The Archer Files

by Ross Macdonald

  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.

  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.”

  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.”

  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.

  —

  A man is only as good as his conscience.

  —Inspector Fate of Limehouse

  “Most private detectives come out of police work,” 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.” 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,” 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.” (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.”

  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.”) 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:

  I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

  There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.

  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.

  —

  I was an officer in the war, but the gentleman part didn’t take.

  —Lew Archer

  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—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.”

  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.” 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.”

  —

  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”—and he would see it, too often, in America, after the war.

&nbs
p; 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,” 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.

  —

  “My wife divorced me last year. Extreme mental cruelty.”

  “I think you might be capable of it.”

  —The Drowning Pool

  Archer claimed not to trust blonde women, but he was drawn to them—not to the “dumb blondes” who “cluttered up the California landscape” 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:

  Don’t you dare touch me.

  I have a legal right to. You’re my wife.

  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” 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.

  —

  “You don’t talk like a married man and you don’t look like a bachelor.”

  —The Zebra-Striped Hearse

  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,” 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.”

  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.”

  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.”) 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 a
nything 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.” 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.

  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.