60. The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross MacDonald

I've now come all the way around with Ross MacDonald.  He may have moved to the top of my detective fiction rankings after reading the Zebra-Striped Hearse.  This is the fourth or fifth book of his that I have read in the 50 Books era and they just keep getting better and better.  It's really the detecting that gets me and this one has a lot of it, but then the intricate and tightly-structured plot that keeps revealing more and more and finally the real darkness at the end that brings to near-masterpiece level for me.

Archer is almost a cypher in this one, though with several great quips and observations along the way.  He starts here with a request from an angry old man to investigate the beau of his rebellious daughter (well a request preceded by the angry old man's wife, which anticipates the complexity of the case to come).  The daughter, who is 24 and will inherit her aunt's millions when she turns 25, has run off to Mexico and met an old, attractive artist/bum and threatens to marry him.  It begins with a pretty straightforward effort to find out the true identity of the artist.  An envelope found in the beach house where the couple was hiding away suggests that the man came across the border using an alias.  Archer hops it to Mexico and things start to get complex.  I'm going to stop there with the plot, because the unraveling is a big part of the pleasure.  I did find it a bit confusing about two-thirds of the way in, but it's all so carefully built that it comes back together again (and boy does it!) by the end.

What I love about MacDonald is that there is a ton of real investigating.  This book is quite procedural.  I just love scenes of the detective talking to various characters, getting past their defenses and getting the info he needs to go to the next character.  Nobody does it better in my reading experience so far than MacDonald in these Archer books.  Each encounter is also an opportunity to expose a little bit of mid-20th century America, especially California.  The locations (expat artist town in Mexico, seedy Reno hotel apartment, Malibu beach houses) and the weirdos that live there (struggling bar owner, cute girl who goes on dates for slot machine money, drunken mom with wayward son) are each finely crafted and in the aggregate open up to the reader a fading, changing America.

I'm not going to say this book is super deep, but the title reveals a richer sub-text.  The hearse in question is the vehicle of a gang of surfer kids whose role is only incidental to the plot but thematically quite central.  It's about wayward children, the separation from their parents and the anger towards them, anger that comes out of trauma and just change.  The Zebra-Striped Hearse was written in 1962 and California feels decaying.  The 60s are coming and MacDonald makes you feel it in the wind.  I know too that Macdonald and Millar had their own wayward daughter with her own tragic end (and their own responsibility) so may surmise that is what he is writing about here.

It does get very dark in the end.  Characters that we thought were bad are much, much worse.  What I particularly appreciated is that the complex plot once you know the whole story is not that complex at all. It's just that everybody lying and hiding and Archer coming into it backwards makes the unravelling complex, which is the pleasure of the mystery.  Great book.  I haven't gone back and checked thoroughly but this is up there for one of the top books in 2023.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, there is a great little interchange near the end where Archer interacts with an early sci-fi nerd "a fat man with a frowzy unwed aura".  LOL!  He clearly did not approve: