From the looks of other reviews, mine is a minority viewpoint, so be warned: but I found the first two-thirds of this book boring—something I would never have said about any of the previous eight books in the Archer series. The main characters are flat and uninteresting. The minor characters are (mostly) described without the zing that I'm used to supporting characters getting in other of Macdonald's books. The commentary is cookie-cutter wry rather than witty or surprising. And too many conversations read like depositions.

Then, around chapter 20, the author wakes up and remembers who he is. The characters start to live like real people and the similes start to fly like they should in a good noir thriller:

"A fuller moon than last night's was rising behind the trees. It gleamed through their branches like a woman's breast pressing against wrought iron."

"I glanced up at her tense small face: she looked like a bunny after a hard Easter."

The solution starts coming into place and it's admirably complex, surprising, yet right and believable. A four-star ending after a three-star beginning. ( )

review of
Ross MacDonald's The Wycherly Woman
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 14, 2021



Ok, anyone out there in the great beyond (beyond my house) who reads my reviews knows that I'm on a Ross MacDonald kick. Instead of reading deep intellectual works I'm wasting my life away enjoying these turbulent tales. There are worse ways to spend my life. I cd be taking prozac & watching TV (shudder). I hardly took any reviewer notes about this one wch make my life easier. As I sit here while the buzzards sit right outside my window looking hungrily at me, as my whole life melts like a candle burning at both ends & on the sides too, I bravely try to write something funny enuf to make you LTY (Laugh To Yourself). If I fail, I'll never meet you & hear yr complaints. The darkness will soon be defeated.

"Sunlight poured in, migrating across the room to a small picture on the wall above the marble fireplace. Composed of blobs and splashes of raw color, it was one of those paintings which are either very advanced or very backward. I never can tell which. Wycherly looked at the painting as if it was a Rorschach test, and he had failed it.

""Some of my wife's work." He added to himself, "I'm going to have it taken down."" - p 3

Archer gets a job as art critic for the Baltimore Sun & proceeds to make the lives of local artists even more financially disastrous than they already were.

I've noted before & I'll note again that MacDonald uses more 'poetic' description in paragraphs that begin chapters. In this case, chapter 2:

"Boulder Beach College stood on the edge of the resort town that gave it its name, in a green belt between some housing tracts and the intractable sea. It was one of those sudden institutions of learning that had been springing up all over California to handle the products of the wartime population explosion. Its buildings were stone and glass, so geometric and so spanking new that they hadn't begun to merge with the landscape. The palms and other plantings around them appeared artificial; they fluttered like ladies' fans in the fresh breeze from the sea." - p 13

MacDonald's novels are chock-fulla-nuts, characters that meet psychological profiles.. in this case manic-depressive:

""In what way was she an odd-ball?"

""That's hard for me to say. Psych is not my line. I mean, Phee had two or three personalities, one of them was a poisonality. She could be black, and frankly I'm not so highly integrated, either. So we sort of matched up."

""Was she depressed?"

""Sometimes. She'd get so depressed she could hardly crawl around. Then other times she was the life of the party."" - p 24

"She was a thirtyish blonde in an imitation mink coat which had seen better days. So had she. One of those blondes who ripened early like California fruit, hung in full teen-age maturity for a few sweet months or years, then fell into the first high reaching hand. The memory of the sweet days stayed in them and fermented." - p 65

The "imitation mink coat" had "seen better days" when it was still the hide of that imitation mink. That's what you get for being such a talented chameleon. Or at least that's what the newspaper art critic sd. But let's revel in the glory of more literate types:

""How old are you?"

""I never tell my age. On account of I'm a hundred. Like Lord Byron when he was thirty-five or so and he was asked his age when he registered at some hotel. I think it was in Italy. He told them he was a hundred. I know how he felt. He died the following year at Missolonghi. Lovely story, isn't it, with a happy ending and all. You like my story?"

""It's a load of laughs."

""I have a million of them. Morbid tales for little people by the old lady of the sea. I think of myself as the old lady of the sea." Her mouth twisted. "I'm spooky, aren't I?"" - p 93

S/He who laughs last might just be slow on the uptake.

"When I came back to her, she had upended the bottle again like a crazy astronomer holding a telescope to her blind mouth. Her white throat shimmered as the whiskey went down." - p 98

That's funny, my white stoat came as the whiskey went down on it. That's pretty much the same as saying that this bk was published in 1961.

""You're going to be writing an autobiography."

""I'm older than I look," she said. "Twenty-four. I've had a very full life, and people keep telling me I should write it up. I mean, look how Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg cleaned up, writing up their youthful experiences. I've had many varied experiences."" - p 147

True, dat. I distinctly remember when Ginsberg cleaned up my puke. Or maybe I'm confusing that w/ when I cleaned up my image. Anyway, the above-quoted passage helps date this bk. Too bad the computer dating services I tried weren't as successful.

"Vitamins, the signs said, Foreign Cars, Pediatrics and Psychiatry, Fuchsias, Storage and Moving, Remedial Reading Clinic. Bury Your Loved Ones at Woodland, Rejuvenation, Real Estate." - p 153

See what I mean? That was practically a list poem.

'You call this review?! I call it an insult to my intelligence!!' - Lew Archer, art critic ( )

Another great Lew Archer mystery. I must be picking them up at the right time or reading them with just the right mood, because they have been hitting the spot lately. I predicted one element of the conclusion, but it was just about to be revealed, and the story as a whole went at just the right pace for me. ( )

So nice to get back to something not icky and saccharinely sweet.

Horace Wycherly hires Lew Archer to find his daughter, Phoebe. It seems that Horace went off for a few months on a cruise to the South Seas, and by the time he got back, he found that Phoebe had left college and been missing for several months. Archer is sternly told that in no case is he to spend one iota of time checking with Horace's ex, Catherine. Phoebe and Catherine hated each other, he claims, and would never in a million years have anything to do with each other. What's he hiding?

Well, after poking around a bit here and there, Archer discovers that the last time anyone had seen Phoebe was on the day her father sailed off. Her mother also showed up and created rather a scene. Eventually, members of the ship's crew, aided by Phoebe, escorted Catherine off the ship and into the taxi that had been waiting for Phoebe. So, mother and daughter went off together in the taxi and, essentially, both vanished...or something. Then what? Well, it's a mystery?

We do have some vague reports that Phoebe might have been seen a few weeks later, or perhaps she was the body found in her car, which had been dumped over a cliff and into the ocean. Her mother appears, perhaps, to have surfaced for a short time, then disappeared again. A couple of people show up murdered in the house that the mother had bought, then tried to sell. Other associated folks get murdered.

Then too, perhaps, there is some tangle in the relationships between Catherine, Phoebe and Horace's sister, Helen, and brother-in-law, Carl, who appears to be the one who actually runs the family business.

Well, I'm just giving hints here and there. Lots of tangled webs and stuff. Another very good noir detective story from Ross Macdonald, someone almost as good as Raymond Chandler. ( )

Well done & convoluted plot; not too gritty. One of the best Lew Archer books I have read so far! ( )