Mixed up metaphors

Ross Macdonald

I'm sure I was not the only person who began reading Ross Macdonald mysteries because of an article by William Goldman on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 1969. Goldman called Macdonald's Lew Archer books "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Just the fact that murder mysteries were being discussed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review seemed notable, but putting MacDonald ahead of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett made this notable indeed. And so I began reading The Goodbye Look, The Drowning Pool, The Far Side of the Dollar and other Lew Archer adventures. I don't remember particularly enjoying them. I found them confusing. But then I've found Chandler confusing as well. If the Times said Ross Macdonald was the best, perhaps it was so. Or so I thought at the time.

After a time, however, I put my Ross Macdonald novels aside, some still unread, and haven't read one in decades.

I was caught by surprise recently when I came upon an article by Bill Delaney called "Ross Macdonald's Literary Offenses" in a 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective. (Yes, I do read, and sometimes reread, very old magazines.) Delaney rips apart Macdonald about as thoroughly as anyone has ripped apart another writer since Mark Twain famously did the same to James Fenimore Cooper.

Focusing mainly on The Moving Target, the first Lew Archer novel published in 1949, Delaney ridicules sentence after sentence, metaphor after metaphor, pointing out every bit of twisted logic he finds. He wonders why a woman would hire Archer to find her missing husband when he has been gone less than 24 hours and has a history of being gone for days at a time. And why would any private investigator show up at the house in a cab with a suitcase in his hand? Does he expect his client to put him up for the night? Or give him a ride back into town?

"The plot is just too stupid for words," Delaney writes. And, "I see no point in searching for higher meanings in a man who could hardly write a straight sentence."

So could this be true? Could Ross Macdonald really have fooled William Goldman, the New York Times and those thousands of readers, myself included, who made his books bestsellers? I decided to do 10 minutes worth of research.

Here's a metaphor I found on the first page of The Goodbye Look, which has Goldman's quote, cited above, on its cover: "The heavy dark lines accenting her eyes made her look like a prisoner peering out through bars." That's a line you might just skim over, but stop to think about it and you see it makes little sense. Makeup that looks like prison bars? On a young woman who makes her living as a model?

From the first page of Black Money there's this: "A few dry bathers were lying around as if the yellow eye of the sun had hypnotized them." This suggests these sunbathers were looking directly into the sun. Could they have been that stupid?

Early in The Far Side of the Dollar I found, "His smile was brilliant, but it faded like an optical illusion." At first this metaphor sounds as brilliant as that smile, but the brilliance fades when you stop to think about it. How, exactly, can a real smile be anything like an optical illusion? Sure optical illusions sometimes fade, but smiles always fade eventually.

If insane metaphors are that easy to find in Macdonald's work, I am inclined to believe Bill Delaney was right.