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The Ivory Grin (Lew Archer Series Book 4) by [Ross Macdonald]

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Ross MacDonald

The Ivory Grin (Lew Archer Series Book 4) Kindle Edition

by Ross Macdonald (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

158 ratings

Book 4 of 18: Lew Archer Series

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Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.
A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s gone mysteriously missing.

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258 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Publication date

December 29, 2010
File size

344 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Macdonald's spare, controlled narration, built for action and speed, conveys the world through which the action moves and gives it meaning, [bringing] scene and character, however swiftly, before the eye without a blur.”—Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review"Archer-Macdonald are working together at their peak, piecing together a most modern American tragedy, making literature out of the thriller form, gazing more clearly the ever into the future as it rolls through the smog.” —Newsweek“Ross Macdonald must be ranked high amongst American thriller-writers.”—Times Literary Supplement

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed numbers runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who's gone mysteriously missing. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Ross Macdonald's real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain's Silver Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1:I found her waiting at the door of my office. She was a stocky woman of less than medium height, wearing a blue slack suit over a blue turtleneck sweater, and a blue mink stole that failed to soften her outlines. Her face was squarish and deeply tanned, its boyish quality confirmed by dark hair cut short at the nape. She wasn't the type you'd expect to be up and about at eight thirty in the morning, unless she'd been up all night.As I unlocked the door she stood back and looked up at me with the air of an early bird surveying an outsize worm. I said: "Good morning.""Mr. Archer?"Without waiting for an answer, she offered me a stubby brown hand. Her grip, armed with rings, was as hard as a man's. Releasing her hand, she placed it behind my elbow, ushered me into my own office, and closed the door behind her."I'm very glad to see you, Mr. Archer."She had begun to irritate me already. "Why?""Why what?""Why are you glad to see me?""Because. Let's sit down and be comfortable so we can talk." Without charm, her petite willfulness was disquieting."About anything in particular?"She seated herself in an armchair by the door and looked around the waiting-room. It was neither large nor expensively furnished, and she seemed to be registering those circumstances. Her only comment was to click her ringed fists together in front of her. There were three rings on each hand. They had good-sized diamonds in them, which looked real."I have a job for you," she said to the sagging green imitation-leather davenport against the opposite wall. Her manner had changed from girlish vivacity to boyish earnestness. "It's not what you'd consider a big job, but I'm willing to pay well. Fifty a day?""And expenses. Who sent you to me?""But nobody. Do sit down. I've known your name for ages, simply ages.""You have the advantage of me."Her gaze returned to me, tireder and older after its little slumming excursion around my antechamber. There were olive drab thumbprints under her eyes. Maybe she had been up all night, after all. In any case she looked fifty, in spite of the girlishness and the boyishness. Americans never grew old: they died; and her eyes had guilty knowledge of it."Call me Una," she said."Do you live in Los Angeles?""Not exactly. Where I live doesn't matter. I'll tell you what does, if you want me to be blunt.""I couldn't bear it if you weren't."Her hard dry glance went over me almost tangibly and rested on my mouth. "You look all right. But you sound kind of Hollywood to me."I was in no mood to swap compliments. The ragged edge on her voice, and her alternation of fair and bad manners bothered me. It was like talking to several persons at once, none of them quite complete."Protective coloration." I caught her glance and held it. "I meet a lot of different types."She didn't flush. All that happened was that her face looked a little congested for a moment. It passed, and the incomplete boy in her came to the point:"I mean, do you make a habit of cutting your clients' throats? I've had some pretty discouraging experiences.""With detectives?""With people. Detectives are people.""You're full of compliments this morning, Mrs. --" "I said just call me Una. I'm not proud. Can I trust you to do what I want you to do and stop? Take your money and go about your business?""Money?""Here." She produced a crumpled bill from a blue leather pouch and tossed it to me as if it were an old piece of Kleenex and I were a wastebasket. I caught it. It was a hundred-dollar bill, but I didn't put it away."A retainer always helps to establish a bond of loyalty," I said. "I'll still cut your throat, of course, but I'll give you sodium pentothal first."She addressed the ceiling, darkly: "Why does everybody in these parts work so hard for laughs? You haven't answered my question.""I'll do what you want me to do so long as it's not illegal and makes some kind of sense."I'm not suggesting anything illegal," she said sharply. "And I promise you it makes sense.""All the better." I tucked the bill into the bill compartment of my wallet, where it looked rather lonely, and opened the door to the inner office.There were three chairs in it, and no room for a fourth. After I had opened the Venetian blinds, I took the swivel chair behind the desk. The armchair I pointed out for her faced me across the desk. Instead, she sat down in a straight chair against the partition, away from the window and the light.Crossing her trousered legs, she pushed a cigarette into a short gold holder and lit it with a squat gold lighter."About this job I mentioned. I want you to locate a certain person, a colored girl who used to work for me. She left my house two weeks ago, on the first of September to be exact. It was good riddance of bad rubbish as far as I was concerned, only she took along a few little knickknacks of mine. A pair of ruby earrings, a gold necklace.""Insured?""No. Actually they're not very valuable. Their value is sentimental--you know? They mean a lot to me, sentimentally." She tried to look sentimental and failed."It sounds like a matter for the police.""I don't think so." Her face closed up solid like brown wood. "You make your living tracing people, don't you? Are you trying to talk yourself out of a living?"I took the hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped it on the desk in front of me. "Apparently.""Don't be so touchy." She forced her grim little mouth into a smile. "The truth is, Mr. Archer, I'm a fool about people. Anybody that ever worked for me, even if they took advantage of me--well, I feel responsible for them. I had a very genuine affection for Lucy, and I guess I still have. I don't wish to make any trouble for her, nothing like that. I wouldn't dream of sicking the police on Lucy. All I really want is a chance to talk to her, and get my things back. And I was so hoping that you would be able to help me?"She lowered her short bristling lashes over her hard black eyes. Maybe she could hear the music of distant violins. All I could hear was the pushing and hooting of traffic on the Boulevard one story down."I think you said she was a Negro.""I have no race prejudice--""I don't mean that. Black girls are unfindable in this city. I've tried.""Lucy isn't in Los Angeles. I know where she is.""Why don't you simply go and talk to her?""I intend to. First I'd like to get some idea of her movements. I want to know who she sees, before I talk to her, and after.""That's a pretty elaborate way to go about recovering some jewelry. What's the purpose?""It's none of your business." She tried to say it gaily and girlishly, but the hostility showed through."I believe you're right." I pushed the bill across the desk towards her, and stood up. "In fact, it sounds like a wildgoose chase. Why don't you try the classified ads in the Times? There are plenty of investigators who live on a steady diet of wild goose.""By God, I think the man's honest." She spoke to one side as if her alter ego was standing there. "All right, Mr. Archer, you have me, I guess."The image didn't excite me, and I registered a suitable apathy."I mean I'm in a hurry. I haven't got time to shop around. I'll even admit that I'm in a spot of trouble.""Which has nothing to do with petty theft or costume jewelry. You could have thought of a better story. But please don't try.""I'm not. This is straight. When Lucy was working in my house she naturally got to know my family affairs. Well, there was bad feeling when she left, not on my side, on hers. There are one or two things that could embarrass me if she decided to spread them. So I want to know who she's seeing. From that I can draw my own conclusions.""If I knew a little more about these embarrassing facts--""I'm not going to tell you, that's definite. My whole idea in coming to you is to keep them from getting out. Now what could be franker than that?"I still didn't like her story, but the second version was an improvement over the first. I sat down again. "What sort of work did she do for you?"She hesitated briefly. "General housework. She's a maid. Her full name is Lucy Champion.""And where did she work for you?""In my house, naturally. There's no reason for you to know where it is."I swallowed my irritation. "Where is she now, or is that another secret?""I know I seem unreasonable and suspicious," she said. "Believe me, I've been burned. I take it you'll do this job for me?""I might as well.""She's in Bella City, up the Valley. You'll have to hurry to make it before noon. It's a good two hours from here.""I know where it is.""Good. A friend of mine saw her there yesterday, in a restaurant on Main Street near the corner of Hidalgo. My friend talked to the waiter and found out that Lucy eats her lunch there every day between twelve and one. It's a cornbination cafe and liquor store called Tom's. You can't miss it.""A picture of Lucy would help.""I'm sorry." She spread her hands in an automatic gesture that placed her ancestry on the north shore of the Mediterranean. "The best I can do is a description. She's a handsome girl, and so light she could pass for South American or California Spanish. She has nice big brown eyes, and not too much of a mouth, like some of them. A nice little figure, too, if she wasn't so skinny.""How old?""Not old. Younger than me--than I." I noticed the self-correction, as well as the self-flattery in the comparison. "In her early twenties, I'd say.""Hair?""Black, in a straight bob. She keeps it straight with oil.""Height?""A couple of inches taller than I. I'm five foot two.""Distinguishing characteristics?""Her legs are her best feature, as she well knows." Una couldn't pay another woman an unmixed compliment. "Her nose is sort of turned up--cute, if her nostrils didn't sort of stare at you.""What was she wearing when your friend saw her?""A black-and-white checkered sharkskin suit. That's how I know it was her. I gave her the suit a couple of months ago. She altered it for herself.""So you won't want the suit back."That seemed to strike a nerve. She removed the butt that had gone out in her holder and crushed it violently in the ashtray beside her chair. "I've taken quite a bit from you, mister.""We're about even now," I said. "I've been keeping score. I just wouldn't want you to think that you were buying very much for a hundred bucks. I have to watch that around here. You're suspicious. I'm touchy.""You talk as if you were bitten by a bear. Do you have an unhappy home life, by any chance?""I was just going to ask you about yours.""Don't start worrying about my home life. That's one thing--I don't want you talking to Lucy." She had a quick change of mood, or affected one. "Oh hell, it's my life and I live it. We're wasting time. Are you willing to do what I say, no more no less?""No more anyway. She mightn't turn up at the restaurant today. If she does, I tail her, keep a record of where she goes, who she sees. And report to you?""Yes. This afternoon if possible. I'll be registered at the Mission Hotel in Bella City. Ask for Mrs. Larkin." She glanced at the square gold watch on her right wrist. "You better get going. If she leaves town let me know immediately, and stay with her."She moved deliberately and quickly to the outer door. Her walk was the shortest distance between things she wanted. The back of her neck was heavy under the cropped hair, swollen with muscle as if she had often used it for buffing and rooting. Turning at the door to lift a flashing hand in good-bye, she hitched the mink stole higher. I wondered if she used it to conceal that telltale grossness.I went back to my desk and dialed the switchboard of my answering service. Standing by the window, I could see the sidewalk below through the slats of the Venetian blind. It swarmed with a bright young crowd of guys and girls buzzing and fluttering in pursuit of happiness and the dollar.Una emerged among them, dark and foreshortened by the height from which I was watching her. She turned uphill, her head thrust forward on her heavy neck, like an irresistible force searching for an irmnovable object. The switchboard answered in a youthful female gurgle on the fifth ring. I told it I was going out of town for the weekend.CHAPTER 2:From the top of the grade I could see the mountains on the other side of the valley, leaning like granite slabs against the blue tile sky. Below me the road meandered among brown September hills spattered with the ink-blot shadows of oaks. Between these hills and the further mountains the valley floor was covered with orchards like vivid green chenille, brown corduroy ploughed fields, the thrifty patchwork of truck gardens. Bella City stood among them, a sprawling dusty town miniatured and tidied by clear space. I drove down into it.The packing houses of the growers' associations stood like airship hangars on the edge of the green fields. Parched nurseries and suburban ranchos offered tomato plants and eggs and lima beans for sale. There was a roadside traffic of filling stations, drive-ins, motels slumping dejectedly under optimistic names. In the road the big trucks went by in both directions, trailing oil smoke and a long loud raspberry for Bella City.The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland. I remembered that Hidalgo Street ran parallel to the highway and two blocks below it.It was fairly hot and very dry. The dryness ached in my sinuses. Main Street was loud and shiny with noon traffic moving bumper to bumper. I turned left on East Hidalgo Street and found a parking space in the first block. Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled by hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004FEG2JU
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reprint edition (December 29, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 29, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 344 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #152,145 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #774 in Hard-Boiled Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- #838 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- #1,578 in Private Investigator Mysteries (Books)

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Early MacDonald Still Finding His Voice

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 26, 2021

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Solid 1952 outing, MacDonald’s fourth featuring his series character, private detective Lew Archer. It’s really in this book that MacDonald began to deliberately move Archer away from being a flint-tough, cynical copy of Raymond Chandler’s flint-tough cynical detective, Phillip Marlowe.

And the series is definitely the better for it. We get more empathy from Archer, and both less judgement, and less of his personal backstory: no mention of his ex-wife, beyond the fact of his divorce, and a single mention of his prior career in law enforcement in Long Beach. There’s no need to mention that Archer was fired from the police force for refusing to take kickbacks. We know by his actions that he’s not on the grift-in part by contrasting what Archer does with the moves made by a competitor who is grubby and bent to the core.

There were some plot holes (if you invoke “the Mob” they had better make an appearance, especially if one of your characters is making money off them for no visible return. Racketeers in the ‘50s were known neither for their benevolence nor for their stupidity.), but as a mass character study THE IVORY GRIN is a great read, and as usually seems to be the case with MacDonald’s work, the third act is a freight train running downhill toward a violent conclusion growing inexorably clearer in the distance.

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C. M Mills

The Ivory Grin is a fast paced hardboiled Lew Archer novel which will keep you page turning!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 10, 2020

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Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) is viewed as one of America's greatest hardboiled detective authors of fiction. He ranks in the pantheon of crime writing greats with such luminaries as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Reading Macdonald is a wonderful trip to the land of bad boys and girls!
The Ivory Grin was published in 1952. It is short and I finished it in one day. The story is intricate but understandable. Macdonald's plots are better constructed than those of Hammett and Chandler while his colorful use of metaphor is excellent. A jewelry clad wealthy woman named Una visits the office of Lew Archer the L.A. private detective. Una wants Archer to find her maid who has stolen from her and fled. Archer will find the missing African-American woman in a sleazy motel with her throat cut from ear to ear. Archer meets the leading suspects in the case who live in a small California burg called Bella City. The Ivory Grin of the title refers to the face of a skeleton which is owned by a medical doctor involved in the case. If you like a good mystery, colorful characters and vivid prose this little novel should meet your sleuthing needs. Recommended.

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Hank

Nothing like Lew Archer books will ever be written again.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 7, 2021

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I read Ross Macdonald books very slowly. I don't want them to end quickly but they do because I cannot put them down.
The story telling is effortless and the details that MacDonald describes paint the scenes for you perfectly. He describes the atmosphere and surroundings as if he is standing there and is reporting it live to you.
Lew Archer stories are about right and wrongs. About people doing the bad things and the people who are doing the right things. These are simple directive stories with simple formula of one of more persons doing something bad or wrong and others trying to right it or find the truth with Lew Archer in the middle of it.
But don't get me wrong, these aren't simple books and they are filled with ahead of its time judgements. Lew Archer is the sound of the reason in these books. So get the whole series and read them; read them all and savor them because nothing like these books will come around in our lifetimes again.
Nothing like Lew Archer books will ever be written again. Ever.

3 people found this helpful

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Christopher (o.d.c.)

This is the payoff, Wionowski!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2015

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This is easily one of the best Lew Archer novels, although I give the edge to The Way Some People Die and The Galton Case: A Lew Archer Novel . Like those novels, this one has a surprising number of elements, very evocative of postwar California. The Ivory Grin goes beyond noir into the macabre:

... Two pale hands sprang out from his dark silhouette and gripped the bars framing his face. He swayed from side to side, and I saw the white blaze on one side of his tangled head. His shoulders writhed. He seemed to be trying to wrench the bars out of their concrete sockets. Each time he tried and failed, he said one word in a low growling guttural. “Hell,” he said. “Hell. Hell.” The word fell heavily from his mouth forty or fifty times while his body tugged and heaved, flinging itself violently from side to side. He left the window then, as suddenly as he had appeared in it. I watched his slow shadow retreat across the ceiling and dissolve out of human shape.

Re-reading it, wondering why it didn't make the cut in the Library of America (it is far better than THE DOOMSTERS), I did notice some very 'writerly' similes and descriptions. A more experienced writer can do more with less. The final chapters, however, are so satisfying and well-written- a virtual descent into the Hell foreshadowed in the passage quoted above- that I was willing to forgive Macdonald all minor flaws. That extremely corny, intentionally corny line, "This is the payoff, Wionowski," is so startling in context, and yet so well prepared by the entire book (we are dealing with the Purple Gang, for crying out loud) that I lost all doubt. This is a great book.

9 people found this helpful

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Allen Smalling

Satisfying but not superlative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2015

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This 1952 Lew Archer detective novel by Ross Macdonald is suspenseful and unfolds in the space of two days. Even for a work this early, the settings (exurban and small-town California) and concerns (which include racism, class conflict and mental illness) are hallmarks of Macdonald. The crisp pacing is satisfying, but frequently new characters are introduced -- and old ones reappear -- in too metronomic a fashion. Sometimes the tough-guy similes -- "His uncombed hair was a fringe of withering grass around the pink desert of his scalp"; "Lights shone like wit in a dowager behind the windows of the Palladian villa" betray an overreliance on the Raymond Chandler approach that Macdonald would move away from later in the decade. THE IVORY GRIN is a good book, but there are better to come.

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