THE IVORY GRIN by Ross MacDonald: As Hardboiled as it Gets!

Published in 1952, The Ivory Grin is one of Ross MacDonald’s grittiest and most violent novels. It sounds strange, right, to call a Ross MacDonald novel “gritty” and “violent.” Well, while his later works are known for their psychological depth and moral complexity, this title is as hardboiled as they come. Not that those aforementioned elements – which have come to distinguish his mature work from more run-of-the-mill crime fiction – are missing here. They’re not. It’s rather that The Ivory Grin has an edge to it that has been “refined” out of (for lack of a better phrase) such novels as The Chill (1964), The Far Side of the Dollar (1965), The Underground Man (1971) and The Goodbye Look (1969). Written as it was over fifty years ago, some of the incidental elements in this story do seemrather dated. Nevertheless, The Ivory Grin has (largely) stood the test of time. This novel is as unnerving and as genuinely chilling as just about anything out there in the genre today … and, like most dyed-in-the-wool mystery fans, I read a fair amount of what’s out there. Most often, I find that the “old stuff” is just about as good as – if not better than – the new.

The novel opens as PI Lew Archer is hired by hard-as-nails Una Larkin to tail her former employee, a young African-American woman named Lucy Champion. The detective follows Champion to Bella City but, before long, the girl ends up in a cheap roadside motel with her throat cut. With typical doggedness, Archer becomes determined to get to the bottom of Lucy’s murder and to discover the real reason for his erstwhile client’s continued interest in Champion. As the case unfolds, he uncovers a connection between the murdered young woman, a sleazy small-town physician, a missing playboy, a deranged mobster on the lam from Detroit and a blonde bombshell who uses and then discards men the way most people with a cold go through Kleenex. The fetching “Mrs. Benning” really puts the “fatale” in femme fatale, that’s for sure! The novel is also notable for its depiction of the interaction between diverse characters from vastly different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds. Not bad for mere genre fiction!

The action in The Ivory Grin is, at times, fast and furious, and some of the scenes are as bizarre and macabre as you are likely to find anywhere. (The title of the novel is taken from one particularly gruesome scene at the end of the story). Be that as it may, MacDonald’s main focus is, as usual, on probing the motivations of his characters, on bringing to light the greed, the loneliness, the insecurity and the despair that impels people to act the way that they do. While The Ivory Grin probably shouldn’t be considered one of MacDonald’s “major” works, it remains one his most visceral and, in many respects, one of his most engaging. Readers familiar only with the more dispassionate Archer from MacDonald’s critically acclaimed latter novels may be surprised (and, hopefully, intrigued) by his emotional intensity in this story. In many ways, The Ivory Grin deserves to be read … and reappraised today … by a new generation of mystery fans.

Unfortunately, The Ivory Grin is (as far as I can tell) currently out of print. With their publication of both The Moving Target (1949) and Find A Victim (1955), Vintage Crime/Black Lizard seems willing to re-issue some of the author’s early work in its great series of reprints. One hopes that maybe this novel will likewise surface in their catalog one day very soon. Meanwhile, while hardcover copies of this book are both scarce and expensive, there are a number of cheap paperback editions available on the used market. And each one of those seems to have a more lurid cover than the next one! Hardcore MacDonald fans might also be interested to learn that The Ivory Grin was conceived initially as a short story. Before submitting the work for publication, however, MacDonald decided that the story, entitled, “Strangers in Town,” deserved novel-length treatment. (It’s also worth noting that MacDonald wrote a mere nine short stories during his lifetime). “Strangers in Town” was published for the first time – along with two other similarly unknown MacDonald stories – by Crippen & Landru in 2001 as Strangers in Town: Three Newly Discovered Stories by Ross MacDonald.

NOTE:

Many, many thanks to “JH2” for the links to 1). J. Kingston Pierce’s marvelous article, “The Private Eye of Ross MacDonald” at: http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/january/1999/01/ross.html and 2). the interview with Tom Nolan, MacDonald’s biographer and the editor of Strangers in Town, which may be found at: http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/january/2001/01-01-08/nolan.html .

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THE IVORY GRIN by Ross MacDonald: As Hardboiled as it Gets!