The crime writer Ross Macdonald, when he is not being ignored, seems to be left to languish in the shadow of Raymond Chandler. As the film of James Ellroy's LA Confidential renews interest in the Californian crime novel, Macdonald - arguably the finest writer of the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald triumvirate - remains largely forgotten. In a recent thumbnail review in this newspaper of an omnibus edition of three of his novels (The Ivory Grin, The Galton Case and The Blue Hammer) Vincent Banville described Macdonald as "lighter in tone and less cerebral than Chandler", but "dependable".
"Dependable" is the critical equivalent of "nice"; it is damnation with faint praise. It is the word one uses about an old cart-horse who has served his time and now, sadly, is due to end up as glue on the back of an envelope. Like the other adjectives used in the review, it hardly did justice to Macdonald as one of the founders of the modern psychological detective novel.
The received wisdom is that Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe, is the greatest American crime novelist. But only three of his novels can be regarded as great (The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye) and even Farewell My Lovely can be endorsed only with reservations. Once Chandler is established as the benchmark, all other writers working in a similar tradition are shoe-horned into the subsidiary places.
Psychological complexity
But Macdonald's work represents a progression on the earlier work of Hammett and Chandler, marked in particular by a psychological complexity which the other two largely lacked, with the notable exception of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. It provided a template for later writers who believed that a genre novel does not necessarily have to sacrifice psychological depth for the sake of plot.
Hammett's world view was bleaker than that of either Chandler or Macdonald, a vision of universal corruption in which no-one - not friends, not lovers, not the law - could be trusted. Chandler, in turn, localised this decay, placing it in the context of the notorious Los Angeles police department, the criminal community of the city and the new, unscrupulous wealthy who had flocked to California.
In Macdonald's world, it is families which are presented as dysfunctional, or even actively corrupt, and the sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons, sometimes with a disturbing directness. In The Under- ground Man, for example, Stanley Broadhurst is killed on the same spot as his father, whose body lies buried underground in the rotting shell of his car.
Lew Archer
At the heart of the novels stands Macdonald's detective, the isolated, deeply sympathetic Lew Archer. Archer, we learn, is divorced from his wife, though we never actually encounter her. It is the failure of his own marriage, the blighting of his own attempts to create a family life for himself, that gives Archer a humanity that is largely absent in Hammett's characters. Hammett offers us instead the anonymous gunman who annihilates the gangster population of a small town by playing the warring sides off against each other in Red Harvest, itself the inspiration for Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing.
Chandler's Philip Marlowe is a shop-worn knight in soiled armour, as grimly appealing as he is unrealistic. Chandler's image of him as a man untouched by corruption is undermined by Marlowe's bursts of sadism and the unearned moral weight which Chandler has placed upon him.
In Archer, the American detective novel finds for the first time a character defined by his humanity. He has a natural sympathy for the young in particular: he takes the case at the heart of The Chill because he believes that if he does not, the marriage of two young people will fall apart. Similar feelings about troubled youth motivate his interventions in The Galton Case, The Doomsters and The Underground Man. In fact, open any Macdonald book and within the first five pages you are likely to encounter a young man or young woman in some form of emotional turmoil, whose roots Archer must trace carefully back into the past.
As Archer puts it in The Doomsters: "The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough."
For these reasons Macdonald is actually a far darker writer than Chandler, finding instead of an institutional corruption a deeper disease at the heart of the human condition which threatens to engulf the young if they are not given the strength and assistance needed to transcend it. His intelligence is far subtler than Chandler's and is coloured by empathy - a quality which rarely extends beyond the perfunctory in the older writer's work. To view Macdonald as "less cerebral" without any qualification of the term is to do him an injustice; to describe him as "lighter in tone" is simply to misread him. Overcooked metaphors
Chandler's style has often blinded critics to the lack of substance underlying it. Clive James once remarked that Chandler had a tendency to "overcook his metaphors" and it is fair to say that his metaphors have a tendency to tell the reader more about the writer than the character to whom they are applied. Take perhaps his most famous one, the description of Moose Malloy in Farewell My Lovely. Chandler, through Marlowe, describes him as looking like "a tarantula on a slice of angel food". It's an arresting image and one which sticks in the mind, yet we know no more about Moose Malloy after reading it than we knew about him when we opened the book.
Compare it with Macdonald's description of Cassie Hildreth in The Galton Case:
"Our eyes met. Hers were a deep dark blue. Discontent flicked a fin in their depths. . ." Chandler's image rattles emptily; Macdonald's resonates.
I suggest that readers seek out The Underground Man, which exemplifies Macdonald's concern with the clash of nature and modern life and the power of the past to blight the present; The Chill, one of the most brilliantly constructed crime novels ever written; and the bleak, haunting The Doomsters. Look at the money spent as not merely an investment in a neglected author, but an opportunity to encounter a deeply compassionate writer who transformed his genre.