DEFINING DETECTION DOWNWARDS:

The last testament of Ross Macdonald (Leonard Cassuto, 11/2/2003, Boston
Globe)

AT THE TIME OF Ross Macdonald's death 20 years ago, critics and readers alike considered him the greatest American crime novelist since Raymond Chandler. Like Chandler, Macdonald was praised as a literary artist, not just a detective story writer. The New York Times
once described him as "a major American novelist," period.

But unlike Chandler, Macdonald has since slipped to the back shelves. Fewer than half of his books remain in print. And although American crime fiction now receives unprecedented attention from literary scholars, Macdonald's reputation lags behind that of contemporaries such as Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith.

Why the decline? In short, it was the serial killers who did Macdonald in.

Today's army of fictional serial killers are Macdonald's child victims grown up -- but with all hope for them gone. Nothing can redeem the serial killer. He needn't even confess; he just has to be killed. He's a monster in human form. But Ross Macdonald's murderers are not monsters.
Macdonald understood that the acts of grown-up abused kids inevitably raise questions of responsibility. In his interconnected fictional world, everyone shares responsibility for these acts. In "The Blue Hammer" (1976), Macdonald's last published work, a weary Archer sums it
up when he says, "We're all guilty." Macdonald's kind of story -- backward-looking, involuted, self-probing -- is not the kind people want to read in an age of monsters, when you can blame everything on outside malevolence. Eudora Welty -- a Macdonald fan, friend, and influential
booster -- described his novels as stories of "the absence of love." His signal, said Welty, is "simple and undisguised: find the connections; recognize what they mean; thereby, in all charity, understand."

It is indeed a sad comment on the age that folks can no longer bear the message of Ross MacDonald--that responsibility must be taken for evil, by the evildoers themselves and by we who create the conditions that breed them. Just because we can understand the source of a person's social pathology does not excuse them or us from correcting it.

One of the most disturbing ways in which this refusal to accept moral responsibility manifests itself in modern PI novels is in a device which Robert B. Parker--who has done more to destroy the genre than anyone else--introduced with the character of Hawk. By giving the detective a lethal and amoral sidekick, authors are able to have their cake and eat it too--the hero doesn't have to get his hands dirty because he can count on his more brutal alter ego to do so.

This isn't just a problem because it dodges ethical questions, but because it weakens the drama. Let the hero engage in extra-judicial killings and we'd be forced to confront ourselves over the question of whether we can accept such things. Rely on an uncontrollable secondary character instead and the question is never even posed, thereby doing a disservice to the reader and to literature.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 13, 2003 9:18 AM