The Chill by Ross Macdonald

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 1964

Type of work: Novel

The Work

The Chill, which won a British Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award, begins with young Dolly Kincaid abandoning her husband the day after they are married. Alex Kincaid hires Lew Archer to find her, which Archer does effortlessly, but this turns out to be only the beginning of the story, involving a triple murder case extending back over many years. Young Alex, early in the story, remarks with awe to Archer: “It’s almost as though history is repeating itself.” Later, when someone says to him, “Anyway, it’s all past history,” Archer replies, “History is always connected with the present.” On another occasion, he compares his present problem with earlier ones, “which opened up gradually like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past.” The thematic and structural traits of The Chill place it in the Macdonald mainstream, a continuation of his contemporary Oedipal legend, but it is more complex than its predecessors, and it concludes with a stunning reversal that Archer happens upon only at the very end.

Dolly, the runaway bride, had witnessed the shooting of her mother years previously and testified against her father. Upon his release from San Quentin, he pleads his case to her, and she realizes that an unknown woman, not her father, had committed the crime. Rent by guilt, she flees her husband, Alex, and goes to a local college, supporting herself by assisting the dean’s mother. Within a short time, Helen Haggerty, a French professor who serves as Dolly’s adviser, is murdered, and Dolly finds the body. An emotional wreck, she is treated by a psychiatrist who had seen her as a child. Through therapy, she sorts out the confusions of past and present, resolving her doubts about herself and others.

Meanwhile, Archer travels from California to Nevada and Missouri to do his own sorting and unraveling, and he finds that Haggerty also had witnessed a murder when she was a girl and was blackmailing Dean Bradshaw, an old beau. He also learns that Bradshaw had been leading at least two lives, hiding romantic liaisons from his elderly mother, with whom he lived. Haggerty’s death leads Archer to delve into the long-ago death of Luke Deloney in Missouri, officially an accidental self-killing but actually a murder. As he peels away the layers of the past in an attempt to get at the truth about present events, Archer is confronted by new problems, with previously unknown people emerging and a bewildering sequence of events occurring. Roy Bradshaw becomes increasingly suspect, as the supposed facts of his life conflict: his excessive devotion to his mother, with whom he lives; his secret divorce from a woman called Letitia Macready; his similarly quiet marriage to his colleague Laura Sutherland; the summer tour of Europe that he never took, despite postcards home to Laura and his mother; and the many years of psychiatric care he underwent. In contrast, old Mrs. Bradshaw seems to be the epitome of stability, except for her obsessive attachment to her son.

At the very end, however, Archer sees that not even Mrs. Bradshaw is the matriarch he assumed she was. Signaling the startling revelation is Roy Bradshaw’s cryptic statement, “I’m beginning to hate old women”; moments later, Archer sees a family picture and realizes that the Bradshaws are not mother and son but husband and wife. She had been Letitia Macready but pretended to have died in Europe to cover her murder of Deloney: She perpetrated the later charade to obscure her motive for murdering Helen McGree. It was she who killed Helen Haggerty out of fear that the younger woman was going to steal Roy. The ultimate irony is that she unintentionally kills Roy while going to murder his new wife.

After he has exposed the truth, Archer calls Letitia Osborne Macready Bradshaw an “old woman,” and she snaps back, “You mustn’t call me that. I’m not old. Don’t look at my face, look into my eyes. You can see how young I am.” He reflects: “She was still greedy for life.” This senator’s daughter also was greedy for love, money, and power; sustained by her fantasies, she permitted the obsessions to corrupt her and consequently ruin or destroy many lives. The morality tale, one of Macdonald’s most successful books, concludes with Archer’s “No more anything, Letitia.” After decades, then, Archer has excised evil from society, and the survivors—particularly Dolly—can face the future confidently, secure in the knowledge that the past no longer holds secrets from them.

Bibliography

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