The past lies where it does. Any excavation has the chance of uncovering lies that have impacted into fictions. This is a delicate, and possibly perilous, matter of its kind when the lies are told in families.
II.
Throughout the great Archer series, Ross Macdonald <1> was concerned with variations on the subject of the past. In The Underground Man, Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer, is confronted with family fictions that may have had a part to play in murder in the past, and may well have led to murder in the present. Archer's services are first involved when Jean Broadhurst tells him of her concerns for the safety of her child. At six years of age, the child is her son Ronny, and he has been taken by his father, Stanley Broadhurst, to visit his grandmother.
Elizabeth Broadhurst lives in Santa Teresa, California, and that setting in the novel is in present danger with a spreading forest fire. Archer and Jean drive to the Broadhurst address. "Before we reached Santa Teresa I could smell smoke. Then I could see it dragging like a veil across the face of the mountain behind the city. Under and through the smoke I caught glimpses of fire". <2> Mrs. Broadhurst is unable to help Archer and Jean with their inquiries. Moreover, Elizabeth's own son, Stanley, is found dead, while Ronny seems to have been kidnapped by two troubled young people, Jerry Kilpatrick and Susan Crandall.
Jerry's father is at a loss to explain why his son has turned his back on his parents, and society in general. "He added in a discouraged voice which made him sound like an old man: 'We're losing a whole generation. They're punishing us for bringing them into the world.' " As for Susan Crandall, Archer senses a fiction - just one among the other fictions he will find in this case - at work between Susan and her parents: "an unreality so bland and smothering that the children tore loose and impaled themselves on the spikes of any reality that offered."
The murder of Stanley Broadhurst leads Archer to yet another broken child-parent relationship. Leo Broadhurst had left his family when Stanley was a young boy; as an adult, the son had spent years trying to find his father. He had persisted despite the advice offered in a letter from a minister who had known Leo as a parishioner. "I think it is unwise for a son to attempt to delve too deeply into his father's life. What man is without blame? ... The past can do very little for us ... except in the end to release us." Archer will find himself returning to the seemingly disappeared Leo Broadhurst, and, his late son's search for a missing father.
III.
The fictions detailed by Ross Macdonald in The Underground Man perpetuate and protect the interests of specific characters in the novel. Lew Archer's investigation uncovers the complex dynamic of these fabrications. Over time, and between the generations, a certain collusion has been assumed. Then one day, in its way, the past bleeds into the present.
__________
<1>"Millar than Macdonald". BMT (razaqar.blogspot.com), March 31, 2015.
<2>Macdonald, Ross. The Underground Man (1971), in Ross Macdonald: Four Later Novels. The Library of America, 2017.
