Who knew Ross Macdonald was in the zeitgeist?

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Last week, when I posted an item about Ross Macdonald, I had no idea he was so much with us once again. Then, another new Macdonald volume arrived — “The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including Newly Discovered Case Notes” (Crippen & Landru: 352 pp., $25 paper), edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan (who is an occasional contributor to Book Review).

What Nolan has gathered are 12 stories, mostly from the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as 11 additional story fragments — the “Case Notes” of the subtitle — that, for whatever reason, Macdonald left incomplete. (Much of this material comes from the author’s papers, which are at UC Irvine.) That makes the collection something of an inside job: constructed as a detective’s notebook, complete with a “biographical sketch” by Nolan that frames Archer as a real person, born in Long Beach, marked by war and police work, defined by his times.

I love a hard-boiled short story, but what intrigues me more are all those false starts and near-misses, the glimpses of Macdonald at work. Too often, we think of writing as inevitable, unyielding as stone. Yet, every author starts with a blank page (or a blank screen) and no real idea how to fill it in. Here, then, Nolan offers us the clues to such a process, evidence of Macdonald’s writing life laid bare.

David L. Ulin