The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Ross Macdonald’s complicated plots hinged on PI Lew Archer’s investigations into family backgrounds. Social class, economic hardship, mental illness, and substance abuse pressure families, leading moms to snap, dads to disappear, and kids to dabble in trouble. Macdonald’s stories are all virtually the same, but the concise style plus the social and psychological insights keep us fans reading these uniquely American tragedies.

In The Underground Man, Archer is hired by a distraught mother whose child has possibly been kidnapped by two crazy, mixed up teenagers. Set in about 1970 in California, two specters haunt the setting. The psychedelic drug LSD drives kids to places their minds probably shouldn’t go. Environmental damage is caused by deforestation and wildfires and subsequent landslides as well as oil spills and chemicals  such as DDT. Referring to DDT damaging the eggs of seabirds, he mentions “a generation whose elders had been poisoned … with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.” Indeed, the moral rot and cowardice among the California rich go far beyond one character’s bald advice to small business owners, “The rich never pay their bills.”

The wonder of Macdonald, though, is his Agatha Christie-like talent at misdirection. We readers get so immersed in the calamities that these families must face that the reveal of the perp comes as a complete surprise. Whatever that literary magic thingy is that keeps us reading, engrossed, Macdonald, like Dickens, Christie and Gardner, had it in spades.

The Passenger from Scotland Yard by H. Freeman Wood

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The opening chapters feature the shenanigans on the overnight mail train to Dover and the crossing of the English Channel. Wood deliberately obscures what the five passengers are up to so we readers stay on guard. After a killing comes out of the blue, we wonder if the book will focus on the murder or the diamond theft.

Reading an early mystery, I had prepared myself for Victorian verboseness and digressions. I was pleasantly surprised by the tightly constructed plot. The characterization of the Scotland Yard man Byde, the fence Grandpa, the pickpocket Bat, and his vicious mentor St. John held my rapt attention. Only mildly stagey and wordy, the intricate and subtle conversations were enjoyable to read. The author feels affectionate toward Byde’s touching belief in education, especially the use of Euclidean geometry to consider and eliminate suspects. Mathematics fans will like Wood’s implicit assertion that training in math fosters clear thinking, a skill and habit that can be transferred to other areas of life.

The evocation of traveling by train in the 1880s is not the only effective period re-creation in the novel. Wood must have lived in Paris during that time because his believable descriptions of the people and places are full of life. Back then, when the cops were unable to identify a corpse, they would expose the remains at the morgue near Notre Dame so that worried friends and relative and perhaps curiosity-seekers and tourists too could stroll by and recognize the departed. I find descriptions like this most worthy tangents:

Just wonderful. In the midst of life, there is death, but in the face of death life rocks and rolls, cracking nuts and putting up song sheets on wooden frames. Fin-de-Siecle Paris I add to my list of places that would have been cool to have lived in.

In the introduction to the Dover edition released in 1977, editor E.F. Bleiler, whose job was to distinguish trash and treasure, considers The Passenger from Scotland Yard to be the best detective novel published between The Moonstone (1866) by Wilkie Collins and The Hounds of Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1902).

The Enormous Shadow by Robert Harling

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This Cold War story from 1955 is set in London, with many references streets like King’s Road and places such as Chester Square and Tower Bridge. Before WWII, Harling published The London Miscellany, a survey of the design of Victorian London, so he knew the city inside and out.

In fact, this is a newspaper thriller because the narrator is an international correspondent. While his base is in New York City, he is on vacation in London, checking in with his wily editor in chief. Said boss assigns him to interview up and coming MP’s. One of the MP’s, the reporter finds, may be a traitor. Working in tandem with a dodgy mathematician, he may be passing guided missile secrets to the Soviets.

While the action may feel slow to some readers, the pace is steady and incidents unfold with surprises all down the line to a rousing climax. Harling’s prose is clear and civilized. The love story grows naturally out of the action and is believable. To my mind, the appeal is the verisimilitude. Harling worked on Fleet Street before the advent of our information age, so his stories of tough editors, hard-bitten reporters, and their dance with the authorities in government and the police ring true to life. Any reader who likes stories about newspaper trade before Rupert Murdoch and ilk will certainly enjoy Harling’s chronicle of a vanished world, little known outside the memoirs of forgotten journalists.

Don’t confuse this writer with the playwright famous for the 1985 hit Steel Magnolias. Our Harling here was one of those versatile Englishmen who were skilled at both the arts and espionage. He worked in publishing, as a typographer and graphic designer. During WWII, his friend Ian Fleming, later creator of James Bond, got him transferred into Fleming’s Secret Navy, which “was responsible for day-to-day liaison between the naval intelligence division and the British war propaganda teams (see Harling’s obit here).”