10/365: The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald

The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald Rating: ★★★★ Series: Lew Archer #3 Publication Date: June 1, 1951 Genre: noir Pages: 245 ReRead?: No Project: Project 365 In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

This is the third or fourth in Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer series that I’ve read. I don’t think that MacDonald was quite so accomplished a prose stylist as Chandler, but his plots are better and his characters are just as good.

There is just something about Hollywood in the 1950’s that feels so perfect for crime fiction. It’s in the blood of mid-century California; I can’t think of the golden age of Hollywood without also thinking of the squalor and grit of noir.

Earlier this year I went on a book buying binge and snagged a number of the Library of America crime collections. The Ross MacDonald collection was the last one I bought, and this is the first entry of the first book in the set. Whoever edited the collection didn’t start at the beginning and go through to the end – there are just too many Lew Archer’s for the standard LOA two to three book set. Mine has 11 novels. The first book selects 4 from the 1950’s, the second has 3 from the early 1960’s, and the third collects 4 “later” novels, whatever that means. There are a total of 18 Lew Archers, so my collection is missing 7 of them.

The Way Some People Die is a pretty standard hard boiled private eye novel, with all of the accoutrements of noir: femme fatales, crime bosses, heroin addicts, double-crossers and inept police officers. The plot is complicated but ultimately makes sense and is easy to follow – something that is often not true of Chandler, who is more interested in the way he tells the story than in the story itself (this is not a criticism. I love the way that Chandler writes). Lew Archer is a quintessential noir hero: life has not been kind to him; he’s cynical, and more than a bit frayed and rumpled, but his moral compass, while a bit askew, points true, if not true north.

Noir is so stylish. This one has the style, but also the plot to go with it.