Another in my infrequent series of posts on Ross Macdonald.
My dear friend Tom is leaving Leamington Spa soon, and I was very touched when he passed on this copy of The Ivory Grin to add to my collection.
Bantam Press, 1984
What a grotesque, lurid cover! I love it, and the picture of Macdonald in a fedora on the back. As you can see, it’s very battered about but I know that Tom brought this back from San Francisco, so that just adds value in my opinion.
Thanks Tom!
When I visited my parents last week, my mum gave me this copy of The Moving Target.
Fontana Books, 1966
As you can see, it’s in a pretty sorry state. The cover is badly scuffed and creased, some of the pages are falling out and the fragile spine is held together by Sellotape. Despite all of this, it’s the prize of my collection.
You see, this was the book that got me into Ross Macdonald. This was the book that I found on my parents’ bookshelf all those years ago, and the book that introduced me to the private eye genre. I hadn’t read Chandler or Hammett back then. This is where it started, with this battered old film tie-in.
I was surprised and pleased that it’s survived. My parents have moved house twice since then, and now it’s with me. I was really touched when my mum presented it to me – she must have been following this irregular series of posts!
I think it’s a great cover too, with that pop art target image so much more imaginative than the design for The Drowning Pool tie-in.
(Last year, Existential Ennui wrote a great blog about this edition of The Moving Target, and here’s the link to my other Ross Macdonald covers.)
It’s far too long since I posted one of these (July? Blimey!) but the truth is, I’ve been trying to be restrained in my book buying. The flat is full to bursting as it is, and money’s tight. Still, this was a pre-Christmas treat and since it was only 99p on Ebay, it didn’t break the bank!
Great Pan edition, 1959
As with my copy of The Way Some People Die, it’s nice to see Ken Millar’s original pseudonym “John Ross Macdonald” on this cover. I don’t think the illustration is quite so strong in this case though. The looming head-and-shoulders of Hester (the wannabe starlet around whom the mystery revolves) is nice enough, but the image of Archer discovering a body is rather clumsy. There’s something weird about the way Archer’s neck connects to his shoulders here, as though this was retouched by another artist.
I do love the description of this as “A tough Lew Archer thriller” – it’s the kind of thick-ear branding that Millar deplored! The back cover offers up similar pleasures…
I haven’t seen this little Lew Archer seal before. I assume it’s supposed to resemble a bloody thumbprint? If I ever lay my hands on the Pan printing of The Ivory Grin, it’ll be interesting to see whether it carries this too.
I’m currently re-reading the novel and, while it’s not one of the best Archer mysteries, it does deliver on many counts. As in other Archer novels, the characterization of Hollywood as a modern-day Gomorrah seems crude and unconvincing. Maybe Millar was too much of a literary man to ever really get his head around the movie business? But his detective Lew Archer is as brilliantly drawn as ever. Here he is going easy on a suspect:
“I caught myself doubting my premises, doubting that she could be any kind of hustler. Besides, there was just enough truth in her accusation, enough cruelty in my will to justice, enough desire in my pity, to make the room uncomfortable for me. I said goodnight and left.
The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one.”
See my other Archer covers here!
There’s never been a really satisfactory filmed version of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels. In the past, I’ve blogged about Paul Newman’s performances in Harper, The Drowning Pool and Twilight (here and here). Less well known are the TV movie and short-lived series based on the character, produced in the 1970s.
Peter Graves (Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible) took the part of Archer in a 90-minute adaptation of The Underground Man in 1974. Tom Nolan’s biography of Macdonald records that the author was impressed with Graves’ interpretation.
“In thirty years of writing about Lew Archer, I never thought much about how he looked,” Macdonald told the LA Times. “Except that he was Californian, tanned, athletic. Then one night a few years ago, I saw Peter on Mission: Impossible and thought, ‘That’s Lew Archer; that’s the way he looks.’ It was really quite eerie when I was told Peter was playing Lew, because I had nothing at all to do with the casting.”
However, NBC showed no interest in picking up the pilot. Those who’ve seen the film tend to criticize Douglas Heyes’ screenplay, which fiddled with Archer’s character and compressed the plot. Macdonald later observed, “Paramount spent a lot of money on it, and hired some good actors, but the script seemed rather obscure and hysterical.”
Still, on the evidence of the video below, it looks like an interesting failure. It has an outstanding guest cast: Dame Judith Anderson, Vera Miles, Jack Klugman, Celeste Holm and Sharon Farrell are all actors I like to see onscreen. Though it’s difficult to get much sense of Graves’ performance from this clip, he seems to be playing Archer as a quiet, thoughtful listener. Much closer, then, to the character of the novels than Paul Newman’s cocky Lew Harper.
Most of all, I like the melancholic tone set by Marvin Hamlisch’s score. It’s a haunting, wistful melody that very effectively conjures the sense of yearning so distinctive to Macdonald’s work. Twenty-four years later, Elmer Bernstein would write a similar theme for Robert Benton’s Twilight, an Archer film in all but name.
I’m going to have to get hold of a copy of The Underground Man to satisfy my curiosity. There seem to be a few DVD-Rs knocking about on the net (though sadly, none of Brian Keith’s six-episode series Archer, which I’d also like to see). When I do get a copy, I’ll be sure to review it for Squeezegut Alley. Until then, if any of you remember this film, do get in touch!
Peter Falk casts his spell
Anyone who’s interested in crime fiction should read The Rap Sheet.
This week J. Kingston Pierce posted a long and fascinating interview with William Link, one of the co-creators (with Richard Levinson) of Columbo. It’s particularly charming to discover Link and Levinson met as children through a shared love of magic tricks. “There’s a connection between magic and mystery, you know,” observes Link. “They’re both about deception.”
I was very interested to read about Link and Levinson’s early work with Martin Sheen, That Certain Summer and The Execution of Private Slovik which sound like remarkable TV movies. Pierce has posted some nice clips from these, along with the title sequence of another Link and Levinson show I’d dearly like to see: Tenafly.
It’s a fascinating read, not just for what it tells us about Columbo’s production history but also for the picture Link paints of network television in the 1970s. I’m also very pleased to discover that Link is a fan of Ross Macdonald!
Read the interview here.
Here’s another in my irregular series on Ross Macdonald covers. Previous installments can be found here, here and here.
There’s a pleasing abstraction to this cover. I love the way that the book’s title seems to be sinking into the grave! The way that pick and shovel are leaning so casually against the earth is slightly sinister. We wonder who has dug this grave, and who it is for…
William Collins edition, 1972
Here’s another in my irregular series on Ross Macdonald covers. You can find the first two installments here and here.
Over at Killer Covers, there’s an insightful post by J. Kingston Pierce on pulp paperback art. Do go over and read it here.
Pierce interviews Charles Ardai, Max Allan Collins and David Saunders. Their consensus is that by the 1970s, the trend for cheaper photographic art had forced pulp cover artists toward Hollywood and advertising. This struck a chord with me. Time has passed. Living next to a cinema means I’m depressed daily by the Photoshopped eyesores that now pass for movie posters.
Since reading that post, I’ve been mulling the subject over. Do I find photographic covers inherently less interesting? Is this unwarranted prejudice or a simple matter of aesthetic preference?
With this in mind, let’s look at another Ross Macdonald cover. My first post in this series depicted two painted covers, partly because I thought they were unusual and visually more stimulating. However, my second post showed the movie tie-in for The Drowning Pool, a lazy job of design (publicity still reproduction) but meaningful to me because of the quality of Archer-ness in Paul Newman’s face.
My subject today is a different kettle of fish altogether. Yes, it’s a photographic cover, and it’s an eccentric image.
Fontana edition, 1967
I think my first response to this cover was amusement. The forced perspective makes the corpse’s feet seem comically enlarged. Ditto the baldness of that protruding dagger. However, the more I look at it, this image unsettles me. Its gallows humour, perhaps consciously, recalls this still from Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry.
The Trouble with Harry, 1955, Alfred Hitchcock
In each case, the corpse is dehumanized, a figure of fun. And perhaps this is why the cover seems so inappropriate for this novel. As Fred Zackel recalls here, Ross Macdonald was of the opinion that, “The detective isn’t your main character, and neither is your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective’s job is to seek justice for the corpse. It’s the corpse’s story, first and foremost.”
Despite its incompatibility with the book’s contents, I’m happy to have kept this copy in my collection. That curious blend of macabre humour and genuine creepiness is very striking!
Although most of my Fontana Ross Macdonald editions went to the charity shop (as explained here), a few escaped the cull. I kept The Drowning Pool for its photographic cover, a tie-in with the Stuart Rosenberg-directed movie.
The Drowning Pool, Fontana edition, 1975
Harper was made in 1966, its sequel The Drowning Pool a long nine years later in 1975. Perhaps the studio realized that its rights to the character were due to expire?
As you can see, Newman has matured in a way that nicely visualizes the character’s worldliness. This is the face of a guy who’s been around the block so many times he’s running low on petrol. Reading Macdonald, this is the face I always see in my head. Hair slightly greying, skin slightly lined. Newman in the 70s embodies Lew Archer perfectly.
It’s a shame the film is so bad. Harper is flawed but fun, but The Drowning Pool is an endurance test. Uncharacteristically, Newman delivers a broad unlikeable performance. In Harper, his arrogance seemed like youthful hubris; here, he recycles schtick which ill befits an older man.
Inexplicably, the action of the book is moved from California to Louisiana. Perhaps this explains why much of the film looks like it was shot through a lens doused in swamp water.
The back cover
Newman’s co-star is his wife Joanne Woodward. The film invents a past romantic history for their two characters which (I don’t want to reveal a plot twist) plays out very unpleasantly. My guess is that Newman only agreed to play this character again if his wife could be involved – perhaps that explains his lacklustre performance. Happily, Newman would have another crack at the character (obliquely) in the 90s. But that’s for another blog entry…
So, a stinker of a movie. But I still treasure the cover. Because that’s what Lew Archer looks like.
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been trying to replace my collection of Ross Macdonald paperbacks. My watchword for buying has been ‘variety’, my objection to my previous 70s Fontana editions being their uniform ugliness.
So, here is the first installment of what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts, as my collection grows. That’s assuming I do continue to find editions with decent covers. If not, just be a pal and forget I mentioned it, OK?
The Way Some People Die, Pan editon, UK, 1956
The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Bantam edition, US, 1964
Paul Newman started me reading Ross Macdonald. In 1966 Newman starred in a movie called Harper, based on Macdonald’s detective novel The Moving Target. Newman played private investigator Lew Harper as hip and cynical, in his words a cross between Humphrey Bogart and John F Kennedy. He made short sleeved shirts under jackets seem the epitome of cool.
Paul Newman as Lew Harper
When I began to read the Macdonald novels I started noticing differences. Here, the PI’s name was Lew Archer. And far from being cool and cynical, Archer was a compassionate thinker. He could swing a fist with the best of them, but a great deal of the books focus on Archer listening. Listening to people’s stories, listening to the way they talk about each other.
For me, this is why Macdonald is the most affecting of the great crime writers, the one whose writing reaches out from its period and continues to resonate.
Go to Dashiell Hammett for ice-pick ruthlessness. Not a spot of ruth in his prose. Go to Raymond Chandler for the romance of the city and the well-turned quip about the well-turned ankle. But go to Macdonald and you find violent emotions and secret cruelties. The family melodrama told by a man tired of hearing lies.
Lew Archer private investigator
I suppose Archer’s defining quality is his involvement with the people who come to him for help. It’s rarely romantic involvement; he often acts like an older brother or a father to his clients, steering them away from the tragedies in their lives, trying to save them. Lew cares.
‘I have a secret passion for mercy,’ Archer admits in The Chill (1963). ‘But justice is what keeps happening to people.’
Macdonald wrote eighteen Archer novels and nine short stories between 1949 and 1976. Over the course of the series Archer ages and matures as Macdonald’s literary style develops. It’s with the seventh novel, The Doomsters (1958) that Macdonald really finds his theme: the broken family, torn apart by the sins of previous generations. The author’s obsessive return to this narrative led Donald Westlake to quip, ‘He must have terrific carbon paper.’
But it’s this familiarity that keeps me coming back. I want to spend time with Lew, learn from his kindnesses and (I admit it) savour his melancholy at a disappointing world.
Ross Macdonald
Over the years, I’d collected all of the Archer novels, mainly in the easy to find but ugly 70s Fontana paperbacks. Recently I threw most of them out. I decided that I wanted to collect Macdonald all over again, this time in older editions that are easier on the eye. I’m looking forward to the hunt!
There’s a fascinating account of Macdonald’s life here, an overview of Lew Archer’s career here, and January Magazine’s marvellous and comprehensive Ross Macdonald tribute here. Enjoy!
