The Way Some People Die by Ross Macdonald
I've read a fair few of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels over the past 10 years courtesy of the Library of Mum and Dad but I think I've only reviewed one (The Barbarous Coast) so it felt like it was about time I recommended another. The Way Some People Die is an excellent slice of hard-boiled noir from 1951 featuring juvenile delinquents, drugs and exploited women, with the bodies piling up as Archer drives up and down the Californian coast getting confused and misled. It starts, as many do, with a missing girl...
As with Philip Marlowe, there is a chivalry at the core of Lew Archer that gets him into trouble. Also like Marlowe, I would say Archer is a cynical optimist — while he's painfully aware that many people would sell their own grandmother for half an hour's excitement, he believes that most (definitely not all) people are worth saving, if he can. It's that blend of gunning for the truly bad guys while trying to save the others from themselves that makes Archer worth spending time with. There's double-crossing aplenty, the odd wisecrack, and some lovely description.
I've written before about the sense of place in detective novels, and this is no exception. The landscape, weather, and particularly the sea play a large part in the atmosphere of the book. He doesn't have Raymond Chandler's terse style but he can conjure a nice image nevertheless, from driving 'under the smothering gray sky' to meeting someone with grey hair 'like iron filings tempted by a magnet' to this description of Pacific Point: 'It rose from sea level in a gentle slope, divided neatly into social tiers, like something a sociologist had built to prove a theory'. When Archer mentions how recently some small town was bare desert it hit me how fast-changing that whole area was, and I wondered if some of it would seem as exotic to a local now as it does to me 5,000 miles away.
If you're looking for happy endings this isn't the place to find them, but if you like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett I can heartily recommend both this novel and Ross Macdonald in general. I believe he wrote a couple of dozen novels between the 1940s and 1970s though not all of them are Lew Archer cases.
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