A short and silly story that has Lord Peter foiling a diamond heist. The tip-off comes as a result of his “persistent and undignified inquisitiveness,” a character trait described in the intro. Detectives, even amateurs, are just nosey people.

While in a Paris train station Lord P eavesdrops on a conversation, and this is what leads to his capture of the pair of jewel thieves. What gives them away is a grammatical error that you’d have to know French to pick up on as the conversation isn’t translated. Hint: the title of the story is a pun on “article.” Then, after they’re apprehended, they’ll slip into “a torrent of apache language which nobody, fortunately, had French enough to understand.” This is another reference, so common in Sayers, that contemporary readers might not get. Les Apaches were criminal gangs in Paris in the early twentieth century.

I call the story silly because one would have thought there was a more obvious tell for Lord Peter (and everyone else) to pick up on than the article in question. Jacques Sans-culotte dresses up well, but his ankles give him away.

Wimsey index

I’ve been reading the Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories in the collection The Archer Files edited by Tom Nolan. In a prefatory note to the reader for “Gone Girl” Nolan explains how it incorporates some elements from the story “Strangers in Town,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime (“Strangers in Town” was also expanded into the novel The Ivory Grin). This is fine, but the note doesn’t explain why Nolan (I assume it was him) changed the title. “Gone Girl” was first published in 1953 under the title “The Imaginary Blonde.” Why is it “Gone Girl” here? Because The Archer Files came out in 2015 and Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name had been published in 2012 and the movie released in 2014? I guess. That seems kind of cheesy to me though, and personally I prefer “The Imaginary Blonde” anyway.

Given how Macdonald mined his own material I wasn’t surprised at how familiar it played. And it was interesting to note how he held on to stuff. I noted in my review of “Strangers in Town” the description of the gangster’s eyes looking “like thin stab-wounds filled with watery blood,” which he cuts and pastes here. I can’t remember though if sand “drifted like unthawing snow” was used previously. Sand as snow is good but unexceptional; it’s the awkward rightness of “unthawing” that really lands. If you look unthaw up in a dictionary it’s synonymous with thaw, but that’s not how it’s being used here. The sand is snow that will never thaw because it can’t. It’s sand! I love it.

Archer index

First some quick background. “Strangers in Town” was written in 1950, with Macdonald planning to submit it to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He withdrew it, however, so that he could expand it into a novel, which turned out to be The Ivory Grin. He also recycled parts of it into the story “Gone Girl.” The original story itself was only published posthumously in 2001 when his biographer, Tom Nolan, discovered it among Macdonald’s papers.

Judged on its own it’s a pretty good story. Things start off with a woman coming to Archer to see if he can clear her son of a murder rap. He’s Black, you see, the victim is a white woman, and things don’t look good. Then there are some of the usual elements, like the way the murder investigation turns into a missing person case, and the trip to the big house where Archer gets roughed up by a powerful figure who doesn’t like him snooping around. Archer again moves quickly (the case only takes about 24 hours of frantic driving back and forth) with the action culminating in a rush of information at the end where you have to force yourself to slow down to make sure it all makes sense.

You can see why Macdonald thought there was more in it though. We don’t get to know the characters as well as we feel we should (Dr. Benning in particular), and what we’re mainly left with are descriptive flourishes such as the elderly gangster’s two day’s beard having the appearance of “motheaten gray plush” and his eyes looking “like thin stab-wounds filled with watery blood.” Who needs the movies with writing like that?

Archer index