Hello Fellow Rare Birds-
Just picked up this little gem (the trade paperback, not the
fifty dollar hardback with "extras"), and am thrilled to have
this interesting retrospective of Ross MacDonald's short work
featuring the inimitable Lew Archer. Has anyone else read it?
From the back cover:
"THE ARCHER FILES for the first time collects all the brief
Archer fiction: the stories from MacDonald's 1955
paperback-original THE NAME IS ARCHER, the additional tales
included in the Otto Penzler-edited 1977 volume LEW ARCHER:
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, and the three then-unknown novellas
presented in Crippen & Landru's 2001 book STRANGERS IN
TOWN. Also included in THE ARCHER FILES are several lengthy,
never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald
stories: 'case notes,' as it were, from the files of Lew
Archer."
I found this collection irresistible, especially in light of
the inclusion of the so-called "case notes," which are really
just the first several pages of a number of what turned out
to be uncompleted stories. I've found these interesting
going, an opportunity to see how MacDonald got started on a
story over several different phases of his writing career,
beginning with a 1952 fragment with a wonderful title
("Heyday in the Blood"), and ending with 1965's "100 Pesos"
(the stories themselves begin much earlier, with "Find the
Woman" and "Death by Water," fboth rom 1946.
For those Rare Birds who haven't experienced the work of Ross
MacDonald, I think THE ARCHER FILES could be a welcome entree
into the world of Lew Archer for you, and since it's made up
entirely of short-stories and novellas, it's a potentially
minimal commitment. Nolan has also included an interesting,
speculative "biographical essay" based upon an exhaustive
reading of MacDonald's entire body of work (he cites various
comments Archer dropped here and there throughout the essay),
which, if not necessarily authentic, is certainly
provocative, and therefore worth a look.
Someone wrote here recently about Chandler's short fiction,
lauding it as being superior in many ways to his novels. I
agree with that sentiment, and fortunate indeed was I that I
picked up the TROUBLE IS MY BUSINESS as my initial foray into
Chandler's writing back when I was a teenager. I don't think
that MacDonald's short stuff is "better" than his novels, but
because he doesn't have a couple of hundred pages in which to
spin one of his famous (infamous?) byzantine plots, it's
definitely easier to keep track of the other
characters!
All the Best-
Brian Thornton
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