THE UNDERGROUND MAN by Ross Macdonald

 Finished Su 9/15/24

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I first finished July, 4 1997 before 'GROSSE POINT BLANK' at the Esqire. 

A link to a deep dive into the novel:

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-underground-man-at-age-50

From Library of America:

"A hot wind awakens Lew Archer in his Los Angeles apartment on the first page of The Underground Man (1971), presaging the conflagration ninety miles to the north which will race through this often breathtaking chronicle of unrestrained weather and people: “The edges of the sky had a yellowish tinge like cheap paper darkening in the sunlight.”

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the narrative spurs interest, sympathy, and a mood of growing danger.

A youngster, Ronny, joins Archer in the courtyard of his building, to help him feed the morning’s jaybirds. “The boy looked about five or six. He had dark close-cropped hair and anxious blue eyes. . . . The jays were all around him like chunks of broken sky.” The gentle, vulnerable lad was a miniature portrait of Macdonald’s own grandson Jimmie, towards whom Millar had grown protective. Into Jimmie his grandfather invested his hopes and anxieties for the human future.

Archer becomes fearful for Ronny, whose estranged parents quarrel in front of him. Lew protects the boy from the father’s raised hand. “I want to stay here,” Ronny says. “I want to stay with the man”—with Archer. But the angry father drives away with the son. “I wanted to stop him and bring the boy back,” Archer admits. “But I didn’t.”

The lingering image of the vulnerable youngster stays with Lew as he returns to his apartment; it blends with his own reflection as he gazes at himself in the mirror, “as if I could somehow read his future there. But all I could read was my own past . . . A hot wind was blowing in my face.”

Archer swiftly responds to Ronny’s mother’s plea to retrieve her son from his unstable-seeming dad, who’s driving in the direction of that growing forest fire. “The tang of fear I felt for the boy had become a nagging ache.”

Thus was launched the novel which would prove one of Macdonald’s best: a work which combined thrills and lyricism, psychology and symbolism, in ways Macdonald had been perfecting for years. As the chairman of UCLA’s meteorology department wrote Macdonald regarding Underground, “It is fascinating to see the interplay of Santa Ana [wind] and sea breeze. The growing intensity of the fire . . . tends to accelerate the sea breeze; so the fire, like your other characters, is working towards its own destruction.”

On July 2, 1970, the author told agent Dorothy Olding of his new manuscript: “For me the book has the merit of not being an imitation of the last book . . . Underground Man has more movement, and the movement is in the present, for the most part, though of course everything started long ago when everybody was younger. . . . It has, I think a strong single narrative device and is as much a suspense novel as a detective novel.”

I thought it was a compelling story, but too many characters. You almost need a spreadsheet to keep everything straight.