The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald

First published: 1969

Type of plot: Mystery

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Southern California

Principal Characters:

• Lew Archer, the narrator, a private detective
• Lawrence (Larry) Chalmers, the wealthy, middle-aged scion of a distinguished family
• Irene Chalmers, (née Rita Shepherd), his wife
• Nicholas Chalmers, their son
• John Truttwell, the Chalmerses’ attorney
• Betty Truttwell, his daughter
• Jean Trask, the daughter of Eldon Swain, who has disappeared years earlier
• Samuel Rawlinson, a former bank president
• Mrs. Shepherd, his housekeeper and Irene Chalmers’s mother
• Randy Shepherd, her former husband
• Dr. Ralph Smitheram, a psychiatrist
• Moira Smitheram, his wife

The Novel

The Goodbye Look, like most of the Lew Archer novels, ranges widely in its action, but its principal setting is the fictitious town of Pacific Point, an affluent community which appears in several other Archer novels, most notably The Chill (1964). As the novel begins, private detective Archer has been called to Pacific Point (which lies a few miles south of the Los Angeles county border) by lawyer John Truttwell, who wants him to investigate a burglary at the palatial home of Irene and Larry Chalmers, longtime clients, neighbors, and friends, whose son Nicholas is engaged to Truttwell’s daughter Betty. All that is missing, according to Mrs. Chalmers, is a gold box containing some letters that her husband had written to his mother more than twenty years earlier during World War II. The Chalmerses refuse to call the police because they suspect Nick, who, Archer learns, has had emotional problems over the years and recently has become involved with an older woman, Mrs. Jean Trask.

With this background Archer begins his investigation, which leads him on a circuitous journey into the past and involves him with a variety of people from all walks of life. Before he solves the case, three people are killed, one commits suicide, and an old murder is solved.

Nick’s desire to learn about his past is the motivating force behind the action, and he joins with Jean Trask, who also is obsessed with learning the fate of her father, Eldon Swain, who disappeared years earlier, deserting his young daughter and wife Louise (daughter of Samuel Rawlinson, president of the Pasadena bank where Swain was cashier). Swain generally is thought to have been the person who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from his father-in-law’s bank. To aid in the search, Jean had hired Sidney Harrow, a San Diego bill collector, but when Archer locates him, he discovers Harrow’s corpse. When Archer first meets Nick, the young man is suicidal and believes that he shot Harrow; the pistol, Archer learns, has an interesting pedigree, for it first was owned by Samuel Rawlinson, who gave it to his daughter Louise, and it subsequently was taken by Eldon Swain, upon his return from Mexico, where he had gone with young Rita Shepherd, daughter of the Swain gardener.

Jean’s hope that Swain is still alive is dashed by the discovery that the same revolver which was used to kill Harrow had been used to kill Swain fifteen years earlier in the local hobo jungle. A suspect had been Randy Shepherd, former husband of Rawlinson’s housekeeper. After that murder, Nick, then eight, thought he had killed Swain, and this belief in his own guilt led to lingering emotional problems. When Archer comes across Randy Shepherd, who fostered the relationship between his daughter and Swain in return for a share of Swain’s embezzled money, Shepherd inadvertently reveals that Swain had kidnaped Nick fifteen years earlier. Adding to the complexity of the case is the murder of Jean Trask, Nick’s attempted suicide, and the apparent attempt to delay discovery of the unconscious Nick.

Archer’s continued delving, with layer upon layer of past events unfolding at each turn, leads him to Moira Smitheram, the wife of Nick’s psychiatrist, who confesses to having had an affair, during World War II, with a young postal worker in La Jolla, Sonny. “Sonny” was Larry Chalmers; thus, Chalmers never had been in the Pacific after all: He had received a discharge for reasons of mental health a few months after enlisting in the Navy, and, rather than return home in disgrace, he contrived his letters to his mother with the help of Moira, whose husband’s letters from overseas served as the basis for Chalmers’s elaborate hoax.

The family correspondence finally turns up when Nick confesses to his fiancee that he, Trask, and Harrow had stolen the letters; after reviewing them and considering their dates, Nick thinks that Larry Chalmers is not his father. Other evidence from the past is provided in Mrs. Swain’s collection of old films which Archer, Irene Chalmers, and Truttwell watch. The films confirm what Archer had begun to suspect: Rita Shepherd, who had an affair with Eldon Swain, bore his child and later took on a new identity as Irene Chalmers, Larry’s wife.

Reconstructing the events of more than two decades, Archer concludes that Rita Shepherd and Larry Chalmers conspired to rob Swain of his bank money and stash it in the Chalmers home. During their getaway, they ran down Mrs. Truttwell (who had been observing the mock burglary) and killed her. Years later, Nick shoots Eldon Swain (his real father) with Swain’s revolver when the drunken degenerate makes sexual advances to him in the hobo jungle. He leaves the murder weapon at the site, where Larry Chalmers finds it; Chalmers uses it years later to kill Sidney Harrow, whose activities with Jean Trask are threatening to expose him. For the same reason Chalmers also kills Jean and even is ready to let Nick die a suicide, since the young man is getting perilously close to uncovering the secrets of the past.

There is, therefore, a pervasive irony to the Chalmers case. At the start of the book, Nick burglarizes his parents’ home, just as many years previously they also had faked a burglary of the same premises. In search of his father, Nick learns that he had killed him fifteen years earlier; as a corollary to this, Larry Chalmers, Nick’s putative father, plans to kill him. Another ironic element is that Truttwell, who for years was the confidant and friend of the Chalmerses, learns that they had killed his wife. Finally, while much of the novel focuses upon Nick’s suicidal tendencies and attempted suicide, the work concludes with Larry Chalmers’s own suicide.

The Characters

Lew Archer is both the narrator of the novel and its conscience. While almost every other character engages in posturing and duplicity, Archer is forthright and honest, in pursuit of the truth for its own sake and to right a series of wrongs. Even when dismissed from the case by a disaffected client, he continues his probing. Almost everyone else may want money (indeed, it is the impetus behind many of the crimes), but “Not me,” he says. “Money costs too much.”

Despite his modest background, Archer is comfortable among the wealthy, and all sorts of people take him into their confidence and speak frankly to him, albeit grudgingly in some cases. (Says Mrs. Shepherd at the end of their first meeting: “I’m talking too much myself, bringing the past back to life.”) Perhaps people open up to him because he is such a good listener, or maybe because he obviously is a lonely man, still sad over his long-ago divorce, and thus sensitive toward others who are similarly lonely or whose marriages are in trouble. In this book, as elsewhere, he has a brief affair with one such woman but is unwilling to become involved in a lasting relationship; though sensitive to others, he is the quintessential loner. (He says: “I like to move into people’s lives and then move out again.”) That fleeting passion is with Moira Smitheram, who earlier had been unfaithful to her psychiatrist husband (with Larry Chalmers, while Smitheram was in the Pacific during World War II) and was an unhappy wife in subsequent years as her husband became more interested in his career and less in his wife. The marriage endured primarily because of her need for social and financial security and his awareness that she knew all the secrets of his connections with the Chalmerses.

The character whose personality is closest to Archer’s is attorney John Truttwell, for he, like the detective, has had his outlook on life clouded by a personal tragedy (the death of his wife) that he cannot forget; also, like Archer, he remains true to his ideals and loyal to people, even when they turn on him. (Having served the Chalmers family for two generations, he continues working on their behalf even after they dismiss him.) While not as altruistic as Archer, Truttwell has a more balanced attitude toward money than do most of the others. Yet he does have a problem coping with his daughter Betty, in large measure because of her relationship with Nick. Like her father, she is a rock of stability in a seething maelstrom. Not only does she help Archer achieve his first breakthrough in the case, but also she manages for a long time to keep Nick in check. Her prime virtue is loyalty to Nick, motivated by her love for him. This devotion ultimately wins over her father, who seems to accept the prospect of Nick as son-in-law.

Important as he is in the book, Nick is a shadowy figure, talked about but rarely seen. On the few occasions when he is present, he is little more than a brooding fellow from whom vitality has been drained; the exception is Archer’s first meeting with him, when the detective and Betty go to Nick’s apartment, and he confronts them with a revolver. This incident, his participation in the burglary, and an earlier six-month disappearance demonstrate that he finally is attempting to assert himself and become independent after years of subservience to his parents and Smitheram.

Except for Jean Trask, the other characters are minimally developed and merely two-dimensional, people with important functions in the plot but without much life. Trask, who is killed less than halfway through the story, dedicated herself to learning the fate of her father, Eldon Swain, and became a strong-willed, angry woman in the process—quite the opposite effect that her brother Nick’s similar obsession has on him.

Central though they are to the plot, Irene (née Rita Shepherd) and Larry Chalmers are shadowy figures, appearing on various occasions but remaining elusive, understandably so in the light of what is subsequently learned about them. Rawlinson’s housekeeper, Mrs. Shepherd, also is a character with greater potential but necessarily is made to seem merely peripheral. Only once does Macdonald let her true feelings emerge, and that occasion provides Archer with a vital lead. Her former husband, Randy, less important to the resolution than she is, has a larger role and is more realistically developed, perhaps because his presence offers an opportunity for action in an otherwise predominantly cerebral novel.

Critical Context

Published in 1969, The Goodbye Look was Ross Macdonald’s twenty-first novel, his sixteenth with Lew Archer as detective, and his first best-seller. This also was the first of his books to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review instead of getting merely a brief notice inside along with other mysteries—an indication that the literary establishment was starting to look upon him as more than simply a writer of complex whodunits in the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Beginning with this book, Macdonald was taken seriously as an important novelist.

This new recognition notwithstanding, The Goodbye Look is replete with echoes of previous novels. The Southern California setting and multiple plots are Macdonald commonplaces, as are the quest, Oedipal, antiwar, and greed motifs. Yet distinguishing this book from its predecessors is the author’s surer hand. Here, for example, his multiple plotting, more complex than ever, encompasses six different families whose paths cross over a quarter of a century. Even those characters who are not fully developed or who are presented only through others’ eyes (such as those of Eldon Swain) are depicted so that their moral decline is vividly delineated.

Finally, while Lew Archer’s ratiocinative instincts are as sharp as ever in this novel, they are tempered here by a greater sensitivity toward the people with whom he becomes involved. In The Goodbye Look, he is a more humane and sensitive man, not merely a stereotypical private eye.

Bibliography

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Richard Layman. Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2002. A handy supplemental reference that includes interviews, letters, and previously published studies. Illustrated.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Ross Macdonald. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Describes the development of Macdonald’s popular reputation as a prolific author of detective fiction and his critical reputation as a writer of literary merit. Includes illustrations, an appendix with an abstract of his Ph.D. thesis, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Schopen, Bernard A. Ross Macdonald. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A sound introductory study, with a chapter on Macdonald’s biography (“The Myth of One’s Life”), on his handling of genre, his development of the Lew Archer character, his mastery of the form of the detective novel, and the maturation of his art culminating in The Underground Man. Provides detailed notes and an annotated bibliography.

Sipper, Ralph B., ed. Ross Macdonald: Inward Journey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cordelia Editions, 1984. This collection of twenty-seven articles includes two by Macdonald, one a transcription of a speech about mystery fiction and the other a letter to a publisher which discusses Raymond Chandler’s work in relation to his own. Contains photographs and notes on contributors.

Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. An indispensable volume for the scholar interested in tracking down unpublished dissertations as well as mainstream criticism. Includes brief introductions to each author, followed by annotated bibliographies of books, articles, and reviews.

South Dakota Review 24 (Spring, 1986). This special issue devoted to Macdonald, including eight articles, an editor’s note, photographs, and notes, is a valuable source of criticism.

Speir, Jerry. Ross Macdonald. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. Serves as a good introduction to Macdonald’s work, with a brief biography and a discussion of the individual novels. Includes chapters on his character Lew Archer, on alienation and other themes, on Macdonald’s style, and on the scholarly criticism available at the time. Contains a bibliography, notes, and an index.

Wolfe, Peter. Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1976. This detailed study contains extensive discussions of the novels and a consideration of the ways in which Macdonald’s life influenced his writing. Includes notes.