At 01:44 PM 07/01/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Nolan's bio is always recommended on the list, but
I've never picked it
>up. I will if I see it, though. Mr. Schooley was
especially enthusiastic
>about it.
I too was distracted by the strange index listing. Nolan
doesn't say that much about Black Money directly, except that
it was written, published, won critical praise and financial
success. The last was a significant point. Harper came out in
1966, and as the most recently published book, Black Money
was the first to benefit from the exposure and popularity of
the movie. Previously, Macdonald's books were more critically
than financially rewarding. Even as Harper was in production,
Nolan says Bantam had plans to let some of Macdonald's titles
go out of print. Knopf essentially stood by Macdonald for 20
years before the dollars really began to roll. Hard to
imagine that happening now.
Though Nolan doesn't provide much direct criticism about the
Macdonald's books, reading the biography reveals many of
Macdonald's resources. The Millers lived in Santa Barbara, a
small college town where they were members of a private club
on the Pacific beach. Well, that's our setting for Black
Money. I wondered how many of the characters in Black Money
were based upon members of the Coral Casino Beach Club. Most
were the type of judgmental, privileged, empty lives that
Nolan suggests characterized the upper strata of the Millers'
community.
Miller's youth was split between school, the jukes and pool
halls of Kitchener, Ontario and his maternal grandmother's
puritan household. Many of those street-level joints, Nolan
suggests, sported gambling machines and back-room betting.
Though the phrase hasn't come up in the book, Black Money is
laundered cash- the cleaned up and "legitimized" flow from
the proceeds of crime, in this case the skim off Las Vegas
casino profits by organized crime. Macdonald suggests that
the volumes are so large in North America that they
infiltrate and corrupt all levels of society. Gamblers are
hooked, leading to the breakdown of businesses and families,
but even more important, the monies wash into businesses and
through banks, over the transoms of ambitious politicians and
justice officials, corrupting the values of those exposed to
it, and almost everybody is exposed to it one way or another.
Vegas has since gone legit as a family playground now,
meaning youth is exposed to it while forming their own values
and brand loyalties. Yet somehow money laundering is an
activity that still has currency in today's economy.
Miller grew up without his father, and Black Money, like so
many of Macdonald's books, revolves around the failure to
nurture children in North America. Black Money is more than a
case of an individual kid gone wrong due to lack of a father
figure. Macdonald reveals a number of ways in which children
are used by adults for their own advantage. This includes the
kids' own parents, and Macdonald is very good at describing
how individuals and societies distance themselves from their
knowledge of this activity.
Miller was a failed academic. Despite recommendations from
acclaimed Coleridge experts, he couldn't get his Ph.D. thesis
on Coleridge published, Nolan suggests, because several
university presses were reluctant to acknowledge serious work
produced by a mystery writer. The notion of a
crime-writing/literary dichotomy still exists, but I'd
suggest that with pop-lit courses in so many institutions it
can hardly be taken seriously anymore. But clearly Macdonald
lands some vengeful blows on academia in Black Money, when he
suggests that sexual liaisons between students and professors
were not uncommon. And the scenes revolving around the "Five
Questions for a Frenchman" are hilarious, with the tough
Archer increasingly wishing he'd not brought the subject up
as Tappinger gradually takes the notion seriously and
composes the test. Then, because his client is with him,
Archer reluctantly asks Martel the questions, though he
know's they're stupid. Still, it's not all fun and games. At
the end of the novel, Macdonald uses the list to suggest that
Tappinger may have subconsciously revealed himself in
creating the list.
Humour may not appear in Black Money as much as in other
crime-writers' works, but it is there, when Archer gives his
first name as "Fallen" to a drunken woman who insists on
calling him "Arch", or, under the appraising eye of a
hospital clerk he asks how much she thinks he's worth. "Dead
of alive?" she says. There's more, but what's interesting
about so much of Macdonald's writing are the multiple layers
of meaning. That Archer asks to be addressed as "Fallen"
implies more than his aching feet. The "dead or alive" crack
gives pause to anyone engaged in the dangerous business of
life. "That stopped me," Archer tells the reader. And the
"Five Questions", as well as providing humour, and as well as
alluding to Tappinger's motivations, are a whip against
pop-psychology quizzes that appear in everything from
consumer magazines to job-evaluations. And everything,
ultimately provides insight into complex systems for the
betrayal of children.
I find much in Macdonald's work that is prescient, and that
includes the notion of strong female characters dependent
upon weak men. I don't think that has quite played its way
through the entrails and out of society yet. Last I looked,
men still had a lock on most senior executive positions. Bill
Clinton got the top job, not Hillary. Not yet.
But I'd suggest that Macdonald influenced his times, and
times since. He builds on Hammet and Chandler, but in
somewhat different times. Hammet and Chandler peaked between
the wars, the brief period when books were a popular medium.
Their stories suggested merit and skill in the hardscrabble
lives average people. The Working Joe wasn't necessarily
stupid or undeserving, but still needed to be tough to get
along. Spade had street smarts and understood how things
worked. Marlow seemed to have achieved a level of
self-education. Both used their brains and brawn in equal
measure. Macdonald writes after WWII, when television is
quickly replacing reading as a mass medium for entertainment,
and the market splits between the brawn-backed judgments of
Mike Hammer and the psychological inquiries of Lew Archer. In
Black Money, Archer doesn't even pack a gun until the very
end of the book. He muscles no one. He doesn't blackmail or
threaten information from anyone. As Bill Crider points out,
Archer's investigation is more like the "talking cure" of
psychoanalysis. People volunteer information because they
know they're morally uncertain, even as they repeatedly say
otherwise. They have a need to confess. As the dick hired by
a sympathetic member of their inner circle, a community rife
with gossip and guilt, Archer becomes the community
priest.
One of the interesting implications is what this does to the
notion of hard boiled. Archer is tough enough. He's certainly
world-weary and cynical in his narrative asides to the
reader. He's not afraid to go up against his opponents
without a gun. Of course, most of them are middle-class
wimps, but there's the Vegas casino front man, who Archer
thinks might have killed at least one of the book's victims.
Archer doesn't run from him. I think we can agree that
Archer's tough enough. The question though, is what's
colloquial during the mid-sixties when television has spent
20 years stamping out regional dialects and gotten everyone
talking like mid-Atlantic evening newscasters? Once in a
while a character will slide into bad grammar, but that's
about it, unless you include Martel's French. Macdonald's
writing isn't colloquial in the way that Ellroy's is, but
Ellroy latches onto the lingo of jazz musicians or the
scandal-sheet yellow press for its stylistic flourish. This
more jargon, the language of determined subcultures, not the
dialects of average people.
Still, I don't think style is Macdonald's strong suit. Some
of his earliest stories attempted tough colloquialisms and
came off as forced, in my opinion. And while Black Money
contains some lovely lines (the one with the moon looking
like a fingerprint on the windowpane), some other
descriptions are laboured and there's a tendency here and
there for unnecessary adjectives, even when the point has
been made in the progress of a scene. Some of this comes from
the use of Archer, the flawed human being and investigator,
as narrator. He says he's not the type of guy most people
would enjoy for company, and he's not. He's judgemental as
hell, especially at the beginning of the book, and they
aren't judgments that most people would agree with. So I'd
agree with those who felt the characterization of the
surfer/life-guard wasn't quite up to Macdonald's intentions.
It's hard to see why Archer is so upset with his youthful
stupidity.
It's not that style and character development are
consistently bad. They're often quite good. It's just that
occasionally they're not quite what they could or should be.
The characters are usually strong enough for the stories, but
Archer himself aside, few are memorable in the long run.
Macdonald's greatest strength, I'd suggest, is his
description and development of the relationships between
people and how they necessarily work out. Macdonald is a
master of plot.
Ironically, at the beginning of Black Money, the Tennis Club
is somewhat similar to Christie's drawing rooms, almost a
parody of social life. But Archer peels away the layers,
finding at first the customary infidelities and debaucheries
with their attendant hypocrisies, then the deeper secrets
resulting from obsessive behaviours, followed by their
attendant criminalities and murders, finally leading to the
darkest secret of them all: the failure of society to support
it's children's dreams and hopes for the future, a corruption
that ripples through the shifting sands of life like an
atomic bomb set off in the Nevada dessert.
Noir? I'd say so.
Best Kerry
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