Customer Reviews

Sleeping Beauty

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the obvious observations about Ross MacDonald's series of Lew Archer detective novels is that they are essentially the same story. Eerily MacDonald's plot lines reflect his own troubled and unsettled childhood. On the surface, this novel is about a very troubled young woman that seems to be in the wrong place at the precisely wrong times. It seems impossible that she could be innocent of anything or everything. Nevertheless, true to MacDonald's plot form, the real villains are the immature adults that compounded their original sins year by year, lie by lie. The true crime always is years in the past in Ross MacDonald's novels. The perpetrator forever spends his or her life covering up the original crime and always enmeshing his or her child into the original felony.

Ross MacDonald's prose is simply pure art. He settles you into the tacky 40's through 60's of California and then contrasts the empty lives of the rich and the destitute. He exposes his characters as being very troubled and not very innocent. Archer, his guide/protagonist is dogged as the revelation of the true perpetrator(s) slowly emerges. Terse first person narration gives this novel a stunning sense of realism.

This is a really wonderful detective novel, a form of noir that is so special. Vintage Crime/Lizard Press has reissued most of the Archer series and they remain as vital, and entertaining as when they were first printed. I recommend working through the whole series of these wonderful reprints.

However, having read them all and having read most of them several times over, this in my opinion is the best by a far measure. The best of this series is perhaps the best of all detective novels. Chandler and Hammett did not have the power of prose that Ross MacDonald so effortlessly spins.

Having just read Sleeping Beauty once again, I find myself perilously close to starting a cycle of rereading all eighteen Lew Archer mysteries. Sleeping Beauty is among the last of the Archer novels, and yet it would serve quite well as starting point for a reader new to Ross MacDonald's private detective.

As Lew Archer's flight returns to Los Angeles from Mexico, he looks down upon a large oil spill extending for miles off Pacific Point. That evening along the coast he encounters a young, angry woman attempting to rescue oil-drenched sea birds. Before the night is out, Archer has been employed to rescue the woman herself, thought to have been kidnapped. Her grandfather is the patriarch of the imposing Lennox family, and chairman of the company that is responsible for the spreading oil slick.

Lew Archer is essential to MacDonald's mysteries, but not as an action figure. Archer's task is to unravel the psychological complexities that define his clients, the suspects, and the victims. Often the solution to a crime lays in the distant past; later generations sometimes pay severe penalties for old sins.

The Lennox family skeletons are many. The plot is complicated and twists unexpectedly as Archer uncovers buried family memories and hidden infidelities, some stretching back to World War II. Tautly told in the manner of a Chandler mystery, Sleeping Beauty is superb detective fiction.

Lew Archer is often mentioned in conjunction with Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, and is generally deemed as their natural heir. The respected literary critic and writer, Anthony Boucher, even argued that Ross Macdonald was a better novelist than either Hammett or Chandler.

Ross MacDonald was a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar. In the early 1970s Millar and his wife Margaret Millar (also a successful mystery author) helped lead protests following the large oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara. Many of the Archer stories take place in and around Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Santa Barbara.

This is a superlative production. Yulin doesn't merely read, he performs, and his voice matches the role. The other parts are nearly all well played, and the music never intrudes. Atmospheric and involving for 9 hours!

The book is one of MacDonald's last, and it has some of the overwrought quality that mar his later books, but this is only occasionally a distraction.

For those looking for other MacDonalds, the best are The Chill, Far Side of the Dollar, the Zebra-Striped Hearse, The Galton Case (all from 1959-65).

*possible spoilers*

When I was a young man in the seventies, I was a devoted reader of Ross MacDonald. Since then, I have moved on to Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman and Lawrence Block. And many others. In digging through some old boxes of books I came across "Sleeping Beauty" by MacDonald. I remembered nothing about it except that it had impressed me long ago. So I reread it.

Some observations:

Unlike so much of current detective fiction, there is virtually no back story to PI Lew Archer here except for the fact that he is a former cop from Long Beach. In age when so many fictional detectives live in an ongoing soap opera, that was refreshing. For that reason, this novel makes a good place to start for the Archer uninitiated.

MacDonald's choice of plot lines for his novels varies little. The Archer novels usually start with a missing young person. Archer is hired. Three generations are introduced. A crime was committed decades earlier by the oldest generation. The next generation covered it up (and often got rich). Sins of the past come to haunt the third generation. All is on display here.

This novel requires and rewards close reading. It is not slam-bang hard boiled. It intricately picks apart the history of a family that has long been in denial about the rotten things done in the past.

Archer never gets shot, punched out or hit over the head in this book. As for gunplay, it's all off screen. What crime writer could pull this off today? Well, maybe Connelly.

Red herrings? A ton of them. Don't even try to guess the ending, which only appears on the final page. But it takes your breath away.

Lauren, the "kidnapped" girl who launches the action and who everyone is trying to find, doesn't die but never takes the stage.

Class war. Rich vs. poor is a constant theme for MacDonald. How do different classes intersect? Sex.

In contrast so so many PI-cop interactions in other novels where the cops snarl, "Stay off this case, shamus, if you know what's good for you," Archer is treated with total respect by the cops on the case. In fact, the level of respect and freedom to act by the cops is downright remarkable. In fact again, in a multiple-murder and kidnapping case involving a rich California family, the cops barely appear as a footnote.

MacDonald beautifully incorporates the "sin" of environmental depradation (an oil spill) with the more more human sin of murder.

Ken Millar, RIP. Your books are still being read.

William Lennox, patriarch of the Lennox clan, has become very rich by virtue of his success in the oil business. But now he has been cursed two-fold. One of his wells off the coast of southern California has ruptured resulting in an uncontrolled eco-disaster involving a large segment of shoreline that ironically enough includes his own beachfront property.

At the same time, the youngest member of the Lennox family, William's married granddaughter, Laurel Lennox Russo has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As Lew Archer searches high and low for beautiful and troubled Laurel, he uncovers a twisted saga of family dysfunction, duplicity and murder that goes back 25 years and more.

It's not hard to see the parallels between the two storylines. Drilling for oil in geologically unstable offshore terrain is likely to result in disaster. In a similar fashion, a family dynasty held together by a matrix of lies and deceit may implode upon itself at any given time.

Sleeping Beauty is worthy of a 5 star rating for a number of reasons. The characters are interesting and well fleshed out. The dialogue is authentic sounding. Macdonald's descriptive prose, always first rate, is particularly brilliant here. Moreover, the wickedly complex plot all comes together in the final pages.

Ross Macdonald wrote this novel toward the end of a very long and prolific literary career. The decades of experience show.

One of Ross MacDonald's better books to begin with. I'm usually not a big fan of audio books - I don't like abridged versions of books, but full versions of books on audio can get monotonous. This dramatic production of Sleeping Beauty is neither. I've listened to this play at least three times and I'm sure I will enjoy it again in the future. I just wish Harris Yulin would put together another cast and produce another Lew Archer novel in this fashion.

Though not the best Ross MacDonald novel, this is certainly one of the best (which places it head and shoulders above nearly all the competition).

What is amazing about this audio performance is the exceptional care, expense, and art that went into its creation. Most novels are condensed when put on cassette; nearly all are read by only a single actor or actress. This is read by a large and excellent cast, and the recording company devoted some effort to making the background sounds both realistic and appropriate. The music was simple but quite effective. The acting was sometimes a bit uneven, but the narrator (playing the detective, Lew Archer) was pitch perfect in his role. His voice was the perfect embodiment of the Archer character -- a bit depressed, extremely competent, and at heart a passionate advocate for the good but weak (even if that description does not fit his client).

All in all, this is a novel -- and production -- that can be recommended with the greatest enthusiasm (to quote the tag line that professors must place in their letters of reference for graduating students).

But not quite. While I wouldn't say this was a terrible novel, I also wouldn't say that it was in any way memorable. Because of the wonderful dramatization on the audio cassette, I passed an afternoon at work more pleasantly, being entertained by the acting skills of the readers. However, if I'd been merely reading a text version of this story, I wouldn't have finished it because the plot did not interest me enough to deserve my full attention. The characters are too typical of a mystery novel, the prose style unremarkable, and the ending not too exciting.