The Classic Mystery That Prefigured the Los Angeles Wildfires
There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower. If you’re lucky enough to have an Agave americana on your land, wary enough to stay clear of its sharp-toothed leaves, and patient enough to hang around for anything from eight to thirty years, you will be rewarded, at last, with the sight of its butter-yellow blossoms. Likewise, if a copy of “The Underground Man,” a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly, it’s a book in full bloom.
The cause of that flowering is not hard to find. You hear a hint of it in the opening sentences: “A rattle of leaves woke me some time before dawn. A hot wind was breathing in at the bedroom window.” At once, we are on our guard; since when did the weather become an intruder, stalking us while we sleep? Further down the page, a few hours later, we get a wider prospect:
Something, we realize, is ready to catch fire. The man we’re listening to is Lew Archer, the private eye who appeared in eighteen novels by Macdonald. The earliest was “The Moving Target,” from 1949. The last was “The Blue Hammer,” which came out in 1976. (Eleven of them are available in a three-volume boxed set, hefty and handsome, from the Library of America.) “The Underground Man” is the sixteenth in the series and one of the best. As a reader, you can spend a lot of time in Archer’s company, tracking him as he unravels case upon case, and still feel that he eludes you, being the kind of fellow who holds things in reserve. He’s an ex-cop, with an ex-wife. In “The Underground Man,” he tells us, “I had no children, but I had given up envying people who had.” The grimness of his adventures should grind him down, and yet, from book to book, he perseveres. Here he is, staring into a mirror to check for damage:
What matters most about Archer, as with any cat, is not who he is but where he prowls. His basic beat is Southern California. In “The Way Some People Die” (1951), he covers Santa Monica, somewhere called Pacific Point (most likely a stand-in for La Jolla), and Palm Springs. The preceding book, “The Drowning Pool” (1950), offers a sardonic overview of the state—“They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert”—before zooming in on an oil-rich town north of Los Angeles, which Archer compares to a tumor. In 1975, when the novel was adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman, the action was redirected to Louisiana, and the result fell predictably flat. It was like sending Madame Bovary to Marseille.
Now and then, Archer heads farther afield. “The Chill” (1964) takes him as far as Chicago. But his heart, or his busy brain, remains on the country’s western edge. He can’t stop examining the kinds of people who live there, within different pockets of the land, and the sharp shifts of texture and light which greet him as he goes from one pocket to the next. In “The Instant Enemy” (1968), he takes a punch and a tumble, smacking the back of his skull against concrete—just another day in Pacific Palisades, where a couple’s emotional rapport gives off “a faint wrong smoky odor,” and where “purple princess flowers glowed among the leaves.” Arriving in Malibu, in “The Barbarous Coast” (1956), he drives first to a club with a fifty-yard swimming pool and then to a cottage that resembles “a discarded container.” With him is an anxious young man named George:
The walls of the cottage, Archer reports, “had been scoured bare and grained by blowing sands.” You can all but rub the tips of your fingers against the grain. That’s how grit gets into a private eye. You might say the same of Philip Marlowe, who moseys through the masterworks of Raymond Chandler, but what’s extraordinary—and I sense this ever more keenly, after years of immersion in Chandler—is how those works amount, in the end, to one long prose poem.
On a map, Marlowe’s hunting grounds abut or overlap with Archer’s, yet the moods of their investigations are quite distinct. Chandler haunts you and makes you laugh; Macdonald keeps you posted, although his Californian evocations are not without a quick lyrical toughness of their own. Through the medium of Archer, he tells us how the skin of the landscape rises, falls, and smells; how it looks through the windshield of a car (“the leaping road, the blue sky streaming backward”) or from the window of a plane; and, most indelible of all, thanks to “The Underground Man,” how it burns.
The Los Angeles wildfires that started on January 7th of this year were remarkable for a number of reasons. Among these was, first, their geographical spread, across half a dozen counties of the metropolitan area. According to California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, more than fifty-seven thousand acres were burned and more than sixteen thousand structures destroyed. Second, there was the longevity: on the last day of January, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire were yet to be quenched. And, third, there was the unearthly rush of the conflagrations. Between midmorning and midafternoon on January 7th, the fire that began around Pacific Palisades swelled from ten acres to more than twelve hundred.
Needless to say, among the countless aspects of this disaster, the fact that it was partly foretold in a fifty-four-year-old mystery story is, by any reckoning, the most trivial and the least consoling. If you approached a family in Altadena, as they stood in front of their scorched home, and informed them that a guy called Ross Macdonald saw it all coming, they would quite rightly tell you to go to the place where the fires are never snuffed out. Nonetheless, there is something creepy and compelling in the prophetic strength that is harbored, and slowly revealed, by particular books. (Or by a particular author: in Kafka’s case, the foresight is terrifying.) What is caught most acutely in “The Underground Man,” and what came to mind as I watched the footage from L.A., is the sheer velocity with which such catastrophes can unfold. Hell comes on fast.
Archer first gets word of fire, indirectly, from a radio report. Then he sees a veil of smoke, with “glimpses of fire like the flashes of heavy guns too far away to be heard.” Up closer, he tries another tack: “The flames that from a distance had looked like artillery flashes were crashing through the thick chaparral like cavalry.” The military likeness lingers (“outriders of flame were leaping down the slope to the left”) before giving way to other images—the fire, we are told, resembles “a displaced sunset,” “fuming acid,” or “a loose volcano,” and the air is like “hot animal breath.” Later, as the day fades, the illusion of being at war returns:
What’s going on here? One could argue that Macdonald is stuck in a mixture of similes. The more charitable view is that he’s thinking dramatically through the eyes, ears, and nostrils of his hero, and that, if Archer struggles to pin down what he encounters, it’s because the fire is, truly, indescribable. (He’s too wise for cracks.) That’s what most of us—laconic sleuths included—tend to do when we find ourselves on the verge of being overwhelmed. Trying to articulate what strikes us, we fail, fall short, and try again.
Yet something else is going on in “The Underground Man.” What Archer observes is not just the haste of the fires, or their ever-changing shape, but whom they attack. At one point, he goes to the imperilled home of a woman named Mrs. Armistead. Cleaving instinctively to the principle that you protect what you love, she has saved her mink coat from the inferno. It lies at the bottom of her swimming pool, out of harm’s way, weighted down by what look like jewelry boxes. She and Archer leave, pause at a curve in the road, and gaze upon her house:
