(from the archives)
Strangers in Town: Three Newly-discovered Mysteries by
Ross Macdonald, edited by Tom Nolan
(Review by Deb)
(Review by Deb)
Containing three short stories (only one of which was
published in Macdonald’s lifetime), written in 1945, 1950, and 1955
respectively, Strangers in Town
displays some of the earliest themes, characterizations, plot twists, and
motifs that are found in Macdonald’s longer works. In each one of these stories, we see elements
emerge that will be explored more fully in future mysteries, including the development
of Macdonald’s series private investigator, Lew Archer.
The first story, Death
by Water, was published in 1945 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under
Macdonald’s real name, Kenneth Millar.
Written while Millar was serving on a naval vessel in the Pacific
Theater of WWII, the story features Lew Archer prototype, p.i. Joe Rogers, who
is investigating the drowning death of a wealthy man. Was it just an unfortunate accident or was he
deliberately killed? And, if the latter,
who is the killer? The man’s younger,
wheelchair-bound wife has only a few months to live herself. The man’s stepson is on a navy ship (much
like Millar himself when he wrote this story) and therefore unable to have
committed the crime. How about the dead
man’s brother, who struggles to live on a limited income? And where was the wife’s personal nurse when
the death occurred? Millar manages to
pack a lot of suspects and motives into a few pages, but what I found most
interesting about the story was the reference to ALS (aka, Lou Gehrig’s
disease) just a few years after Gehrig himself succumbed to the condition.
Lew Archer appears in the next story, 1950’s Strangers in Town, where he is hired by
a woman to prove that her son did not kill a pretty, secretive young woman who
was renting a room in her house. Archer
has to travel to a dusty town in the California desert to investigate this
one. As in much of Macdonald’s longer
fiction, the small California community in which the story is set is a
character in itself. What I liked most
about the story was the sympathetic and dignified treatment of African-American
and Hispanic characters (the victim and the alleged killer are both black; the
attorney defending the young man is Mexican-American)—they are depicted neither
as caricatures nor noble stoics, but as fully-realized characters with the
standard human mix of decency, faults, and failings.
The final story in the collection is 1955’s The Angry Man which features several
frequent Macdonald themes: The
mentally-ill and the often callous treatment they receive from law enforcement
and society as a whole; wealthy but dysfunctional families; the lengths to
which people who have no money will go in order to get it; and the
juxtaposition of a character’s surface persona with their inward self. You can also see Macdonald working on the
technical problem of how to have a first-person, non-omniscient narrator receive
and communicate information without the story devolving into one long piece of
exposition (I think Macdonald handles this type of narrative extremely well in
both his short and long fiction). Neither
this story nor Strangers in Town was
published in Macdonald’s lifetime. He decision
not to publish these works was not because they did not measure up to his
standards but for quite the opposite reason:
He liked what he had written so much that he wanted to expand upon it
and develop the material into longer works.
As entertaining as these short stories are, I found the
most interesting thing about the book to be its long, informative introduction
written by Tom Nolan which quotes extensively from letters Millar/Macdonald
wrote to his wife (fellow novelist, Margaret Millar—herself an FFB honoree some
time ago) while he was serving in the Navy.
During long, occasionally dangerous, deployments, Millar was able to
read extensively from the ship’s library and continue to write fiction and
develop his ideas for writing first-person murder-mysteries narrated by the
hard-boiled but moral private investigator who ultimately became Lew Archer.
Todd Mason
