The Barbarous Coast
The Barbarous Coast is a 1956
Plot summary
Lew Archer is summoned to the Channel Club on Malibu Beach and stops to talk to the gateman, Tony Torres. Just then a hot-headed Canadian named George Wall tries to barge into the private grounds with the plea that he is looking for his wife, but is turned away. Once inside, Archer discovers from Clarence Bassett, the club manager, that the job being offered is to protect him from Wall's threats. His wife Hester had once been an exhibition diver at the club and the middle-aged Bassett has taken a fatherly interest in her welfare. In his office is an old photograph of three divers in action who are identified as Hester Campbell, as she was then known, Gabrielle Torres (Tony's daughter) and her cousin Manuel (who now calls himself Lance). Since the three were photoed together, Gabrielle had been found shot dead on the beach, Hester had run away from Malibu and married Wall in Toronto, while Lance had started working for the gangster Carl Stern.
In order to keep him out of trouble, Archer allows Wall to tag along as he tries to locate Hester. As he does so, he discovers that Stern has been trying to establish a casino in Las Vegas. Unable to gain a gaming licence because of his Syndicate connections, Stern has brought in Simon Graff as his front man. Graff, a partner in Helio-Graff Studios in Hollywood, is a member of the Channel Club and has married the unstable daughter of his partner. Manuel Torres, now going by the name of Lance Leonard, is to have a part in the studio's next film.
Another lead takes Archer to Hester's former home in
Later Wall rings Archer from a hospital in Las Vegas, where he has been taken after a beating in Stern's office. Hester has also rung Archer from the town and he flies to Las Vegas to locate her. When he does so, he discovers the woman is really Rina Campbell, Hester's sister, who resembles her closely. Carl Stern had persuaded Rina to lay a false trail in order to allow Hester to escape abroad. But as they talk, Frost appears together with Stern's thugs in order to kill Rina, having already disposed of Hester, as Archer suspected. This time Archer overcomes the thugs and disables Frost by shooting him in the arm; then he forces Frost to show them where Hester's corpse has been hidden.
After returning to Los Angeles, Archer interviews Dr Frey, Rina's employer, about his schizophrenic patient Isobel Graff, whom Archer had met the evening before at a party in the Channel Club. Her husband Simon had once had an affair with Gabrielle Torres and Isobel may have been the girl's killer and later complicit in Hester's death too. In fact Isobel had shot Gabrielle with a gun belonging to Graff, but only wounded her. Bassett had engineered the confrontation and used the gun himself to complete the killing. Later he blackmailed Graff, making him believe that it was his wife's shot that was fatal. It also emerges that Bassett was responsible for the killing of Hester, Lance and Stern, who had also been blackmailing Graff. Graff incites Tony Torres to kill Bassett in revenge for the death of his daughter Isobel and Archer turns Graff over to the police.
Background and themes
Ross Macdonald’s first nine novels had been published under various
There may also be a connection between this title and Archer's Chandleresque denunciation of the relationship between Hollywood culture and its links with organized crime, which is one of the novel's themes.[4] As he is flying back to Los Angeles from Las Vegas with Rina Campbell, she comments that the pressure of fear which she had been under had made her feel "like a whore – as though I wasn’t worth anything to myself". Archer's reply is "That’s the way the jerks want you to feel…And the jerks would get away with the things jerks want to get away with. They're not, though. Jerkiness isn't as respectable as it used to be, not even in L. A. Which is why they had to build Vegas." Archer's judgment is echoed in the words of a contemporary review that appeared in The Detroit News: "Not since the novels of Nathanael West has the theme of American innocence grinding to a stop at the polluted waters of the Pacific so consistently reverberated through a body of writing".[5]
Social mobility themes
In a later introduction to his novel, Macdonald noted that "it was my largest book so far, in both social range and moral complexity".
Macdonald was aged forty by the time The Barbarous Coast was published, and the novel's sense of disenchantment has an autobiographical basis. Having known poverty also in his Canadian boyhood, he had returned to California to make a career as a writer - perhaps even as a serious or academic author. He had a
References
- ^ Paul Nelson, Kevin Avery, It's All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives, Fantagraphic Books, 2016
- ^ J. T. Joshi, "Ross Macdonald: family affairs" in Varieties of Crime Fiction, Wildside Press, 2020, p.100
- ^ Collected in My Name is Archer (Bantam, 1955)
- ^ Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald, Scribner 1999, pp.156-7
- ^ Bookshop.org
- ^ Introduction to Archer in Hollywood (Knopf, 1969)
- ^ Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), chapter 1
- ^ Sarah Weinman, "Linda Interrupted", Crime Reads
- ^ J. Kingston Pierce, "Fifty Years with Lew Archer", January Magazine, April 1999
- ^ Paul Skenazy, "Bringing It All Back Home: Ross Macdonald's Lost Father", The Threepenny Review No. 12 (Winter, 1983), pp. 9-11