This month I discovered Ross MacDonald’s mystery classic, The Underground Man. For years I’d heard of the Lew Archer series, but they sounded too hard-boiled for me.  (I mostly read Golden Age mysteries.) I have, however, read some of his wife Margaret Millar’s thrillers so I finally picked up a Lew Archer.  And the Library of America has published three volumes of MacDonald’s novels. His books are also available from Vintage Crime Black Lizard paperbacks.

MacDonald’s narrator, Lew Archer, is a private detective. He is aloof, observant, and intuitive, a quiet man who tracks suspects with minimal fuss.  In The Underground Man (1971), set in the hills and canyons of West Los Angeles during a wildfire, he solves a string of related murders and disappearances. One body leads to another.

This was not how he’d intended to spend his weekend. The opening paragraph is terse and unsentimental, yet lyrical. “A rattle of leaves woke me some time before dawn. A hot wind was breathing in at the bedroom window. I got up and closed the window and lay in bed and listened to the wind.”

Lew gets up and feeds the bluejays in the yard and is joined by a small boy, Ronny Broadhurst, who is waiting for his father to pick him up for the weekend.  (His parents are separated.)  We feel the tension as Stanley Broadhurst strides across the yard in his “peppermint suit” and accuses Lew of being his wife Jean’s boyfriend.  Jean tries to soothe him, explaining that Lew is a neighbor they’ve just met. Meanwhile, Broadhurst’s blond girlfriend sits in the car waiting for Stanley and Ronny. There is much irony and hypocrisy. 

The spare, lyrical prose transcends genre, so I will call this a literary mystery (that sounds silly, I admit).  The psychological tension is bow-taut.  Jean is anxious about Stanley’s instability, and Lew also noticed something off.  And so they drive to the burning canyon where Ronny’s rich grandmother, too haughty to evacuate her huge house, tells them Stanley and Ronny are on a walk. She is confident that everything is fine.

It very much is not.  Lew finds a newly-dug grave in the forest.  Stanley’s body is in it. 

So who killed Stanley?  Did the girlfriend do it? She took Ronny and drove off in Stanley’s car. Is this a kidnapping? Then she takes off in a stolen boat with a sullen young man and Ronny. In order to track them, Lew talks to several unhappy families, each unhappy in its own way.

It’s a wild chase to the finish. And with the fire in the background, the drama is so intense that you may find yourself reading 273 pages in one sitting, or possibly two.