I don’t trust people who say they like mysteries. They seem to read for different reasons than me, not better or worse, I guess, but they’re a different species and I don’t know what to say to them. I picture grey-haired cat ladies with Agatha Christie fixations or overweight insurance salesmen obsessed with Sherlock Holmes minutiae. Or I think back to the first time I met one of my wife’s cousins. She saw I was reading The Secret History and said, “Oh, that looks great! I love whodunits!” In turn, I stay away from the “mystery” aisles. I know little about Hammett, Chandler, etc. because of their weak and perhaps unsubstantiated connection to the genre. However, about fifteen years ago my friend Dan hooked me onto Ellroy and I worked through his entire catalog. And I’ve glanced, every now and then, in the direction of others who earn (or acquire while failing to earn) comparisons to Mr. E. Ross Macdonald, a writer of whom I had never heard until I saw a reference on goodreads last week, precedes Ellroy but nonetheless provided a welcome surprise. After reading my first Macdonald I’d feel comfortable recommending his work to the Ellroy-obsessed, and I don’t take that type of recommendation lightly. I could see the authors admiring each other’s work.The Instant Enemy, one of a series of Lew Archer novels, catches fire within the first twenty pages. Mr. Archer, a weatherbeaten private detective, takes on a case in which he agrees to find the rebellious daughter of a wealthy, preening middle manager. In the process he encounters her broken boyfriend, a barren farm with a terrifying history, and a loaded family with too much to hide for long. Mr. Archer lives weary. He’s not a superhero and Macdonald’s prose mirrors the character’s steady, careful pace. Archer, it seems, has witnessed enough terror both to try and save his cases’ victims and to know sometimes people pursue their own demons straight to hell with full knowledge of exactly what they’re doing. tI read The Instant Enemy over a long weekend on a hot front porch, avoiding the sun, and the second I finished I requested more Macdonald from the local library system. In a couple weeks I return to my wife’s family’s house out east, and I’ll need books like this, so I’m glad to have found the author. I get the feeling I’ve missed more out there like him.
THE INSTANT ENEMY. (1968). Ross Macdonald. ***As is usual with a Lew Archer investigation, he quickly becomes involved in family and family history. In this case he is retained by the parents of a young girl to bring her home from her spree with a mentally unbalanced young man. The young man has a history of run-ins with the law and reacting in unexpected ways to events as they occur as a result of his actions. He is basically looking for his father – or at least the identity of his father. He was told that his father was killed by being run over by a freight train while he stood by and watched. Since he was only three-years old at the time, his memory of the event is not as clear as it might be. As he was growing up under this scenario, he becomes more and more mentally disturbed. It doesn’t help that he is taken in by a variety of foster parents who heap additional confusion on him. The latest set of parents aren’t all that stable, either. There’s money involved – as you might expect – and that changes things. As is typical of most of Macdonald’s books, there is no lack of characters. Fortunately, by the end of the book Macdonald has killed off most of them so that the reader can then get back on track to try and understand what has been happening. Lots of mayhem and sex are added to spice up the story, but I still found myself getting lost occasionally as the story was being reeled out. The ending was typical Macdonald: fast, furious and nebulous.
What do You think about The Instant Enemy (1993)?
What makes Ross Macdonald so interesting? I have often wondered why but to me it has always been a keen sense of the underlying angst of California in the post war period and the rise of such things as teenage culture, suburban crime and the rise of the "mobile family". In The Instant Enemy Macdonald asks a very simple question, how does a parent react to the fact that one of their teenage children would participate willingly in a crime.And, typically of Macdonald, these parents are wealthy, amoral and, at times downright stupid, which means that Lew Archer is going to have to navigate through the ridiculous and grim sides of crime while balancing the warring and Freudian inspired parties.Archer, unlike Chandler's characters, is not a loner created by the social conditions, he is in fact a loner by choice and that is what makes him so damn likeable....It is also why so many critics have ignored him, because as they say the mysterious is far more interesting..whereas the world of Lew Archer, is far, far more realistic and more interesting.
—Felix Hayman
Competent but imperfect. Comes uncomfortably close to using convoluted plotting and dramatic revelations as devices to create suspense, rather than sticking to the realist tack of exploring characters' motivations for engaging in crime. There seems to be something slightly 'off' about Lew Archer, as well. He is the perfect distillation of the archetypical noir hero, and for that lacks an authentic personality of his own. His actions seem stereotyped, even scripted, according to the playbook of the Chandlerian PI.
—Stephen
The late sixties feel almost like yesterday compared to times when Raymond Chandler writings took place. We have sex, drugs (LSD is mentioned here), and rock-n-roll. Lew Archer is hired by a typical middle-class suburban couple to find their typical rebellious troubled runaway teen daughter who took a shotgun as a memento with her. It seems she ran off to her equally troubled - and psychotic to boot - boyfriend. This innocent investigation leads to a surprising number of dead bodies and a very complicated and convoluted (I am using this word as a praise here) mystery. The first thing to note about the novel is the very high number of dead bodies I already mentioned, probably the highest so far in the series if you count the bodies both in past and present; the past plays an important part in the book as always touching on dark secrets of several generations of different families. Ross Macdonald is one of the grand masters of mystery - both traditional and noir - sadly mostly forgotten these days. Not only he can and does create a good mystery, his descriptions make southern California of the end of sixties come alive. Most of his characters felt like living breathing real people. While reading the novel I began feeling bad for the teen couple, then I felt really repulsed by them, and then I began to understand them. It takes a real master to pull off such great characterization. I would like to mention I was really impressed by Archer's efforts to do everything he could and then some to save the teens from themselves. I gave 4 stars to this novel initially, but after rereading my own review I realized it needs to be rated higher, so 5 stars is it. Runaway Train would be an obvious and excellent listening choice as a background music for reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRtvq...The review is dedicated to the noble effort by good people who try to help runaway kids all over the world.
—Evgeny
