Order THE CHILL here
"I'm in love with you.''
''Don't say that. It only makes me want to kill myself.''
The best way to start a riot at a writers convention is to ask the following question to a large audience: which crime is the most interesting? I have a precise answer to that question : homicide. It's the only crime that doesn't need to rely on interesting characters in order to be worth writing a novel about. It has a life and a story of its own. It's why mystery is and will always be the king of crime fiction and it's why I love detective novels.
Ross MacDonald has the reputation of being the most sophisticated detective novel writer to ever live, but it's difficult to choose a novel of his to start with, because he's had two separate, fundamentally different eras which both take some getting used to. After a lot of hesitation, I've chose to begin with THE CHILL, a sneaky and byzantine mystery that almost got me to step on the bandwagon.
Private detective Lew Archer hasn't stepped out of his latest case yet that he's solicited by a young man named Alex Kincaid in order to locate his runaway bride Dolly. She vanished a couple days into her honeymoon, after the visit of a mysterious bearded man. Archer doesn't have a lot of mileage to do to find her, but Dolly is having a serious mental breakdown. She claims to have murdered another woman working at her college and rambles about her murder of her mother, twenty years ago. Finding poor Dolly Kincaid was just the beginning of the case for Archer. He's in with a mess of a family to sort out.
THE CHILL is one of these detective mysteries that's almost not a novel. It's a case. It's honest in that sense, as it doesn't pretend to be anything else and offer hollow character development to pad its length. It doesn't feel rigid or restraining though because Ross MacDonald how to grow character through events. He doesn't need long monologues to carry emotion or self-consciousness. The characters in THE CHILL keep testing what Lew Archer is made of, blurring the lines of law and morals. There's a haunting scene between Archer and Helene Haggerty in the beginning which is a quite original spin on the femme fatale that's a good example of what I mean here.
"What would you say if I told you that I'm likely to be killed this weekend?"
"I'd advise you to go away for the weekend."
She leaned sideways toward me. Her breast hardly sagged. "Will you take me?"
"I have a prior commitment."
I had a major issue with THE CHILL though, that may or may not be the case with every of his novels. Ross MacDonald has die hard fans and some of them might sling rocks at me in the street for saying that, but I like to think I was an objective reader coming in determined to get on the bandwagon, so my intentions were pure. THE CHILL has some of the worst cardboard dialogue I've ever heard. It's NOT ALWAYS the case (scene quoted above is pretty vivid) and it's an aesthetic problem to some degree, but the people obnoxiously withhold information and shutting down Archer drove me mad at some point. It devolved into a series of pointless, frustrating conversations at some point. It didn't hit me that it was the problem until I turned on the television and wondered at how well-written the Law and Order: SVU dialogue was.
Ross MacDonald is referred to as an evolution of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which is just about the most honest way to put it. The Lew Archer mysteries are sophisticated and byzantine, but they're as much of a game than they are literature. The cardboard dialogue in critical moments really prevented THE CHILL from taking a life of its own. It's had a good time with the book. It was fun and challenging to navigate the labyrinth of the McGee family history, but it wasn't immersive or transcendent. My expectations might've been a little too high, but I always have high expectations when I read hardboiled classics. Ross MacDonald was interesting, but I still prefer Hammett's raw urgency to his tight-knit storytelling intricacies. Maybe the universal platitude that fiction is a question of taste is not that wrong.
Ross MacDonald is referred to as an evolution of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which is just about the most honest way to put it. The Lew Archer mysteries are sophisticated and byzantine, but they're as much of a game than they are literature. The cardboard dialogue in critical moments really prevented THE CHILL from taking a life of its own. It's had a good time with the book. It was fun and challenging to navigate the labyrinth of the McGee family history, but it wasn't immersive or transcendent. My expectations might've been a little too high, but I always have high expectations when I read hardboiled classics. Ross MacDonald was interesting, but I still prefer Hammett's raw urgency to his tight-knit storytelling intricacies. Maybe the universal platitude that fiction is a question of taste is not that wrong.
