Lew Archer Short Stories

The Name Is Archer - Ross MacDonald

Ross MacDonald wrote only about a dozen short stories starring his series hero PI Lew Archer. One reason is that MacDonald probably preferred the elbow room that writing novels allows authors. Another may be that the period in which he wrote the stories, 1946 to 1965, coincided with the shrinkage of the market for short fiction in men’s magazines like Argosy. The 1955 collection The Name is Archer is comprised of seven stories: “Find the Woman,” “Gone Girl,” “The Bearded Lady,” “The Suicide,” “Guilt-Edged Blonde,” “The Sinister Habit,” and “Wild Goose Chase.”

“Find the Woman” was MacDonald first piece of detective fiction. Although he dashed it off in only two days in 1946, it won a prize of $400 (about $4,300 in today’s money) and was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.  To my mind, the best story was “The Suicide” because MacDonald shows deft characterization and uses characters and themes he was to explore in later novels, such as youth headed for trouble, miserable families, and past misdeeds haunting the present.  Anthologists, however, have chosen “The Suicide” only twice for now-forgotten collections. They have preferred to collect “Guilt-Edged Blonde” in no less than eleven anthologies – one of which was The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories.  I think it's the most undistinguished story, because it reads like it could have written by a lot of hard-boiled writers of the 1950s.

I liked the fluent prose. MacDonald has a fine sense of place (Southern California) and sketches out characters quickly. He didn’t weigh down sentences with the labored metaphors and similes that we find in the early Archer novels like The Drowning Pool, The Way Some People Die, and Find a Victim.

While I can’t recommend The Name is Archer to readers new to Ross MacDonald, I’m sure that his admirers will get a charge out of reading about Archer just starting to work as a PI in Los Angeles. The seven stories plus a couple more are reprinted in the collection Lew Archer, Private Investigator.