The Name Is Archer by Ross Macdonald, 1955

The spotlight is on Ross Macdonald for this Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

I SAT in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen.
— Opening line of ‘Find the Woman’ in which Ross Macdonald first introduced Lew Archer

If something doesn’t happen then Lew Archer, the private detective from Southern California, makes something happen, as he does in two out of the three stories I’ve read so far in this collection of seven original stories by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar).

In both the stories, Gone Girl and The Bearded Lady, Archer happens to be around when a crime is about to take place or has already taken place. When he is not hired to solve the case, he hangs around to investigate the crime. Although money is thrust into Archer’s hands, you get the impression that it’s not important in his scheme of things and he'll, matter-of-factly, pocket a fifty-dollar advance.

In Gone Girl, for instance, Archer is outside his room in a motel when he sees a girl with blood on her hands. Before long, he is employed by the girl, the only daughter of the motel owner, to investigate the death of a man. Did she kill him? Archer finds more than he’d bargained for. 

In the second story, Archer is visiting a close friend, a talented but down-on-his-luck artist, who vanishes without a trace, as does an expensive painting from the museum he frequented, putting a family’s reputation under a cloud. Archer to the rescue again.

You don’t know what Lew Archer’s motivation is but he has enough to want to stick his neck out.

In Find the Woman, the first story in this collection, the private detective, as Archer likes to call himself, is actually waiting for something to happen when Millicent Dreen, a publicity director for a production house, walks into his office and hires him to look for Una, her beautiful twenty-two year old daughter who has been missing from their beach house. Dreen, who is no less easy on the eyes, suspects that her daughter, a famous actor, drowned because she wasn’t a strong swimmer. Archer accepts the case and pockets the hundred-dollar advance.

It’s not long before Lew Archer gets to the bottom of the case, literally. Una was married to Jack Rossiter, a handsome and athletic naval officer whose long stretch away from home gave her reason to have sexual affairs with other men and her mother the perfect ruse to engineer her own daughter’s death by drowning. To say why she does it or how she does it would be giving too much away.

Ross Macdonald first introduced Lew Archer in Find the Woman, a short story that was published in the June 1946 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The fictional private eye made his debut in a regular novel with The Moving Target in 1949. This was made into a film called Harper in 1966. It had Paul Newman as Lew Harper instead of Lew Archer. I haven't read the book or seen the film. In fact, The Moving Target is one of four secondhand Lew Archer novels I have. Not to have read even a single book yet is a criminal waste.

What did I like most about the three stories I read in The Name Is Archer? Apart from the writing, which is equivalent to a punch right in the solar plexus, and the not so flattering look at women and the depths to which they can sink, the celebrated author pulls a neat trick on the reader: a detective is hired by people guilty of a crime to investigate a crime that really isn't a crime, at least not in the strict sense. The catch-22 scenario in the stories reminded me of No Comebacks, 1982, a collection of ten stories in which Frederick Forsyth uses a similar ploy, the twist at the end of each tale leaving the reader a tad disappointed though not without acknowledging the writer’s brilliant deception.

While Ross Macdonald has admitted to being influenced by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose works I’m not all that familiar with, his style of writing, if not in its intensity, is reminiscent of that other pillar of hardboiled fiction, Mickey Spillane, and his detective Mike Hammer. Clearly, Macdonald acknowledged his debt to Chandler when he told The Village Voice in 1975: “Chandler was and remains a hard man to follow.”


P.S.: After reading Patti's reviews as well as some other reviews of Ross Macdonald's works at her blog, Pattinase, I wish to mention that The Name Is Archer has been included in The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer edited by his biographer Tom Nolan. It contains stories from The Name Is Archer, Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three stories in Strangers in Town among other material.

Three Young Ranchmen by Captain Ralph Bonehill, 1901

Allen stared at the letters on the rock as if he had not spelled out the words aright. But there was no mistake. They really read “Barnaby Winthrop's Mine.

Three Young Ranchmen or Daring Adventures in the Great West reads like a ‘young adult’ packaged inside a ‘western.’ Some readers may see it the other way around. Either way this is a very entertaining story: it has action, adventure, and suspense.

The story revolves around three brothers, Allen, Chetwood and Paul Winthrop, who live on a ranch in the mountainous region of Idaho, close to the Salmon River. Their father who owned the Big Bear ranch died while his three sons were still young. However, before his death he willed it to his sons equally and appointed his brother, Barnaby, as their guardian. Uncle and nephews are warm and generous towards each other.

The brothers are tall, sturdy, brave, and handsome as well as honest and hardworking. They share a close bond that would make any parent proud. They also share duties on the ranch where life is tough and trouble intrudes in the form of horse thieves belonging to an old Sol Davids gang and Captain Hank Grady, a mean and unscrupulous man of forty who wants to posses the Winthrop homestead at any cost. He knows the value of the ranch and its proximity to a secret mine.

Allen and his horse plunge
into the stream below.

While the three young ranchmen manage the sprawling ranch and the rolling land around it, their Uncle Barnaby, an old prospector, is away in the hills looking for gold and silver. In his absence, Chet and Paul look up to their big brother for guidance. Until one day, the old man vanishes without a trace. He was last seen in San Francisco where he’d been making plans to start a company to develop the gold and silver mine he’d secretly discovered—the richest claim in all of Idaho—worth over a million dollars.

As Chet and Paul guard their ranch home from Captain Grady and the old gang, Allen sets off to look for their uncle, with Ike Watson, an old friend and a reliable hunter with a peculiar dialect, and Noel Urner, a broker and speculator from New York. Noel turns up in Idaho after he fails to meet Barnaby at the appointed time at Golden Nugget House, a meeting place for old-time miners and prospectors, in San Francisco. Their search eventually leads them to Captain Grady whose role in the kidnapping of Barnaby, in the hope that he can grab the ranch and the secret mine, is exposed in the end.

The three young ranchmen talk it over.

Final word
Allen, more than his two brothers, has a bigger adventure in Three Young Ranchmen but not without some tense moments, as he goes after the horse thieves, rides his own right through a sabotaged bridge and into the waters beneath, discovers his uncle’s mine in a cave inside a mountain, finds his way across treacherous underground, stumbles into a snake’s nest and is nearly poisoned to death, and encounters a grizzly bear that turns on him. 

There is almost a childlike innocence about the boys and the way they go about defending their home and looking for their uncle, and eventually hoping to get back to their fun loving and peaceful existence. This is also evident in their precise conversation. For instance, in the opening pages of the first chapter, Chet and Paul are awaiting Allen's return from somewhere, when Chet tells his brother, "I don't care so much about the dullness—I like to hunt and fish and round up the cattle just as well as any one—but what I'm complaining of is the uncertainty of the way things are going to turn. For all we know, we may be cast adrift, as the saying goes, any day."

To which Paul replies, "That is true, although I imagine our title to the ranch is O. K. If those title papers hadn't been burned up when one end of the house took fire I wouldn't worry a bit."

If I compared this absorbing western to young adult, it is because Allen, Chet and Paul and their boyish nature and zest for adventure reminded me of brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, amateur detectives, and their best friend Chet Morton from the Hardy Boys. Only the setting is different. The book, available at Gutenberg and elsewhere, will appeal to readers of both genres.

About the author
By a coincidence, Captain Ralph Bonehill, I discovered later, is none other than Edward L. Stratemeyer, the prolific American writer and creator of The Rover Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series, among several others. As Bonehill, he is also the author of A Sailor Boy with Dewey, For the Liberty of Texas, and The Young Bandmaster.

The Outlaw by Howard Hughes, 1943

Click on the image to enlarge and read.

Hollywood veteran and aviator Howard Hughes directed only two films, Hell's Angels (1930) and The Outlaw (1943), and produced over two dozen films. I don't recall seeing any. This week I was going through the ebook version of Dime Mystery Magazine, September 1946, when I came across this vintage advert or plug about The Outlaw which, I assume, is his most famous film. 

Apparently, the western film was banned by US censors soon after its world premier in San Francisco in June 1944. Rather than cut some of the objectionable scenes which, I think, had to do with the scantily-clad Jane Russell, the filmmaker pulled out the film from theatres across the world. I don't know whether this was true. The taglines of the American and Australian posters—"The picture that couldn't be stopped! (left) and "Not suitable for children" (below)—indicates that it was, though I suspect the whole thing was a plug for the success of the film.

The Outlaw is about the complex relationship between seductress Rio McDonald (Jane Russell) and the three men she plays against each other—Jack Buetel (Billy the Kid), Doc Holliday (Walter Huston), and Sheriff Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), who shot the Kid in real life—in the backdrop of a battle with the Indians.

The film is described as "a story of the untamed West. Frontier days when the reckless fire of guns and passions blazed an era of death, destruction and lawlessness. Days when the fiery desert sun beat down avenginly on the many who dared defy justice and outrage decency." It seems like a good film to watch.

For previous vintage ads, see under Labels.

Odds and ends

Diwali spring-clean, pest control, and car servicing, which cost roughly Rs.6,800 ($110), all got in the way of watching an old movie and writing about it for overlooked films yesterday. The annual and periodic tasks carried out by hired hands, including a local gardener, also got in the way of my planned review of the two books I finished reading last week. I intend to review one of these, a Western that reads like Young Adult, for forgotten books on Friday.

A word about the hired hands. They are mostly poor migrants from the interiors of North, East, and South India who come to cities like Mumbai in search of opportunity and livelihood, and possibly a career in Bollywood as inconspicuous extras. They usually leave their families behind and send their meagre earnings home every month. In spite of the government's claim that its grand social schemes have increased employment in small towns and villages, jobs are scarce in the rural areas. This is mainly because of the decline of India's traditional agrarian economy vis-à-vis the rise of the services sector which now accounts for almost 60 per cent of the economy.

The rural-to-urban exodus is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because the young men are willing to do all kinds of menial jobs for a small price, saving you a lot of trouble and hard work, and a curse because they're adding to the city's millions and its poor infrastructure.

A shoeshine boy at a local railway station in Mumbai.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The migrants do more than drive cars, autos, buses, and trucks; sell fruits and vegetables; hawk all kinds of cheap foods; deliver milk and newspapers; polish shoes, cut hair, and clean ears, do housekeeping in malls and multiplexes, in schools and offices; and wait on people in restaurants and supermarkets. The two men, who spruced up my home for Diwali next week, wash cars and maintain gardens in the neighbourhood. They did a good job. I paid them a total of Rs.800 ($13). It's handy money for the handymen. “Tell me if you have any other work. I’m free on weekends,” one of them said before leaving. For one who works 45 hours and commutes 12 hours a week, that is music to the ears.

It’s the language, you know!
Last week, I attended a daylong conference on the real estate industry and was a touch annoyed when many of the qualified speakers uttered “you know” after every few words. If “you know” is meant to replace the studied pause during a speech, then it's a poor substitute. Its misuse has more to do with the speaker being nervous or unsure of what to say next than with anything else. I have noticed this trend among Western celebrities who carry it off well that you don’t really notice it; maybe, it's the in-thing to do, you know.

Here’s another peeve: the Indian print media is keeping up with the times, mainly technology, but some things haven't changed, like using the word “indeed” for emphasis both in speech and text. Rounding up a quote, a story or an article with “Be that as it may” and “Having said that” is equally annoying. Worst of all are newspaper headlines that read “Now, pay medical cover premium in food grains!” and “Soon, retain cell number even if you move cities.” These appeared in a leading English daily, a habitual offender. I fail to see how prefixing headlines with the words “now” and “soon” can add value. They read just as well without them.

Festival of Lights
Next week is Diwali, the festival of lights, and most people in India have at least a three-day break starting November 3, when Hindus will worship Goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Lord Vishnu, the supreme god, by lighting small oil lamps within and outside their homes and praying for the health and wealth of both family and business. This is immediately followed by the Hindu New Year. The last day of Diwali is Bhau-Beej (known variously) when sisters pray for the well-being of their brothers (in August we have Raksha Bandhan [bond of protection] when sisters tie rakhi threads on the wrists of their brothers who in turn pledge to protect their sisters for life). In both cases, the brothers have to present their sisters with gifts, never the other way round.

The traditional oil lamp lit during Diwali.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The five-day festival of lights, colour, and gaiety is celebrated by wearing new clothes, lighting up the house, worshipping the deities, eating sweets, eating out, firing crackers, and visiting family and friends. The bursting of crackers and bombs with little control on the stipulated decibel levels and until late into the night makes it the noisiest festival in India and an absolute nightmare for dogs, both pets and strays, whose sense of helplessness is evident in their terrified behaviour. I know what my pet will go through. It takes the fun out of Diwali every year.

Reading Habits #3: Do book excerpts influence you?

Until the last decade, Indian newspapers and magazines used to reproduce excerpts from a book reviewed by a critic, both appearing on the same page. I’d first read the extract in the small box and if I liked it, I’d proceed to the review, though most of the time I didn’t read it. The extract was enough to help me decide whether to read the book or not.

The reason I enjoyed reading the excerpts first and not the review was the author’s writing style which to this day influences my decision to read fiction, except now I also read the reviews.

While the blurb on the back of a book can goad me into reading a book, it is the opening lines or random paragraphs within that have a special appeal for me. In bookstores, I frequently riffle through a book to see if I’m going to like it. I agree it’s strange that I should choose to read a book without knowing what it is about.

Today, Indian periodicals no longer carry short excerpts. The monolithic online review factory has taken care of that. Instead, they take permission from the publisher to reproduce an entire meaningful chapter from a new book, usually non-fiction, and carry it across centre spread marked “Exclusive Extracts”. I have no patience to read it. It also puts me off the book.

Would you read a novel based on an excerpt? I think not.


For Reading Habits #1 & 2, look under Labels.

Action Comics #1, an anthology of comics, 1938

For Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

The only time you hear or read about Action Comics #1, 1938, is when newspapers report the sale of the first issue of the comic book to the highest bidder for over a million dollars, which has happened on a few occasions. Comic buffs who cannot even think of bidding for one can read this rare comic, or a part of it, online, as I did. It’s a very small consolation for one who is short of a million by several zeroes.

Action Comics #1 requires no formal introduction. Nor do Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster who used it as a storyboard to bring Superman into our world. I’d never read the comic before and when I finally did, I was intrigued by a few things.

The Man of Steel, who is not known thus, has evolved by leaps and bounds from his era, the Golden Age, through the Modern Age of Comic Books. Neither is Superman’s real name, Kal-El, mentioned anywhere, which isn't surprising as his birth planet, Krypton, isn't mentioned either. He bears the name Kent even though his foster parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, are not in the picture yet. 

Superman in the comic and Superman in the 1978 movie.

Clark Kent, a reporter with The Daily Star and not The Daily Planet, is in love with Lois, not Lois Lane, who on her part is patronising towards him. She prefers his alter ego, although that isn't so obvious. When some hoodlums accost her, Kent plays it down by urging her to leave the dance hall. Lois, ever the feisty gal, slaps one of the men as Clark mutters “Good for you, Lois!” She then stomps off with the “spineless, unbearable coward” running behind her. When the gangsters kidnap her, he sheds his suit and dons his caped costume, the iconic Superman logo just a crude letter 'S'.

Among other things, Superman doesn't fly as much as he leaps in the air, climbs up the face of a building, and walks the tightrope. But he does smash cars and steel doors and takes bullets that ricochet off his chest.

I found this first issue interesting for two reasons.

One, Superman plays detective when he wakes up the governor in the middle of the night and gets him to pardon a girl minutes before she is to be put to death for a murder she didn’t commit. He leaves the real murderess tied up on the governor’s lawns.

Two, he gets involved in a family squabble when he slams an ugly looking man into the wall for beating his wife senseless.

As expected, Superman displays his feats of strength right from childhood, lifting a couch and a steel bar, racing a train, and clearing tall buildings with a giant leap. In one unit, his amazing strength is compared, scientifically, to that of an ant and a grasshopper.

While the comic is primitive by today's standards, as is to be expected, I was happy to see that the basic persona of Clark Kent/Superman has largely remained intact over the last 75 years. This is a rare treat for comic book lovers.

But did you know that Action Comics #1 is an anthology of 11 comic book stories? I did not. I have reproduced the rest of the contents below.

Chuck Dawson, a western, by Homer W. Fleming, primarily a political cartoonist whose work as writer, penciller, and inker appeared in Detective Comics, Action Comics, The Big All-American Comic Book, Classics Illustrated, Cowboy Western Comics, and Flash Comics.

Zatara, the master magician, and Pep Morgan by Fred B. Guardineer, American illustrator and comic book writer-artist during the Golden Age of Comic Books, best known for the western series The Durango Kid.

South Sea Strategy by Captain Frank Thomas, one of Walt Disney's team of animators known as the Nine Old Men. He co-authored Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, 1981, with fellow Disney legend Ollie Johnston.

Sticky-Mitt Stimson by Alger (real name: Russell Cole), another writer-artist from the Golden Age, created many of the early issues of Action Comics and Detective Comics.

The Adventures of Marco Polo by Sven Elven, who contributed artworks to various comic books including Fawcett and Centaur in the 1930 and 1940s.

Scooby the Five Star Reporter by William "Bill" Ely, another writer-penciller-inker who worked for National Periodicals Publications now famously known as DC Comics.

Tex Thompson, which was created by comics publisher-writer-editor Bernard Baily (with Ken Fitch), was a DC superhero known as Mr. America and The Americommando. He also created Spectre and Hourman.

Stardust by The Star-Gazer. I have no idea who he (or she) was.

Odds 'N Ends by Sheldon Moldoff, who died last year, was an American comic book artist whose famous characters included Hawkman and Hawkgirl, and Black Pirate (Jon Valor). He was one of Batman creator Bob Kane's ghost artists and went on to co-create other DC superheroes and supervillains like Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Bat-Mite, Bat-Girl, Batwoman, and Ace the Bat Hound.

I intend to track down some of these early comics online.

My previous posts related to Superman

1. The Mighty Marvel Superheroes’ Cookbook
2. How Superman Would End the War
3. Shazam! I am Superman
4. Comics to cinema: journey of the superhero

A Few Good Men, 1992

For Overlooked Films, Audio & Video this Tuesday, head over to Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

A Few Good Men can be classified as an overlooked film if you haven't seen it yet. It is by no means a forgotten movie: I have seen it more than once.

The final courtroom battle between rookie lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) of the US Navy and highly decorated Col. Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson), Commanding Officer, US Marine Corps, Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, is the decisive moment in the entire film. Take this 20-minute high-voltage scene out and Judge Col. Julius Randolph (J.A. Preston) might have dismissed the court martial proceedings as a tad too boring.

Kaffee and his two assistants, Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore) and Lieutenant Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak), try all means to successfully defend the two US marines charged with the murder of a fellow marine, Private Santiago, at Guantanamo Bay. The defendants are accused of carrying out a Code Red order, “a violent extrajudicial punishment,” that Kaffee suspects was ordered by Jessup. He has no evidence to nail the colonel. As a last ditch attempt and at the risk of jeopardising his fledgling career, he puts the acerbic naval officer in the dock, in the thin hope that Jessup's military arrogance and disdain for the civilians he defends will be his undoing.

Aside from Cruise, Nicholson, Moore, and Pollak, A Few Good Men has a few more top actors in the form of Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and J.T. Walsh. But it's Cruise who steals the show with a very fine courtroom performance supported by the rest of the able cast that you can't help thinking might have been quietly told that this was his film; except for Nicholson, who is in his element as the thundering Col. Jessup. Those last 20 minutes are entirely his.

Before I leave you with the high-decibel verbal duel between Cruise and Nicholson (courtesy: IMDb), here’s a question: which other actor would have fit into Col. Jessup’s shoes? My answer: Gene Hackman. Check him out in Crimson Tide (1995) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001).

Now then, read how Nicholson cuts Cruise down to size…

Kaffee: Colonel Jessup, did you order the Code Red?
Judge Randolph: You don't have to answer that question!
Col. Jessup: I'll answer the question!
Col. Jessup: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to.
Col. Jessup: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!

Col. Jessup: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honour, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?
Col. Jessup: I did the job I…
Kaffee: Did you order the Code Red?
Col. Jessup: You're goddamn right I did!

A Few Good Men is directed by Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally, The Bucket List) and written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) based on his play, of the same name, and which was apparently inspired by his lawyer sister’s proposed visit to Guantanamo Bay to defend some marines who nearly killed a fellow marine.

Highly recommended.