The Way Some People Die

Tags:  crime-fiction, detective-fiction, mystery, thrillers,

Ross Macdonald’s 1951 novel, The Way Some People Die, is the first book in the Library of America’s Ross Macdonald Collection. It’s one of the earlier books in the Lew Archer series, and as I’ve read a number of the later ones, I know this is not Macdonald’s best work. It’s worth a read, if you happen to like Raymond Chandler, and I do, but Macdonald’s later work is much better. Better than Chandler, even.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. The end of this first volume of the Collection includes some miscellaneous pieces from the author, one of which is a letter to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. In the letter, dated August 28, 1952, Macdonald complains to Knopf that Pocket Books, the paperback publisher, wants him to dumb down the nuance and spice up the action in one of his mysteries for the dime-store audience.

Pocket Books, in essence, just wants more Raymond Chandler and Macdonald insists in the letter that he is already a better writer than Chandler. Having read Black Money and The Galton Case, I believed that. However, when I re-checked the letter just now, I saw that Macdonald wrote it just a year after publishing The Way Some People Die, and I don’t think this book is better than Chandler. I think Macdonald was full of himself when he wrote that letter, but maybe that inflated self-confidence is what helped him become a better writer in the following years.

The plot of The Way Some People Die, with its large cast of characters and many twists, reads like Dashiell Hammett, but the prose reads like Chandler. At times, it’s a little too smart-alecky, as when Archer visits The Den in San Francisco and has something insulting to say about everyone and everything. The narrator here comes off as a little too superior when the reader wants him to be more part of the world he inhabits and less superior to it. Even when he is superior, he doesn’t need to rub it in as much as he does.

The plot begins simply enough: a mother asks Archer to find her missing daughter. You know before the daughter appears what type of woman she is: young, too pretty for her own good, and too much into men. A woman like this, whether she’s a femme fatale or an ingénue, is practically the engine that drives the mystery/noir genres of the nineteen-forties and fifties.

If greed isn’t enough of a motive to drive a crime story, greed plus double-crossing plus revenge with a heavy dose of lust is, and Macdonald delivers on all those fronts. Lew Archer’s search for the missing young woman, a nurse named Galley Lawrence, takes him from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, where a series of convenient coincidences lead him to find and then lose the woman he is searching for.

On first read, it looks like Macdonald is practicing poor, even amateurish plotting. Sometimes, even in a good mystery, the reader needs to excuse a coincidence, or the fact that some key detail happens to fall into the investigator’s hands a little too easily. We excuse it here, because the action is compelling enough to keep us reading.

Galley Lawrence, as Archer suspected, has run off with a bad man. She slips through his fingers almost the moment he finds her, and then the chase is on again. Galley’s bad husband has a lot of bad friends, and they start doing bad things to each other and to Archer. The detective has gotten himself into a quite a mess, and may even be in over his head when he finds that all the bad guys have double-crossed each other, and he’s stuck in the middle. Instead of looking for a way out, he keeps doubling down and getting himself in deeper. This is where the plot begins to sound like Hammett, and it does keep the reader engaged.

Where this book falls short is in the area that Macdonald himself brags about in the letters and essays at the end of the Collection. Raymond Chandler, says Macdonald, saw the world in terms that were too simple. The bad guys in Chandler’s novels were evil because they were on the wrong side of conventional notions of right and wrong. The good guys were good because they were on the right side of those conventional notions. There was no nuance, no gray area.

Macdonald said his novels rose above the level of Chandler’s because Macdonald was more interested in understanding people than in writing about good guys getting the better of bad guys. And that’s true–in his later writing. I don’t see it so much in this book. In this book, Archer is too smug. He reads almost like an imitation of Philip Marlowe.

Chandler, it turns out, had just as low opinion of Macdonald as Macdonald had of him. But Chandler died before Macdonald wrote his best work. The Galton Case was published in 1959, the year Chandler passed away, and Black Money, which is even better, was published in 1966.

I often wonder how much Macdonald was influenced by his wife, Margaret Millar, who wrote with great brilliance and depth in the same genres. She outsold her husband back in the day, to the point where he couldn’t even use his own name, Kenneth Millar, because in the public eye the name Millar belonged to her. Margaret Millar was a gifted and insightful writer, and when the depth that she aimed for began to appear in her husband’s books, he finally began to outshine Philip Marlowe’s author, to whom so many had compared him.

In the back matter of the Collection, Macdonald chafes somewhat at the comparisons to Chandler and claims that he owes more to Hammett. That aspect of his writing is definitely on display in The Way Some People Die. Without giving away the unusually clever plot, I will say that the early coincidences that lead Lew Archer to the subject of his search are not coincidences at all. They are eventually rolled into the plot quite brilliantly. A good mystery writer is able to fool his reader in ways the reader doesn’t even understand, and Macdonald does that here.

If you’re looking for the later Ross Macdonald, the Margaret-Millar-influenced Macdonald with the tremendous and well-worded insights, this book may let you down. If you ever wanted to read a Dashiell Hammett novel written by Raymond Chandler, this book will light you up.