Detection Pushed Too Far

THE GOODBYE LOOK by Ross Macdonald. 243 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Critics are feared for the damage they can do to reputations, but they are probably at legist as dangerous when they turn kingmaker. After the deaths of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, several of them rushed around trying to fit on someone a dubious glass slipper marked "Greatest Living American Novelist." As a result, some would-be Cinderellas look pinched before their time.

The same sort of thing is happening to Ross Macdonald, a mystery-story writer of the hard-boiled Southern California school. The Goodbye Look is his 20th book, and it is on bestseller lists --a place where hard-cover mysteries are not often found. In the past few years, critical opinion has been massing behind Macdonald to push him past Dashiell Hammett and especially Raymond Chandler, whose style and settings have clearly influenced him. William Goldman calls Macdonald's mysteries "the finest ever written by an American." Other critics number him among the important novelists of our time, full of profound insights on the great themes of time and love and death.

The sad thing is that Macdonald seems to have been listening. The Goodbye Look is overlong for its specious plot, weighted down with pompous prose about lost opportunities, missed communications, failed lives. As in several Macdonald mysteries, the story itself concerns a troubled youth--in this case, a rich college student who may have committed three murders, but because of head wounds and shock, cannot remember whether he did or not.

Detective Lew Archer has never been more moralistic or more maudlin. He may have his difficulties extracting the evidence, but he grows increasingly adept at producing facial contortions in his interlocutors. Under his gaze, faces "darken" or "work with thought"; eyes grow "misty with the quasi-maternal feelings of a procuress" or become "abstract, like a hawk's."

Archer's professional progress is also impeded by his, and his creator's, strivings to bring home to each and every hapless character the wrong turnings in his past. One longs for Chandler's jaunty, corpse-chasing Philip Marlowe: "Murder-a-Day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up the business he finds."

Chandler was also guilty of occasional pontification, but his saving grace was a matter-of-fact, incongruous humor. In Macdonald, the laboring faces and the aura of overhanging doom are intended as symbolic of general existential despair and specific revulsion against California materialism. The trouble is that the symbols are strewn on the page like shorthand glyphs rather than metaphors. As Macdonald used to know, and now seems to forget, the order of imperatives in mystery writing is plot first, red herrings second, and philosophizing last, if at all.

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