The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald
"The Moving Target" is a mystery-adventure novel by Ross Macdonald, which introduces the character Lew Archer, a private detective in Los Angeles. This work marks Macdonald's fourth novel and is significant for its blend of physical action and moral introspection, reflecting the style of "hard-boiled" detective fiction. The story revolves around Archer's investigation into the disappearance of oilman Ralph Sampson, revealing a web of greed and corruption among the characters, set against the backdrop of Southern California's affluent landscape.
Archer, serving as both narrator and moral compass, faces multiple dangerous encounters, which highlight his resilience and evolving character. The plot intertwines themes of wealth, ambition, and social commentary, particularly through the perspectives of Sampson's daughter Miranda, who grapples with the consequences of her father's wealth on their lives and the lives of others. While the narrative is fast-paced and filled with action, it foreshadows deeper explorations of character and morality in Macdonald's future works. Notably, "The Moving Target" was adapted into a film titled "Harper" in 1966, further cementing its cultural impact.
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The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1949
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Moving Target is a quickly paced mystery-adventure novel filled with chases, fights, and murders which Macdonald described as “a story clearly aspiring to be a movie,” which it became: Harper, starring Paul Newman, in 1966. His fourth novel, it is a landmark in his career, marking as it does the debut of Lew Archer, a Los Angeles private detective patterned after Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, with whom Archer shares a sense of righteousness. Archer, however, is more introspective and realistic. Being the narrator, he becomes the moral center of the book.
Linked as the book is to the “hard-boiled” detective fiction tradition, Archer is challenged by several dangerous physical encounters with adversaries. In one struggle: “I clubbed the gun and waited. The first two got bloody scalps. Then they swarmed over me, hung on my arms, kicked my legs from under me, kicked consciousness out of my head. . . . I came to fighting. My arms were pinned, my raw mouth kissing cement.” In another encounter, “His fist struck the nape of my neck. Pain whistled through my body like splintered glass, and the night fell on me solidly again.” A bit later he overcomes his captor, they fall into the water struggling, and Archer kills the man in self-defense. (In later novels, Archer’s challenges become increasingly cerebral instead of physical, as he moves from his mid-thirties to middle age.)
With its Southern California setting and characters whom money, or the desire for it, corrupts, the novel anticipates the anti-acquisitiveness of later Macdonald books. At the very start, for example, Archer comes upon the oceanfront estates of Cabrillo Canyon and muses: “The light-blue haze . . . was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. . . . Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small.”
Though the plot is not as complex as those of later novels, it is multifaceted. The primary action, about the disappearance of Ralph Sampson, an oilman, is intertwined with a story line concerning a Mexican immigrant smuggling operation that Archer happens upon while tracking the kidnappers. Sampson does not appear until the end, when Archer finally discovers his body, but his personality pervades and motivates the action. Miranda, his daughter, recalls that he “started out with nothing . . . his father was a tenant farmer who never had land of his own.” She understands, therefore, why Ralph wanted to own so much land, but she laments that “you’d think he’d be more sympathetic to poor people. . . . the strikers on the ranch, for instance.”
Miranda is being courted by Alan Taggert, Sampson’s pilot and surrogate son (replacing one killed in World War II), whose primary interest is her father’s wealth, and this greed involves him in the ransom kidnapping of his employer. Ironically, Taggert is killed by a rival suitor, Sampson lawyer Albert Graves, a former district attorney who, having worked for millionaires so long, “saw his chance to be a millionaire himself” by marrying Miranda and killing his new father-in-law so he would not have to wait for access to his riches. Says Archer of his longtime friend and erstwhile colleague: “He wasn’t looking down; he was looking up. Up to the houses in the hills where the big money lives. He was going to be big himself for a change, with a quarter of Sampson’s millions.”
Bibliography
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Ross Macdonald. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Gale, Robert. A Ross Macdonald Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Mahan, Jeffrey H. A Long Way from Solving That One: Psycho/Social and Ethical Implications of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer Tales. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990.
Nolan, Tom. Ross Macdonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1999.
Schopen, Bernard A. Ross Macdonald. Boston: Twayne, 1990.
Sipper, Ralph B., ed. Ross Macdonald: Inward Journey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cordelia Editions, 1984.
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.
South Dakota Review 24 (Spring, 1986).
Speir, Jerry. Ross Macdonald. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978.
Wolfe, Peter. Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1976.