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Dave's Reviews > The Chill
The Chill
by
by
In the Chill (1963), MacDonald focuses quite sharply on the psychological issues besetting his characters. The setting is fictional Pacific Point, about fifty miles south of Archer’s normal beat. Perhaps it is a stand-in for San Diego. Perhaps not.
The opening is a courtroom where private eye Lew Archer was testifying and, after Archer was dismissed by the judge, he is approached by a young man who had been sitting in the front row of spectators. “His brooding blue gaze stayed on my face, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be willing to share his troubles with me.� Indeed, Archer narrates: “I shouldn’t have asked him. I should have walked briskly out to my car and driven back to Los Angeles. But he had that clean, crewcut All-American look, and that blur of pain in his eyes.� Archer once again finds himself with a client he is uneasy about and who leads him into far more trouble than it is worth.
The young man, Alex Kincaid, explains to Archer that he does not know where his wife Dolly is and that she left in the middle of their honeymoon weekend, one day after they were married. Archer doubts that she met with foul play and proffers that she may have decided she did not want to be married or not to Alex. “It happens all the time.� Alex says he only knew his wife for six weeks and that she had said her entire family was dead, wiped out in an automobile accident. He did not know too much about her other than she was a wonderful girl. Alex says he did not touch her on the wedding night, but she is a warm person, he assures Archer.
Archer reluctantly agrees to help Alex, who Archer suspects is not fully there. His investigation leads him to a mysterious older man, Chuck Begley, who visited Dolly at the hotel. And finds that Dolly was seen driving away with an old woman in a Rolls Royce. Archer finds that Dolly has returned to college and is working for an older woman. At the campus, Archer finds Dolly who tells him that “Spreading ruin is her speciality.� She also says that Alex can wait til doomsday and she was not going back to him. Tell him, she says, to congratulate himself on his narrow escape. She is quite a mysterious young lady.
It is not too long before Archer finds Dolly covered in someone’s blood and saying that it was all her fault and that she was a devil and so was her father before her and so was Helen’s father and that they had a bond of murder between them which made them blood sisters and she had betrayed her sister and done her in. Yes, if you thought Dolly was bit on the nutty side, you got it right. She is ready for the funny farm, lock, stock, and barrel, and that is precisely where Archer puts her. “Under the raw melodrama of her self-accusations,� he explains, “I had the sense of something valuable and fragile in danger of being permanently broken.�
Where this leads is to questions about how the law treats the insane or mentally infirm and whether in her state Dolly should be talking to the police about the bloody corpse with the bullet hole in its forehead. This is particularly so since Dolly has now explained that she killed her mother and her friend Helen and sent her father to prison in the bargain, “all with her poisonous tongue.�
Archer seems to have a soft spot in his heart for the truly innocent who are beset by guilt and wracked to the point of non-functioning and Dolly fits right into that category with her accepting blame for murders, the one with Helen and others going back in time. Archer takes it as his duty to resolve this twisted mess that began in such an odd fashion, knowing there is often a small glimmer of truth that is expressed in madness.
One of the interesting things about MacDonald’s Archer is that he is not constantly battling mobbed-up tough guys, but situations which have deteriorated over the years and manifested with one sin building on another until there is no longer any hiding from what happened. There is a string of broken and damaged people that Archer finds and he is going to, one way or another, sort out this mess.
The opening is a courtroom where private eye Lew Archer was testifying and, after Archer was dismissed by the judge, he is approached by a young man who had been sitting in the front row of spectators. “His brooding blue gaze stayed on my face, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be willing to share his troubles with me.� Indeed, Archer narrates: “I shouldn’t have asked him. I should have walked briskly out to my car and driven back to Los Angeles. But he had that clean, crewcut All-American look, and that blur of pain in his eyes.� Archer once again finds himself with a client he is uneasy about and who leads him into far more trouble than it is worth.
The young man, Alex Kincaid, explains to Archer that he does not know where his wife Dolly is and that she left in the middle of their honeymoon weekend, one day after they were married. Archer doubts that she met with foul play and proffers that she may have decided she did not want to be married or not to Alex. “It happens all the time.� Alex says he only knew his wife for six weeks and that she had said her entire family was dead, wiped out in an automobile accident. He did not know too much about her other than she was a wonderful girl. Alex says he did not touch her on the wedding night, but she is a warm person, he assures Archer.
Archer reluctantly agrees to help Alex, who Archer suspects is not fully there. His investigation leads him to a mysterious older man, Chuck Begley, who visited Dolly at the hotel. And finds that Dolly was seen driving away with an old woman in a Rolls Royce. Archer finds that Dolly has returned to college and is working for an older woman. At the campus, Archer finds Dolly who tells him that “Spreading ruin is her speciality.� She also says that Alex can wait til doomsday and she was not going back to him. Tell him, she says, to congratulate himself on his narrow escape. She is quite a mysterious young lady.
It is not too long before Archer finds Dolly covered in someone’s blood and saying that it was all her fault and that she was a devil and so was her father before her and so was Helen’s father and that they had a bond of murder between them which made them blood sisters and she had betrayed her sister and done her in. Yes, if you thought Dolly was bit on the nutty side, you got it right. She is ready for the funny farm, lock, stock, and barrel, and that is precisely where Archer puts her. “Under the raw melodrama of her self-accusations,� he explains, “I had the sense of something valuable and fragile in danger of being permanently broken.�
Where this leads is to questions about how the law treats the insane or mentally infirm and whether in her state Dolly should be talking to the police about the bloody corpse with the bullet hole in its forehead. This is particularly so since Dolly has now explained that she killed her mother and her friend Helen and sent her father to prison in the bargain, “all with her poisonous tongue.�
Archer seems to have a soft spot in his heart for the truly innocent who are beset by guilt and wracked to the point of non-functioning and Dolly fits right into that category with her accepting blame for murders, the one with Helen and others going back in time. Archer takes it as his duty to resolve this twisted mess that began in such an odd fashion, knowing there is often a small glimmer of truth that is expressed in madness.
One of the interesting things about MacDonald’s Archer is that he is not constantly battling mobbed-up tough guys, but situations which have deteriorated over the years and manifested with one sin building on another until there is no longer any hiding from what happened. There is a string of broken and damaged people that Archer finds and he is going to, one way or another, sort out this mess.
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