Lew Archer is a bit out of his usual L.A. stomping grounds here. While on his way to Sacramento he stops for “the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me.” This turns out to be a young man who has been shot and left for dead in a ditch by the road. And just like that Archer is involved in a complicated web of murder and corruption in the sleepy town of Las Cruces.
Two things stood out to me. First of all there’s the speed with which the plot unfolds. It got to the point where I started to write down Archer’s full Las Cruces itinerary. He picks up the dying man just as the sun is setting “and the valley was filling with twilight.” From there he takes the man to Kerrigan’s Court – Deluxe Motor Hotel (it is later described as a “motor court”; the word “motel” was first used in 1925 but seems not to be known by anyone here). From the motel he goes to the hospital, where the hitchhiker dies without regaining consciousness and being able to say what had happened to him. Then Archer goes back to the motel, or motor court. Then he goes to a Chinese restaurant and eavesdrops on a conversation between Kerrigan (the motel’s owner) and a sexy young chanteuse. Then he visits the trucking company the dead man drove for. Then he goes out to the house where the owner of the trucking company lives and gets hired by him to find out what happened to the load of booze the dead man had been driving. Then he goes to the sheriff’s house and meets the sheriff’s sexy wife. Then he goes to the apartment of the daughter of the owner of the trucking company. She has gone missing. Then he goes to a sleazy bar and interrogates one of the prostitutes about the missing girl. Then he goes to the singer’s apartment. Then he goes to the motel owner’s house, remaking that by this time “it was getting late.” Then he goes to a drive-in burger joint where he witnesses what looks like a handoff of some money. Then he goes to an abandoned air base just outside of town. At around 1 o’clock in the morning he’s back at the motor court, where he gets knocked out (or at least knocked on his ass) for the third time. Then he goes back to the motel owner’s house. We’re told it’s now 2 o’clock. The motel owner’s wife sends him off to check out a cabin on a lake two hours’ drive away. On the way there exhaustion (finally!) catches up to him and “something broke like a capsule behind my eyes. It leaked darkness through my brain and numbness through my body.” He keeps driving until he comes to a tourist camp where he rents a cottage and spends the rest of the night (or early morning) “wrestling nightmares on a lumpy bed.”
This is a busy guy! And even given Las Cruces isn’t that big a place I still found it hard to believe he was going so many places and meeting so many people in the space of at most eight hours. But that’s the nature of stories like this.
The scenes are set with some quick brushstrokes. Macdonald is particularly fond of personifying buildings, so one will have yellow rust streaks running “down from the balconies like iron tears” while another sports “a peeling yellow face with blinded windows, surrounded by a wild green hair of eucalyptus trees.” I also loved this description of the owner of the trucking business’s man cave:
His living-room was the kind of room you find in backcountry ranch-houses where old men hold the last frontier against women and civilization and hygiene. The carpets and furniture were glazed with dirt. Months of wood ashes clogged the fireplace and sifted onto the floor. The double-barreled shotgun over the mantel was the only clean and cared-for object in the room.
We’re even told that the place smells like a bear cage, which I can believe.
Information in these wonderfully degenerate settings will be conveyed in clipped dialogue with lots of snappy comebacks, and may end in fisticuffs. And then it’s time to hop in the car and go to the next stop.
The second thing that struck me was the evocation of a now long-vanished time. In part this has to do with the language, so I’ll include some notes here for fellow word nerds. “Wasn’t he drunk on Sunday?” Archer asks the singer of the motel owner. “He was pixilated all right,” she replies. This does not mean that the motel owner has the appearance of being an enlarged, low-resolution digital image where the individual pixels stand out, giving it a blocky texture. The word for that is pixelated, though apparently pixilated is now accepted as a variant spelling of the same thing. Anyway, pixilated is a much older word referring to someone behaving in a strange, eccentric or mentally disordered way, as though being led by pixies. Obviously the singer has in mind this older meaning, but even so it seems a bit inappropriate to describe someone who is actually an angry and dangerous drunk.
At another point Archer is driving over a rough road whose “surface was pitted with chuckholes.” I had to look this up and found that it refers to any hole or rut in a road or track. So a pothole. I’ve never seen or heard the word chuckhole before and I don’t think it’s in wide use.
I was far less successful tracking down the term “sluff.” At one point Archer interrogates a drugged out girl who asks him “Are you sluff?” From the context I think she’s asking if he’s with the police. Later, her boyfriend will beat Archer up and say “God damn you, sluff.” So again, I think he’s saying that he thinks Archer is a cop. But I looked around for any information on this one and found nothing except dictionaries giving it as a variant spelling of “slough,” which is clearly not what was meant.
Aside from the language, there are also some other parts of the book that give its date away. In The Way Some People Die Macdonald had indulged his dislike for the drug business by giving us a heroin junkie going through withdrawal. There’s another druggie in this book but she’s hooked on marijuana and she really needs a reefer bad. I think in our own time we’d be put off by such a depiction of “reefer madness” (the film of that title had come out in 1936), as while marijuana can be addictive in most cases it isn’t, and certainly not to the extent depicted here. The scene plays today as silly, but luckily Archer has some reefers in his car (hey, it’s evidence) and he’s able to use it to get her to open up. Which is kind of low, but worse will happen to her later.
There are the usual Archer elements here, especially his fascination with breasts. The sheriff’s wife is stacked, “heavy-breasted and very female, almost too female for comfort.” Later, while he is holding onto her, these same breasts will move “against me like wild things in a net,” and later still she will grip them “cruelly” herself. I don’t know what’s going on with all this. Boobs just have a way of grabbing Macdonald’s attention.
And finally there’s Archer’s sense of mission. Told that he’s brave at one point, he replies “Not brave. Merely stubborn. I don’t like to see the jerks and hustlers get away with too much. Or they might take over entirely.” The jerks and the hustlers, however, aren’t the real problem here. They rarely are. Instead the rot runs deeper, into perverted family dynamics and degenerate psychologies. Archer can afford to be understanding, but is no doubt relieved to finally get out of this town.
Alex Good 