The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

Rating:
Summary: Routine Hard-Boiled
Review: Book number 11 in the 18-volume Lew Archer series is the first of MacDonald's books I've read. Published forty years prior to my reading, it's aged fairly well as a highly convoluted Chalderesque hard-boiled tale. The tough and terse Archer is hired by an unpleasant rich man to investigate the background of his daughter's fiancee. This is the catalyst for an investigation which roams from San Francisco, to LA, to Lake Tahoe, to Reno and Mexico, ultimately involving multiple murders.

I have to say that I didn't find Archer an especially entrancing character. He's a fairly standard fictional detective: world weary, rough when he needs to be, emotionally tender, all topped off with a wide streak of compassion and smart mouth. As he runs around interviewing everyone, patterns start to emerge, people are first open with him and provide him with a morsel of information or two (enough to keep the plot going), then they inevitably turn on him and refuse to tell the whole truth. After a while, it just started to feel too contrived. Another irritant in the narrative is Archer's totally unrealistic ability to more or less use local police as his lackeys. One just doesn't get enough sense of his charisma, why all these cops are willing to tip him off, and why all these dames keep sending him vibes. I suppose that's why noir often seems to work better for me on film, you get to see that charisma, plus the overly complex plots get streamlined-usually with much better results. Certainly, in the case of this story, the hyper-Freudian motives that emerge at the end are hardly satisfying.

Still, if you just can't live without your hard-boiled detectives, Archer certainly fits the mold enough to satisfy fanatics of the genre. It also may be that if one reads the series from the beginning, he emerges as a more fully realized character than he does in this single entry.

Rating:
Summary: One of his best
Review: I've liked everything I've read so far by MacDonald, and Zebra-Striped Hearse is no exception. What I found different is Archer's travels, be it Mexico, Nevada, and up and down California. In particular, his portrayal of an American colony in Mexico of drunks, artists, and others just hiding out, read true. Same with the surfer kids in their zebra striped hearse. It's the kind of writing that gives you a slice of what the early sixties was like, but in a way that doesn't sound dated, but accurate.

The novel as a whole is moody, its story a dark (and very sad)one of sexual depravity, psychological cruelty, a deliberate red herring or two, and of course, murder(s). To some extent I felt novel had too many characters, and it was hard to keep track of all the motivations, not to mention Archer's frenetic movements between Mexico, California, and Nevada. But with MacDonald you get a master of character creation who possesses excellent descriptive powers. He can create a memorable character, with a history in the space of a paragraph or two. He's amazing. And his scenes can very suggestive, very dark. In one, a little girl looking at a comic book suggests (possible) crimes of a much greater scale. But MacDonald doesn't dwell on it. He leaves you hanging, effectively haunting you for the rest of the book. You never know for sure, but it's that not knowing that shows MacDonald at his best. Within the scope of the novel, it's a small moment, but MacDonald cares about those small moments as he builds a whole.

If there is convolution in Zebra Striped Hearse, it's a small sin blown away by the fine descriptive powers of a master.

Rating:
Summary: More than just a mystery writer
Review: It seems odd to say it on a page full of five star reviews, but Ross MacDonald gets consistently underrated -- he didn't just write pulp mysteries with fancy plots and perfect atmosphere. The books deliver that too, though the plots and Freudian resolutions aren't MacDonald's strongest points -- it's the perfect details, the complex characters (Lew Archer principal among them), the engaging intelligence. Aside from the fact that he didn't basically invent the 20th Century noir, MacDonald stands with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as a mystery writer who can be appreciated as a true literary master, comfortable next to acknowledged California masters like John Steinbeck and John Fante. And Ross MacDonald is the man who updated California noir so that everyone from James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard to Thomas Pynchon and Denis Johnson to Kem Nunn to Mike Davis could take it along to the next steps.

And the ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE is one of MacDonald's best, continuing to feel shockingly contemporary as a perfect literary portrait of the Golden State and its fascinating dark side.

Rating:
Summary: Something More here than mere Detective Fiction
Review: It's a mistake to read Ross MacDonald in quite the same way you go about reading other authors of hardboiled detective fiction. His concerns and preoccupations are wholly different than those of inferior writers. For MacDonald, the detective or mystery form is merely the vehicle he chooses to explore those deeper concerns.

THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE is a good case in point and, as such, is vintage MacDonald. The novel is rather pedestrian when viewed purely as a "detective" story. The book is powerful and arresting, however, when seen for what it is on a much more profound level - an exposé of a society teetering on the brink of moral relativism, consumed by greed, and one in which psychosis and psychopathology have become the norm. Although it was written in 1962, the parallels with society today are both telling and relevant.

The zebra-striped hearse of the title plays a prominent (but coincidental) role in the solution to the mystery depicted in the pages of this novel. As a symbol, it functions also to further the author's condemnation of certain aspects of American society and mores. No longer used for its original purpose, the vehicle has now become macabre transportation for a spirited group of teenage surfers prowling up and down the Southern California coast. Decadence, death, moral irresponsibility and decay have thus been covered by a veneer of innocence, health, youthfulness and accountability. In the course of the novel, however, MacDonald's prose lays bare the truth the way the salt air scours even the most garish paint from cars parked for too long in the sea-breezes.

The story opens as Harriet Blackwell takes up with a mysterious artist by the name of Burke Damis. The girl's father, Colonel Mark Blackwell, hires Lew Archer to check up on Damis' background. Blackwell's hope is that the investigation will turn up something that he can use to dissuade his high-strung but homely daughter from marrying her new beau. What Archer discovers, however, is far worse than even the Colonel anticipated. Damis may be more than just an opportunist and a gold-digger. He might just be a bigamist and a murderer.

As Archer pursues the investigation with dispassionate tenacity, he discovers that all is not what it appears to be in the Blackwell household. The current troubles with Harriet may in fact have their origins in an even older murder as well as in a bizarre and perverse network of secret family relations that would keep Sigmund Freud up at night scratching his goatee in disbelief. The novel ends in a bloodbath and with the kind of final twist that typifies MacDonald at the top of his game.

THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE is an engaging and demanding novel. It is, in fact, a book that transcends the genre which spawned it. At the same time, it is also a work that is apt to disappoint those who fail to look beyond the more conventional elements which, like the weird paint-job on the hearse that moves through its pages, disguise something much weightier and even more disturbing. (Reviews by James Clar appear regularly in MYSTERY NEWS as well as in other genre publications).


Rating:
Summary: Good, Evil, Motives Galore!
Review: Ross MacDonald received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and it's easy to see why. Though this novel is over thirty years old, it is a meticulous, finely written, moody, introspective novel which can be read and enjoyed today easily. It is hardly dated at all, with the exception of some minor details.

Full of interesting complex characters, this book is full of the stuff which excellent detective novels are made of: good, evil, and motives galore.

As with MacDonald's books, it is complicated and moves to and fro to a degree that careful reading is necessary, but definately well worth it. While you're reading, the pace increases, the tension rises, the scenes are wonderfully interesting and the characters are delightfully real. The clues are precisely set out and carefully explained as the novel progresses. An excellent read for detective novel fans!

Rating:
Summary: Another stellar novel in a spectacular series
Review: The bad news about this wonderful novel is that it is not Ross MacDonald at his very best. The good news is that it is still far better than most mystery novels that have been written. Of the three great masters of the American hardboiled detective novel, MacDonald never achieved the brilliant prose style of Hammett and Chandler, but neither of those two came close to the meditations on the vagaries of the human soul that MacDonald made his subject over and again. All of MacDonald's novels deal with the consequences of original sin, of an evil that seems to be greater than any individual human being, an evil that constantly threatens to overwhelm human beings when they least anticipate it. Frequently, we discover in MacDonald that, as in the Old Testament, the sins of the fathers have been visited on the second and third generations. Often in his novels, the roots of the crimes of the present lay twenty or thirty or forty years in the past. In this novel, Lew Archer at one points explains to his client, "The past is the key to the present," thus stating explicitly one of the fundamental principles underlying all of MacDonald's fiction. Ironically this novel extends less into the pass than almost any of his other novels. One of his truly great novels such as the incomparable THE CHILL or THE INSTANT ENEMY will extend decades into the past, which MacDonald brilliantly links to the present. Often one gets the sense that MacDonald's is revealing the secret history of his character's lives. This one does as well, but instead of going forty years into the past, he goes merely a few years.

I loved the locales of the novel. Although I wish he physically described the areas Archer visits, MacDonald was always more of an ethicist than a sociologist. He was always less interested in communities and the way society worked than in the way that humans worked and how the decisions they make ripple down through the lives of other human beings. Thus he visits Lake Tahoe, but there is a kind of timelessness to the area he described. In reading Chandler, on the other hand, there is often a deep consciousness of the character and nature of the places where the stories occur. These technique benefits both authors, by providing a concreteness to Chandler's stories that is often missing in MacDonald's, while lending a sense of timelessness to MacDonald that is impossible in Chandler. Most hardboiled writers have tended to follow more in Hammett and Chandler's footsteps than MacDonald's, though James Ellroy is one notable exception.

Though this is not one of MacDonald's best novels, it is still exceptionally enjoyable. It is also one of his least typical. Some people survive you anticipate meeting violent ends (the body count for his central characters is usually quite high). As always, he unrolls his plot skillfully. The characters are all vividly drawn. And unlike many of his other novels, there is more than one unexpected twist at the end. This is as fine a place as any for any newcomer to MacDonald to start, and any MacDonald veteran who has not read it certainly should. It may not contain the glories of his great masterpiece THE CHILL (which more than one critic of the genre considers to be the supreme novel of the entire detective genre), but it is nonetheless a very fine book.

Rating:
Summary: A well-written, psychological mystery
Review: The great thing about all of Ross MacDonald's mysteries is that they are stories about people that seem very real and are very complicated psychologically. I became very interested in the characters in this book, and not just "who did it". Also, in this book, there are characters who didn't kill anybody but are never-the-less guilty of actions that may not be against the law but are certainly morally reprehensible. This book is very good but it is not MacDonald's best. I have not read all of them, but I would highly recommend The Galton Case and The Far Side of the Dollar.

Rating:
Summary: Very good book, not only a Chandler lookalike
Review: When I first started that book, I was glad to be able to read another Marlowe story even though I had read them all before. It was Chandler without its cold humour. But after some pages I realized it was a true original novel and not only a copy of the master. I eventually enjoyed it, with its own style. The scenario is good, the character is interesting etc. I would recommend it to anybody that would like to read classical black novels.

Rating:
Summary: Only in California...
Review: Yeah, only in California are you likely to see a zebra striped hearse full of surfing teens. Although one of the important clues comes from the hearse, it doesn't really play that important a part in the story, but it's a symbol of the California lifestyle, especially the lifestyle of the teens & young adults. And this symbol has a bearing on the character especially of the young woman whose boy friend and potential husband Lew Archer is hired to investigate.

Of course, you know that what appears to be a simple case for Archer is going to develop into a complicated skein of emotions and events including murder. You can also guess that there will be tragic overtones in the matter.

Ross MacDonald is deservedly recognized as one of the elite of the hard boiled school. While there are resembances to Hammett, Chandler and even Parker to an extent, he is unique. While he presents you with a puzzle, he also makes you care for his characters. He may have you disliking and distrusting some of the characters such as the father and the boy friend in this book, and then have you caring in one way or another for them.

If you haven't discovered Ross MacDonald yet, it's time you did. And if you have, you don't even need to be reading this review. (Although I'm glad you are)

Rating:
Summary: Only in California...
Review: Yeah, only in California are you likely to see a zebra striped hearse full of surfing teens. Although one of the important clues comes from the hearse, it doesn't really play that important a part in the story, but it's a symbol of the California lifestyle, especially the lifestyle of the teens & young adults. And this symbol has a bearing on the character especially of the young woman whose boy friend and potential husband Lew Archer is hired to investigate.

Of course, you know that what appears to be a simple case for Archer is going to develop into a complicated skein of emotions and events including murder. You can also guess that there will be tragic overtones in the matter.

Ross MacDonald is deservedly recognized as one of the elite of the hard boiled school. While there are resembances to Hammett, Chandler and even Parker to an extent, he is unique. While he presents you with a puzzle, he also makes you care for his characters. He may have you disliking and distrusting some of the characters such as the father and the boy friend in this book, and then have you caring in one way or another for them.

If you haven't discovered Ross MacDonald yet, it's time you did. And if you have, you don't even need to be reading this review. (Although I'm glad you are)