The First Lew Archer

The Moving Target - Ross Macdonald

This is the first Archer mystery. MacDonald named him after Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s murdered partner in The Maltese Falcon. Published in 1949, WWII hangs heavy over the story.

A distraught wife hires private detective Lew Archer to search for her missing husband. It seems an easy enough case, a job that lands in Archer’s lap every day. Nothing indicates crimes against persons and morality are involved until we get into kidnapping and human trafficking in a case that will cost six lives.

Ross Macdonald is mentioned nowadays in the same breath as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He is considered by fans and critics one of the greats of 20th century American crime fiction. He took the classic hardboiled thriller to a different level by exploring the question of the social and psychological “why.”

For instance, in this one, echoing Simenon’s view that given the right combination of interior and exterior pressures, anybody is capable of anything, Archer explains that war’s undermining of certainties, greed for social status, opportunity or its lack, bad luck, and the wrong crowd cause good but lost people to make mistakes that attract the attention of the law. For others who are just bad to the bone, “Money is just a peg people hang their evil on.”

The first Archer mystery was Macdonald’s fifth novel, and so there are flaws. Some spots are slow. Other parts are over-written, which made Raymond Chandler mock the writing as pretentious (said the guy who invented hokey hardboiled patter). Macdonald learned to restrain the “fine writing” and he produced a body of work that can stand with Chandler, Cain, and Hammet.