It’s 3:45 a.m. The scene is a beach club. Lew Archer, private detective, had some business here with the club’s owner, who’s passed out drunk in his office. What to do? There’s a light in the lifeguard’s room. The lifeguard is Joseph Tobias, twenty-five, Black, a Korean War vet and, now, an English major working his way through school. He’s been studying, reading Elements of Sociology as a party winds down, and now he’s offered to make Archer a cup of coffee. Archer is dead tired. Tobias says that the only time he ever felt tired was in Korea. Archer narrates:
And later:
Ross Macdonald, The Barbarous Coast (1956).
“It clarifies the palate”: I can’t tell you a thing about the plot of The Barbarous Coast, but that line has stuck in my head since I read the novel in the late 1970s.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
“It clarifies the palate”
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comments: 4
Your post makes me want to scour the used-books bins at the local flea markets, to try to find that book. However, most are closed down because to the pandemic. I'll check online.
Always liked the way MacDonald fleshed out his characters and scenes with a dearth of description and dialogue. Most of the old school mystery/detective writers were good at it...not all, but most.
I went on a Macdonald binge back then and always wondered where the next novel was. Little did I know — he had Alzheimer’s.
It’s still in print. But — can I offer you my copy to borrow?
From my June 1977 Bantam paperback printing, some commentary on streetcars and their relation to Canadian English / French politics,
"I don't like the fellow you are working for. He is too aggressive. Also, I am old and he is young. Also my father was a streetcar conductor in Montreal. Why should I help an Anglo from Toronto?"
I'm constantly surprised by what I find in those Lew Archer novels.
That’s wonderful. So much more than “plot” in his novels.
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