The Ivory Grin

In the fourth Lew Archer novel, the world-weary private detective is hired by a very dubious (but conspicuously rich) female client to follow a young nurse and report on her whereabouts. The trail leads to Bella City, a seaside town in precipitous decline, where Archer encounters the usual cast of unctuous hotel clerks, unlicensed snoopers with a fuzzy sense of ethics, and poverty-stricken citizens just doing their best to survive. He soon learns that the real reason he's been hired to tail the nurse has something to do with the disappearance of a wealthy man from a neighboring town.

All of the Archer books are readable and most are great, but The Ivory Grin ranks in the lower tier of Ross Macdonald's work. It's here that he really show more begins to hit his stride in terms of complex plotting, but this novel also finds Macdonald breathing some of his most unpleasant prejudices into the Archer character. Attractive people are virtuous while unattractive ones harbor all the nastiest characteristics of the human race, lashing out at the world and everyone in it because they're incapable of being fully-fledged people themselves. It's about as sophisticated as phrenology, and Macdonald should have been embarrassed. And evidently he was, because he rarely engaged in this kind of stereotyping again. (It showed up once more in the sixth Archer novel, The Barbarous Coast, but then Macdonald washed his hands of it. He was intelligent enough to recognize it as a problem.)

The plot is fast-moving and consistent and entertaining, but The Ivory Grin leaves a bad aftertaste. Three and a quarter stars. show less

“With people. Detectives are people.”
“You’re full of compliments this morning, Mrs. -“

The copy of this book that I read was printed in 1967, two years before I was born! I loved the smell of it and red coloring on the sides of the pages! It made me wonder how many other people had read this very book and how far it has traveled to get to me. Crazy thoughts of mine on this windy day in California…

Lew Archer is hired to follow a woman named Lucy, to recover missing jewelry from her. But when someone cuts her throat, the case takes quite a different turn. And what is the connection to a local missing man? Some folks really do have skeletons in their closet! With their ivory grins.

It's a good read, though a little confusing show more toward the end. Murder by proxy was a new concept for me. I got a bit confused with the two blonde women and which one was doing what and with whom, or to whom. But I liked the journey, and I like Lew Archer! On to #5!

“The state blacktop unwound like a used typewriter-ribbon under my headlights.”

Hamilton Field, mentioned on page 186, is here in my hometown of Novato. Decommissioned now.

"It's the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams."
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p.s. - the mention of Memento mori on page 163, reminded me to read the short story with that title by Jonathan Nolan! Thanks Ross! show less

The fourth book in the Lew Archer series of detective thrillers may not be the best in the series, but it's still pretty good. There were plenty of moments partway through my reading when I thought regretfully that the plot was just too sordid and trashy; but although not every character's arc was resolved, and others' actions are less than believable--what experienced criminal visits an office building to commit a murder there in broad daylight?--the plot is wrapped up in a grimly stylish way, and as always seems to be the case with MacDonald, the incidental and supporting characters are as vivid as anyone you'd remember from a movie. And sometimes a good B picture is just want you want to see.

Ah, noir goodness extraordinaire. Every so often I need a good dose of gritty, fedora-wearing, fist-fighting, heater-packing detection and Lew Archer does a pretty good job of filling the prescription. It’s not the strongest in the series plot-wise, but it’s not terrible. Just a little flat and the whole crime seemed unduly forced to me. Like Macdonald picked a bunch of cards out of a hat with different elements and jammed them together even though they didn’t fit well. Archer’s detection skills are still good as is the dialogue.

Read more: http://thebookmarque.blogspot.com/#ixzz1yRFq5eEd

A conventionally incomprehensible story filled with good writing. Some great inversions of the hardboiled tough-guy detective - like how he won't smoke before breakfast. The racial angle gets dropped a little too quickly, but it's done with enough style at the beginning that it's still significant.

When I began reading Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels last year, I built my acquisitions around the three-volume collection published by the Library of America. These bring together many of the Archer novels that Macdonald published over the span of a quarter century, encapsulating nicely the corpus of his work. The collection is far from comprehensive, though, which led me to search out copies of the novels missing from them.

The Ivory Grin was my latest find. It begins when Archer is approached by a woman asking her to locate a nurse hiding in a small California town. This soon results in a series of encounters that hit the marks familiar to readers of Macdonald's novels, with murders, clashes with local law enforcement, and show more encounters with a cast of sharply-written characters. Yet while an enjoyable read there is a reason why it didn't make the "best of" collection published by the LoA, as the elements of the story don't come together as well as they do his other novels. It just goes to prove that, no matter how good they are or how effective their formula is, not even the best writer can produce a great work every time. show less

Well, after all the sweetness and light of Heidi, I figured I needed to return to the dark side, so to speak. So, more noir detective fiction for me.

So, a mysterious, rich woman, just "Una" (later we learn it's Durano, or sometimes, Larkin) comes to Archer to ask him to find her maid, Lucy Champion. She says Ms. Champion (who could pass for white if she so chose) stole something from her. During the looking around, Archer comes across another P.I., Max Heiss (aka Julian Desmond) who is also looking for Ms. Champion. Well, naturally, there's lots of other stuff, such as a sketchy doctor, Sam Benning and his spouse, Bess, and a rich lady, Mrs. Charles Singleton who wants to find her missing son, for which there is a huge reward. Bess, show more the sketchy doctor's wife, has a major off and on thing with the kid. She is also a good friend of Ms. Champion. Well, people get killed and disappear and so forth, and eventually Archer figures it all out.

It's actually quite a good read, unlike this review, which is a garbled mess. I should write up reviews within a few days of reading, rather than a month later. Sorry 'bout that. Anyway, this book proves, yet again, that Ross Macdonald is a worthy successor to the noir master, Raymond Chandler. Clearly one of the best things I've done in the past six or so months is to get a library card for the library in the next town over, which gave me access to Macdonald. So, let's hear it for Woburn! Much less of a dump than we ever imagined. show less