''The Chill'' is
Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featur ...
's eleventh
Lew Archer
Lew Archer is a fictional character created by American-Canadian writer Ross Macdonald. Archer is a private detective working in Southern California. Between the late 1940s and the early '70s, the character appeared in 18 novels and a handful of ...
novel, published by
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...
in their Borzoi series in 1964. Macdonald's reputation was now growing and the front cover bore the announcement "a new novel by the author of ''The Zebra Striped Hearse''", which had been well received. After the book was published by
Collins Publishers
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News C ...
in the UK that year, it went on to gain the
Silver Dagger award for 1964 from the
British Crime Writers Association. A French translation also appeared in 1964, followed by a Danish translation the following year and an Italian translation in 1967.
Plot
Archer is hired by Alex Kincaid to trace his wife Dolly, after she had left him on the first day of their honeymoon in Pacific Point. The detective soon traces her to the nearby college where she has enrolled as a student. There Dolly also acts as chauffeur for Mrs Bradshaw, whose son Roy is the college Dean. On the night of Archer's arrival, Dolly discovers the murdered body of Helen Haggerty, her college counsellor, and becomes hysterical. While Alex comforts Dolly, Archer contacts Dr Godwin, her former psychiatrist. Godwin immediately arranges for her to enter a clinic where she can be isolated from the predatory Sheriff Crane, who would like to convict her for Helen's murder.
Ten years before, Dolly had been manipulated into appearing as the principal witness when her father Thomas McGee was convicted of shooting her mother. After his release from
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Opened in July 1852, San Quentin is the ...
, McGee had contacted his daughter, protesting his innocence, and the trauma of this was what had caused her to run away. Archer now sets out to look into the background of the killing and begins to suspect a link between that, the murder of Helen Haggerty and the shooting of property developer Luke Deloney in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeton twenty years before. Helen's father, Police Lieutenant Earl Hoffman, had been in charge of the investigation but had been bullied into declaring it a case of suicide. That had caused a breach with his daughter, who knew differently.
Archer returns from Bridgeton via
Reno
Reno ( ) is a city in the northwest section of the U.S. state of Nevada, along the Nevada-California border, about north from Lake Tahoe, known as "The Biggest Little City in the World". Known for its casino and tourism industry, Reno is the c ...
, where his contacts Arnie and Phyllis Walters help him locate Jud Foley, a suspect that he and Roy Bradshaw had seen in the grounds on the night of Helen's murder. It eventually comes out that Jud had supplied Helen with information concerning Bradshaw's financial standing. She had then blackmailed Bradshaw in return for not revealing details of his affair with McGee's murdered wife years before. Knowing that Bradshaw is also staying in Reno, Archer visits his hotel room and discovers that he has secretly married his academic colleague Laura Sutherland and is living with her there. To be able to marry, he had earlier passed a summer in Reno so as to establish residence according to Nevada law and get a divorce from a marriage he made while still a student at Bridgeton to Letitia Macready.
Back in Pacific Point, Dr Goodwin questions Dolly under
pentothal
Sodium thiopental, also known as Sodium Pentothal (a trademark of Abbott Laboratories), thiopental, thiopentone, or Trapanal (also a trademark), is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anesthetic. It is the thiobarbiturate analog of ...
and learns further details about the nights of Mrs McGee's and of Helen's murders. For a while suspicion falls on Bradshaw, then shifts to his former wife, whom no one in Pacific Point has ever seen. Archer deduces at the last moment that she must be the woman Bradshaw has been passing off as his mother and that she was responsible for murdering his other sexual partners out of jealousy. Bradshaw had made it appear as if he meant to marry Helen; now that it is apparent that Laura is his real wife, her life is endangered. Bradshaw sets out to intercept Mrs Bradshaw and is killed when her car collides with his.
"Writing well is the best revenge"
At the time he was writing ''The Chill'', Macdonald was smarting from the criticism and ridicule of his work recently published in the posthumous ''Raymond Chandler Speaking'' (1962). Tom Nolan has even speculated in his biography of Macdonald that the portrayal of Roy Bradshaw's domestic situation was sarcastically based on Chandler's mother-fixation and late marriage to a woman twenty years his senior.
For Macdonald this novel had "my most horrible plot yet", structured around the
Oedipus theme, the Freudian interpretation of which was significant to the author. His working title for the novel was "A Mess of Shadows", a phrase taken from the fourth stanza of the poem "Among School Children" by
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
, in which the future is envisaged as shaped by mythical themes, as if it "took a mess of shadows for its meat".
Another theme of frustrated approximation, returned to several times in the novel, is
Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, first introduced in a conversation between students as Archer begins his investigation in Bradshaw's college. In a race between the athlete and the tortoise, the latter is given a start which Achilles halves at any given moment of time, but it can never be reached because the two are caught in an infinite series of adjustments. Such variations on the time theme were now becoming the main topic of Macdonald's novels, complicating Archer's efforts at detection.
A series of bitter social observations add one more layer of significance to the problems that Archer has to negotiate. When Alex's father tries to pull the detective off the case, Archer comments that "Kincaid was a frightened man who valued his status the way some previous generations valued their souls". In a tree-lined street of an exclusive Chicago suburb, "the light that filtered through their turning leaves on to the great lawns was the color of sublimated money". A divorcee's husband reluctant to make alimony payments is "a combination of
Dracula
''Dracula'' is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking ...
,
Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then ...
and
Uriah Heep". Such judgments continue the attacks on small-minded types begun at the start of Macdonald's career in
''Blue City'' and reflect the frustrations of his youth.
[Macdonald's 1952 letter quoted by Jason Dean i]
"Great 'Forgotten' Thrillers, ''Blue City''"
September 6, 2013
Bibliography
* Tom Nolan, ''Ross Macdonald: A Biography'', Scribner 1999
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chill (Macdonald novel), The
1964 American novels
Lew Archer (series)
Novels by Ross Macdonald
Alfred A. Knopf books
Novels set in California