The Mean Streets

The Underground Man

by Ross MacDonald

Vintage Books/Black Lizard 1996

ISBN: 0-679-76808-4

$12.00

Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man begins with a touching scene that also sounds a major ecological note* which can be heard at times throughout the rest of this 1971 novel. PI Lew Archer is feeding peanuts to the scrub jays that have appeared outside of his apartment when he is joined by five-year-old Ronny Broadhurst: “The jays were all around him like chunks of broken sky.” Accompanied by his mother, Ronny has spent the night in an apartment belonging to one of Archer’s neighbors. When the youngster’s estranged father is murdered and the boy is (apparently) kidnapped, Archer’s earlier chance encounter with Ronny compels him to help recover the child. Against the backdrop of a wildfire** that threatens to consume the community of Santa Teresa – MacDonald’s fictionalized Santa Barbara – Archer soon discovers that the boy’s disappearance is linked to yet another murder, this one fifteen-years-old, as well as to the troubled and labyrinthine histories of four local families.

The Underground Man is an extremely subtle and complex story that in many ways epitomizes the best of Ross MacDonald’s work. As always, Archer is far more concerned with unearthing the hidden motivations and relationships that underlie the events in the narrative than he is with merely catching and punishing the perpetrators of a crime. As the detective himself puts it, “The hot breath of vengeance was growing cold in my nostrils as I grew older. I had more concern for a kind of economy in life that would help preserve the things that were worth preserving

Working against Archer, however, is a kind of karma-like inevitability that, in a perverse sort of way, both mirrors and is mirrored by the environmental degradation that is taking place around him. The wind and rains that have finally squelched the wildfire now threaten Santa Teresa with massive mudslides. The pelicans in the bay, poisoned with insecticide, are no longer capable of reproducing. In similar fashion, the alienated and disturbed young people so prominent in this story belong to “a generation whose elders had [likewise] been poisoned … with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.” In The Underground Man the sins of the parents are indeed visited upon their children to the third and fourth generation … and with nearly biblical ineluctability. Sometimes, as Archer admits, the best we can hope for is a kind of “benign failure of memory.”

The Underground Man demonstrates once again what a fine novelist Ross MacDonald truly is. Thirty-five years after its first publication, this is still an important, profound and entertaining story whose many levels of meaning –  and whose continued/contemporary significance – are best appreciated through careful and repeated reading.

*See also my article on “Sleeping Beauty and a 1969 Santa Barabara Oil Spill” at: http://journals.aol.com/jcc55883/TheMeanStreets/entries/986

** In 1964 a wildfire threatened the Millar home in Coyote Canyon. Ken stayed behind to fight the flames by hosing down his property. William Marling (Marling, William. Hard-Boiled Fiction. Case Western Reserve University. Updated 2 August 2001. http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled/Macdonald.HTM ) reports that only a shift in the wind saved the author’s life.

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