She was staring at the muzzle of the .38. It wasn’t aiming at anything in particular.
“Wake him up,” Ken murmured. “I want him to see his gun in my hand. I want him to know how I got it.”
Hilda gasped and it became a sob and then a wail and it was a hook of sound that awakened Riker. At first he was looking at Hilda. Then he saw Ken and he sat up very slowly, as though he was something made of stone and ropes were pulling him up. His eyes were riveted to Ken’s face and he hadn’t yet noticed the .38. His hand crept down along the side of the pillow and then under the pillow.
There was no noise in the room as Riker’s hand groped for the gun. Some moments passed and then there was sweat on Riker’s forehead and under his lip and he went on searching for the gun and suddenly he seemed to realize it wasn’t there. He focused on the weapon in Ken’s hand and his body began to quiver. His lips scarcely moved as he said, “The gun... the gun—”
“It’s yours,” Ken said. “Mind if I borrow it?”
Riker went on staring at the revolver. Then very slowly his head turned and he was staring at Hilda. “You,” he said. “You gave it to him.”
“Not exactly,” Ken said. “All she did was tell me where it was.”
Riker shut his eyes very tightly, as though he was tied to a rack and it was pulling him apart.
Hilda’s face was expressionless. She was looking at Ken and saying, “You promised to let me walk out—”
“I’m not stopping you,” he said. Then, with a shrug and a dim smile, “I’m not stopping anyone from doing what they want to do. And he slipped the gun into his pocket.”
Hilda started for the door. Riker was up from the bed and lunging at her, grabbing her wrist and hurling her across the room. Then Riker lunged again and his hands reached for her throat as she tried to get up from the floor. Hilda began to make gurgling sounds but the noise was drowned in the torrent of insane screaming that came from Riker’s lips. Riker choked her until she died. When Riker realized she was dead his screaming became louder and he went on choking her.
Ken stood there, watching it happen. He saw the corpse flapping like a rag-doll in the clutching hands of the screaming madman. He thought, Well, they wanted each other, and now they got each other.
He walked out of the room and down the hall and down the stairs. As he went out of the house he could still hear the screaming. On Spruce, walking toward Eleventh, he glanced back and saw a crowd gathering outside the house and then he heard the sound of approaching sirens. He waited there and saw the police-cars stopping in front of the house, the policemen rushing in with drawn guns. Some moments later he heard the shots and he knew that the screaming man was trying to make a getaway. There was more shooting and suddenly there was no sound at all. He knew they’d be carrying two corpses out of the house.
He turned away from what was happening back there, walked along the curb toward the sewer-hole on the corner, took Riker’s gun from his pocket and threw it into the sewer. In the instant that he did it, there was a warm sweet taste in his mouth. He smiled, knowing what it was. Again he could hear Tillie saying, “Revenge is black pudding.”
Tillie, he thought. And the smile stayed on his face as he walked north on Eleventh. He was remembering the feeling he’d had when he’d kissed her. It was the feeling of wanting to take her out of that dark cellar, away from the loneliness and the opium. To carry her upward toward the world where they had such things as clinics, with plastic specialists who repaired scarred faces.
The feeling hit him again and he was anxious to be with Tillie and he walked faster.
Ross Macdonald
(1915–1983)
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) has been widely acclaimed as the most important successor to the tradition epitomized by the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as the writer who elevated the hard-boiled private-eye novel to a “literary” art form (although it can be argued that Hammett and Chandler had in their own ways already done so.) In Macdonald’s case, the claim is based partly on the fact that his fiction sparkles with simile and metaphor; his descriptions of California, his adopted state, are poetic and bring its places and people vividly alive. In fact, however, it is the addition of deep psychological characterization and complex thematic content that is Macdonald’s primary contribution both to the hard-boiled genre and to the noir detective story.
Lew Archer, the narrator of most of Macdonald’s fiction, is more an observer than a fully fleshed-out human being. Indeed, it was the author’s stated intent that Archer be a camera recording events and the people involved in those events. This is both a strength and a weakness of the series, for Archer comes alive for the reader only in terms of his professional life. As he himself states in The Instant Enemy (1968): “I had to admit that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive.” The reader often has a similar wish or fantasy where Archer is concerned.
Some aficionados feel that the best Archer novels were written between 1949 and 1958, particularly those that appeared under the name John Ross Macdonald. (The “John” was dropped when John D. MacDonald complained that the similarity to his name confused readers.) These early works include The Moving Target (1949), The Way Some People Die (1951), and The Ivory Grin (1952). Others prefer such middle-period titles as The Galton Case (1959), The Chill (1964), and Black Money (1966), which have denser plots and larger themes. This middle group is also more consciously (sometimes self-consciously) literary than the early novels and is less deeply rooted in the hard-boiled tradition.
The few Archer short stories sparkle almost as brilliantly as the full-length works; the best, in fact, are miniature novels honed to the sharpest essentials of plot, character, and incident. Seven were published between 1946 and 1954 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, and American Magazine, and were then collected in The Name Is Archer (1955). Two additional stories were written and published in the 1960s, and in 1977 all nine were collected under the title Lew Archer, Private Investigator. “Guilt-Edged Blonde” originally appeared in Manhunt in January 1954. Despite the author’s claim that the first seven Archer stories were written to “show my debt to other writers, especially Hammett and Chandler, and in fact did not aim at any striking originality,” all are first-rate, and “Guilt-Edged Blonde” is original enough to satisfy any discerning reader.
B. P.
Guilt-Edged Blonde
(1954)
A man was waiting for me at the gate at the edge of the runway. He didn’t look like the man I expected to meet. He wore a stained tan windbreaker, baggy slacks, a hat as squashed and dubious as his face. He must have been forty years old, to judge by the grey in his hair and the lines around his eyes. His eyes were dark and evasive, moving here and there as if to avoid getting hurt. He had been hurt often and badly, I guessed.