Monday Morning Digest Magazine: Manhunt, January 1953

This is the first issue of the iconic crime fiction magazine, and it's also an issue I used to own. I read it about twenty years ago. And what an issue it is, with part one of a serial by Mickey Spillane and stories by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich), Kenneth Millar (better known as Ross Macdonald), a Shell Scott story by Richard S. Prather, Evan Hunter, and Frank Kane. Oddly enough, considering that all-star line-up, the story I remember liking the best was a novelette by the now largely forgotten Floyd Mahannah. But here's what really interests me about this issue now: there's another story, and it's by none other than Charles Beckman Jr., also known as Charles Boeckman, still alive, still writing, and a pulp legend I'm proud to call my friend, something that never would have entered my mind when I read this issue all those years ago.

Forgotten Books: The Archer Files - Ross Macdonald

I don't recall the first Ross Macdonald book I read. It may well have been THE MOVING TARGET, the first book in the Lew Archer series. I remember checking it out of the library very early on. But not long after that I joined The Mystery Guild, and one of the books I got as part of my membership was ARCHER IN HOLLYWOOD, a thick green omnibus volume with three novels in it: THE MOVING TARGET (which I'd already read), THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE, and THE BARBAROUS COAST, as well as an introduction by Macdonald about the writing of the books.

Well, that was enough to make me into a lifelong fan of Ross Macdonald's writing and the Lew Archer series in particular. All the books up to that time had been reprinted in paperback (most by Bantam, a few by Pocket Books), and used copies were readily available. I snatched them up and read all I could get my hands on, including the short story collection THE NAME IS ARCHER, which I remember reading at my aunt's house in Blanket, Texas.

All the stories from THE NAME IS ARCHER—and more—can by found in THE ARCHER FILES, a great collection published a few years ago by Crippen & Landru. That "more" I refer to includes a biographical sketch of Lew Archer by Tom Nolan, who edited the book, and what Nolan calls "Case Notes", which are actually the openings of Archer stories that Macdonald never finished. Some of these fragments are brief, only a page or two, but others are fairly substantial. All of them are entertaining and very frustrating at the same time, because we don't get to find out how the stories end. But Macdonald's prose is as compelling and appealing as ever.

I won't claim to have reread all the stories in THE ARCHER FILES for this post, but I reread several of them and they hold up very well, no doubt about that. One of them, "Gone Girl", opens with a couple of lines I really like and have never forgotten: "It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood." Ah, that sweet first-person private eye narration . . . I just love it.

If you've never read Macdonald's work and haven't made the acquaintance of Lew Archer, THE ARCHER FILES would be a great place to start. If you're an old fan like me, well, reading these stories took me back to the Sixties and early Seventies, when I was devouring all the private eye yarns I could find, and it was a great feeling. Now I might have to try to find the time to reread some of the Archer novels.