer edge of possibility would be a violent end for the detective who had had so many weapons aimed at him through the years in Southern California, where handguns sometimes seemed as plentiful as new cars.

A more plausible and in a way more awful fate may be theorized: the private eye may have succumbed to the same disease that halted the author who’d written about him for a quarter-century.

—

Archer all his life had an excellent memory, the sort often called “photographic”: he could read a document twice quickly and fix names, times, and places firmly in his head. Memory was essential to his work, especially for the sort of cases in which he came to specialize: convoluted series of interlocking events, with overlapping personnel.

At some point, though, he felt the need to start jotting things down in a black notebook, keeping track of multiple characters and complicated deeds, much as a working novelist might.

By the end of his recorded exploits, in the late 1970s, it seemed Archer was struggling with facts and language, that it took longer for his mental computer to retrieve information: “I woke up clear-minded in strong daylight…And my mind released the memory I needed.”[107]

He made mistakes in dates and facts. More and more he forgot to eat – or even whether he had eaten.

Thinking seemed to tire him more by the late 1970s, so that he sometimes craved rest from it. “I sat down on one of the padded chairs,” he reported in The Blue Hammer, “and let my mind fray out for a couple of minutes.” In the same work, he made this disconcerting statement: “I felt for a moment that some ancient story was being repeated, that we had all been here before. I couldn’t remember exactly what the story was or how it ended. But I felt that the ending somehow depended on me.”

And so, of a sudden, we lose sight of a sixty-something Lew Archer, resident of a city whose initials he shared, a city he saw in daylight with clarity and at night as metaphor: “a maze, put together by an inspired child,”[108] “a luminous map…Its whorls and dots and rectangles of light…interpreted, like an abstract painting, in terms of everything that a man remembered.” [109]

—

See Archer at night then, one last time, parked perhaps in his car above Mulholland: a single human cell in that luminous organism of an endless city, while a God’s-eye camera pulls up and back and back and back – and the internalized soundtrack of a benignly fraying mind yields pieces of stored-up memory: