The Underground Man by Ross Macdonald

First published: 1971

Type of plot: Mystery

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: California

Principal Characters:

• Lew Archer, the narrator, a private detective
• Jean Broadhurst, his client, whose son is kidnaped
• Ronny Broadhurst, her six-year-old son
• Stanley Broadhurst, her estranged husband, Ronny’s father
• Elizabeth Broadhurst, the wife of Leo Broadhurst, mother of Stanley, and grandmother of Ronny
• Edna Snow, her former housekeeper
• Frederick (Fritz) Snow, Edna Snow’s son
• Brian Kilpatrick, a real-estate man, the partner of Mrs. Broadhurst in Canyon Estates development
• Ellen Strome, his former wife and the mistress of Leo Broadhurst
• Susan Crandall, the illegitimate daughter of Leo Broadhurst

The Novel

The Underground Man, like many of Ross Macdonald’s novels, is set in the fictitious community of Santa Teresa, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Santa Barbara, where Macdonald (in real life, Kenneth Millar) lived from the late 1940’s until his death in 1983. As is typical of Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, however, the action also ranges widely to other locales up and down the state of California.

While feeding peanuts to squabbling jays outside his apartment in West Los Angeles, private detective Lew Archer becomes caught up in the entangled affairs of the Broadhursts, a well-to-do Santa Teresa family that is split by marital disputes. Leo Broadhurst, scion of the clan, vanished fifteen years earlier, supposedly leaving his wife for Ellen Strome Kilpatrick, but then deserting his mistress as well. Stanley Broadhurst, consumed by his desire to find his father, places an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper, succeeding in dredging up the past but failing to locate his father. Among the reward seekers is Albert Sweetner, an escaped convict who once was a foster child of Edna Snow, formerly a housekeeper for the Broadhursts. Sweetner’s return revives a long-buried scandal in which he and Fritz Snow, then teenagers, were accused of getting Marty Nickerson, also a teenager, pregnant. She is now Mrs. Lester Crandall and mother of Susan, a college girl who becomes involved first with Stanley Broadhurst and then with Jerry Kilpatrick, the rebellious son of Brian Kilpatrick and his former wife. Jerry and Susan steal a boat and then a car as they flee parents and all other authority figures in a frantic odyssey with six-year-old Ronny Broadhurst in tow.

While the past of the Broadhursts and the others is starting to close in on them all and threatening their present, there is also a raging forest fire that endangers their lives and property and gives an even greater sense of urgency to Archer’s need to resolve the developing mystery, since the flames could destroy vital evidence. The fire, which Stanley carelessly started with a cigarette while digging to find his father’s body, becomes a subplot and symbolizes nature’s outrage at man’s self-serving destruction of society and the environment. In this regard, when speaking of Jerry Kilpatrick, Archer comments: “He belonged to a generation whose elders had been poisoned, like the pelicans, with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.”

In the course of the few days that the action of the novel covers, Archer learns that Leo Broadhurst was a womanizer who raped as well as seduced, but who finally was shot by his wife when she caught him with the girl Marty, whose daughter he had fathered three years earlier. While unconscious, Broadhurst was actually killed by Edna Snow, who finished him off with a knife as an act of vengeance for his having let Albert and Fritz be charged unfairly with a crime. Justifying her action fifteen years later, she tells Archer: “You can’t call it murder. He deserved to die. He got Marty Nickerson pregnant and let my boy take the blame. Frederick has never been the same since then.”

The three-year-old Susan witnessed the fatal tryst between her mother and Broadhurst and the shooting of Broadhurst by his wife—events that have haunted her ever since. At the start of the novel, she is with Leo’s son, Stanley, who is trying to piece together the story of his father’s fate through her recollections and those of others. Stanley’s quest leads him back to his parents’ mountain retreat, where he believes his father is buried. When he borrows a pick and shovel from Fritz Snow, the thirty-five-year-old boy-man reports to his mother, for fifteen years earlier he and Sweetner had buried Leo for her. Fearful of the consequences of Stanley’s discovery, she dons a disguise, goes to the mountain, kills him, and then dumps him in the hole that he had begun to dig.

By the close of the novel, then, events have moved full circle. The mystery of Leo Broadhurst’s disappearance has been solved, but his son has died in the process. Albert Sweetner’s lust for Stanley’s reward money has led the escaped convict to his death. (Mrs. Snow, afraid that he will reveal how he helped bury Leo, kills him.) Brian Kilpatrick commits suicide rather than risk exposure as an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer who had cheated his unwitting partner, Elizabeth Broadhurst. Yet there also are some positive aspects to the outcome: Ellen Strome is reunited with her son Jerry; Susan, after undergoing psychotherapy for her recurring nightmare, presumably will be able to lead a normal life, as will her parents, no longer hiding behind a lie; and Stanley’s widow, Jean, and son Ronny are freed to go on with their lives. Of all the characters in the novel, only Lew Archer is unchanged, not even having made much money from his efforts.

The Characters

In all the novels in which he appears, Lew Archer is an atypical private eye, for money seems incidental to him, being little more than a means of paying the rent, and he inevitably is emotionally drawn to one or more of his clients, not necessarily sexually, but rather in a sense of kinship with fellow sufferers, for Archer believes that he “sometimes served as a catalyst for trouble, not unwillingly.” A loner who has not fully recovered from the trauma of a long-ago divorce, he looks in his bathroom mirror and comments that “all I could read was my own past, in the marks of erosion under my eyes.” Though he is not obsessed with the past in the way that the others are, it is a living presence and leads him to empathize with those who are its prisoners. Different as he is in this regard from the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler private eyes that are his predecessors in the genre, Archer is like them in his courting of physical danger, and in this novel he endures the obligatory attack (by Jerry Kilpatrick, with the butt of a gun). He is like them, too, in that women find him attractive: Jean Broadhurst, Ellen Strome, even Elegant, Albert Sweetner’s prostitute. Yet almost everyone in the novel is drawn to Archer, who seemingly solves his case because he learns so much from those who eventually talk freely to him. Above all else Lew Archer is a good listener. When Ellen Strome—soon after they meet for the first time—tells him the story of her affair with Leo years earlier, he comments (as narrator of the novel), “we seemed to be held together by a feeling impersonal but almost as strong as a friendship or a passion. . . . The past was unwinding and rewinding like yarn which the two of us held between us.” The closest relationship that develops, however, is between Lew and Ronny: One of them finds (if only temporarily) the son he never had, and the other gets a surrogate father for a time. For Ronny, at the end, Archer wishes “a benign failure of memory.”

The other characters could profit from the same gift, because they have “all the years of their lives dragging behind them.” Even Archer, nearing the resolution of the case, feels “shipwrecked on the shores of the past.” Yet whereas everyone else has tried to forget the past, or at least keep it as thoroughly hidden as Leo in his red-Porsche tomb, his son Stanley’s life for fifteen years “has been a kind of breakdown” and (as his wife Jean tells it) “He’s been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together. . . . When his father ran out on him, it robbed his life of its meaning.” Stanley is on the verge of finding Leo when he is killed and ironically is hastily buried just above his father’s grotesque tomb.

Though most of the women in the book seem to be as much in thrall to the past and as dominated by a strong man as Stanley is, they are by and large survivors, including even Susan Crandall and her mother. Elizabeth Broadhurst also suffers at Leo’s hand, but she finally shoots him; and though she falls prey to Brian Kilpatrick’s financial chicanery, she lives to see him commit suicide rather than confront exposure and ruin. Though bereft of her son, she has her grandson Ronny and her daughter-in-law Jean; in addition, there is still a past for her to shape and control, through her memoir-in-progress of her father, whom she has idealized as “a god come down to earth in human guise.” Ellen Strome, also mistreated by Leo and Brian, survives both, leading a solitary but productive life as an artist in her grandfather’s home.

Edna Snow and her son also are survivors, to a point. A domineering, overprotective mother, she has clung to Fritz as the single stable and unchanging element in her life, even killing one man in revenge for Fritz and murdering two more men years later in a futile attempt to keep secret the first crime. When Archer confronts her with the truth, she takes a butcher knife to him, too, but despite “the kind of exploding strength that insane anger releases,” she fails. According to Archer, she “was one of those paranoid souls who kept her conscience clear by blaming everything on other people. Her violence and malice appeared to her as emanations from the external world.”

Critical Context

When it was published in 1971, The Underground Man got more critical attention than detective fiction normally receives, including a front-page review by Eudora Welty in The New York Times Book Review and a Newsweek cover story. With his twenty-second novel (the seventeenth starring Lew Archer), Macdonald finally was given his rightful recognition as successor to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the hard-boiled school and also was accepted as a serious novelist. Yet it is more than a breakthrough novel. The Underground Man also is Macdonald’s major achievement, the work in which his worldview—including social commentary, particularly on environmental and ecological matters—is given its fullest and most memorable expression. Though all the Lew Archer novels have multiple plots, the several story lines in this one are more skillfully developed and unified than is the case in the previous books. Recurring, too, is the theme of a corrupt society, but Macdonald’s portrait here is especially memorable, with Archer’s pursuit of the truth revealing the venality behind the facade of propriety.

Thus, echoes of previous Archer novels abound in The Underground Man—the primary one being the demonstration that the past usually has the answers to the mysteries of the present. Yet despite the shared similarities of style, tone, theme, setting, and method, it has a distinctive voice and quality and the perfect combination of timeless and timely themes.

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.