• DOI:10.1353/WAL.1974.0006
• Corpus ID: 165787318

Ross Macdonald’s Violent California: Imagery Patterns in The Underground Man

@article{Pry1974RossMV,
  title={Ross Macdonald’s Violent California: Imagery Patterns in The Underground Man},
  author={Elmer R. Pry},
  journal={Western American Literature},
  year={1974},
  volume={9},
  pages={197 - 203}
}

• Elmer R. Pry
• Published 4 October 2017
• Art
• Western American Literature

It is easy to underestimate the literary merits of any given detective story: we study Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of ratiocination in our literature courses because we agree that his arabesque psychological stories are masterpieces; we often read Sherlock Holmes in our popular culture courses, for we know that Conan Doyle created the first truly “popular” detective; and Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Ham m ett have a place in our classroom syllabi, particularly as their works contribute to the development of film study and to concepts of the hero. But we have not heretofore considered the detective story as a “serious” work of literature, one worthy of our study as an artistic process; indeed, there have been relatively few detective novels which even pretend to literary significance. But finally, after nearly a century and a half of mystery fiction, there emerges a writer of the first rank, one who is both a master of the detective story and its conventions and a “serious” literary artist of uncommon distinction. Ross Macdonald, writing what he has himself called “modern Oedipean legend(s),” 1 explores the significance of the past as it intrudes itself on the present, and he does so with as much regard for historical implications and literary artistry as the reader is likely to find in a novel by Cooper, by Dreiser, or by A. B. Guthrie. But Ross M acdonald is no Cooper, no Dreiser, no G uthrie: where these writers use historicity to examine the New W orld’s mythic past, the impact of determinism in America, and the course of change on the Western frontier, respectively, M acdonald’s historical analyses are attempts to explain the violence of his California social milieu. And that violence is described not simply in the narration of the violent incidents common to the mystery story; Macdonald pushes beyond the conventional limitations of his genre, and of utmost import­ ance in his perceptive vision is a metaphoric world — the violent events E L M E R R. P R Y