Aditya's Reviews > The Zebra-Striped Hearse

Macdonald was formulaic in the best way. His old school hard boiled noirs relied on some excellent back and forth dialogue, complex yet satisfying mysteries and character motivation that relied on pop psychology which often sounded pretty credible. There were pitfalls too - characters shoehorned into neat, little cliches or subtle misogyny. But Macdonald got the balance right more often than not and The Zebra-Striped Hearse is a damn good noir.

Sympathetic audience surrogate Lew Archer has to dig up dirt on bohemian artist Burke Damis before he elopes with a rich man's daughter. Archer finds enough dead bodies tied with Damis to send him to the gallows but nothing is as it seems. Macdonald starts with a predictable web of deceit and then washes it away with waves of twists that subvert expectations. His characters were often perverted by the sort of domineering parent or enabling spouse that thrived on toxicity. Incest both psychological and physical were combined with the old backups of money and lust to give layered motivations that at least tried to nudge the mystery into tragedy territory. Here his attempts to do so work better than they did in some of the previous entries (like say #8 - The Galton Case) and the solution was both unpredictable and good.

Macdonald charts the path laid down by Chandler and while his plots are usually better, he does not have Chandler's way with words. So Archer never possesses Marlowe's infectious wit. It makes him effective but never memorable. And as with all crime noirs, most women throw themselves at Archer though he always remains a celibate wise guy. I don't know which one is more forced. It veers into melodrama occasionally but the tough as nails prose rights the ship before it ever gets too corny. The prose excels at packing a lot of atmosphere in minimalist sentences. There is a section set in Mexico over a really long night that is specially good. Archer only seems to meet characters dancing in the twilight between last chance saloon and utter hopelessness.

Macdonald is the third prong of the Holy Trinity of noir authors with Chandler and Hammett. But I don't think he ever was as influential as either of them. He still deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the two of them because he was closer to their level than the second tier pulp authors like Gil Brewer or David Goodis. Macdonald is good, he does most things right but he is never perfect. And that might as well be this book's epitaph. Not perfect but good enough to be a priority for noir fans. Rating - 4/5.

Quotes: a connoisseur of rumors and he lived on these morsels and scraps of other people’s lives Both the quotes describe the same sad man but they could have described two separate people, almost everyone here is broken in one way or the other.

She had the faintly anachronistic airs of a woman who had been good-looking but had found no place to use her looks except the mirror. Even when Archer is being cute, he is hard.

“Do you doubt everything and everyone?" “Practically everything,” I said. “Almost everyone."