But the higher he rose in the ranks, the less he approved of how things worked. “The police mind likes simple, obvious patterns,” is how Archer put it later[24] (how different this would be from the mind of the private investigator!). A likely suspect became, for cops, the only suspect. Archer saw men, in Long Beach and in L.A., railroaded on skimpy or circumstantial evidence – sometimes all the way into the gas chamber.
And his superiors didn’t like complaints. Archer’s job seemed to have as much to do with preserving the status quo – in the p.d., as well as in society – as it did with crime-fighting. (Not that civilians were much grateful for the job he did. Archer felt the snobbery of those who didn’t want cops at their parties.) To get ahead on the force, you had to be a bit of a brown-nose; and Archer was still enough of a rebel that he couldn’t stand “podex osculation,” as he’d euphemistically put it.[25]
But that wasn’t the worst part. He ran into dirty politics – on the street and in the office. Often the facts as he knew them didn’t match the official version. And when he reached a certain level in the cop hierarchy, he found he was expected to take a monthly bribe from a certain local honcho.
It was presented as a sort of income supplement: “Look, I know you fellows don’t make enough money…” That was true, and another cause for legitimate complaint – but no excuse for corruption. Archer, the reformed junior-grade hood, was shocked and offended. Soon he was more than that. When he wouldn’t take Sam Schneider’s monthly cut, Schneider had Lew forced out of his job.[26]
In later years, Archer sometimes told people that he’d quit the police out of principle; but the fact was, as he admitted at least once, “I was fired.”[27]
Archer left the Long Beach police after five years, with the rank of detective-sergeant – interestingly, the same rank held by the cop who’d turned Lew’s teenaged life around.
When one door closes, another opens, as some used to say. On this occasion, Lew Archer saw the doors being moved by the hand of his old silent-movie friend Inspector Fate. “When the cops went sour,” Lew later recalled, “the memory of Inspector Fate…helped to pull me out of the Long Beach force.”[28]
Lew could still aspire to the ideals instilled in him by the adventures of that British sleuth in the Long Beach movie house of his youth. Even if he was no longer a policeman, Archer could still be an investigator: a private investigator.
—
“Most private detectives come out of police work,”[29] Archer knew. Private detectives were in the public eye in the late 1930s: as characters in pulp-magazine stories and in motion pictures; and in real life, as protectors of rich or famous people, as lawyers’ investigators, and as auxiliary cops in these years of frequent labor confrontations.
It was through such a dispute on the San Pedro docks in 1937 or ’38, it seems, that Lew Archer – apprenticed, perhaps, to a private investigator named Al Sablacan – first broke into the p.i. game. Longshoremen were consolidating their turf then, and shippers were guarding private property; both sides tussled to work out a system of binding arbitration. It’s not clear what role Archer played in these events, but violence was involved. Later in life, he’d speak of having a bent rib, “where a goon had stamped me back in 1938 on a San Pedro dock.”[30] And at this time, apparently, he took an advanced course in the education begun at the hands of his uncle Jake: “A Finnish sailor on the San Pedro docks…taught me how Baltic knife-fighters blind their opponents,”[31] he said – by slashing them across the forehead so that blood ran into their eyes.
When it was all over, Archer received a Special-Deputy badge from the L.A. sheriff, “for not particularly good conduct.”[32] (Private-eye Archer carried this badge for years, and flashed it whenever he wanted to pretend official cover.) At twenty-four, he was already acquiring a reputation.
—
But the sort of job he was most often given to do, by Sablacan and others, was divorce work – a far cry from the kind of adventurous cases he’d imagined. What would Inspector Fate think of him now? Rather than catching crooks and righting wrongs, Archer for the most part was “peeping on fleabag hotel rooms, untying marital knots, blackmailing blackmailers out of business” – and in general, peering “through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.”[33]
At least he could take a sort of pride in completing assignments, and in supporting himself. In his free time (of which he may have had an abundance), he made efforts to fill the large gaps in his formal education. He became an even more ardent reader. Among the many writers whose works he’d show knowledge of, through the years, were Dostoevsky, Capote, James Fenimore Cooper, André Gide, Nelson Algren, Plato, and Dante. (“You’ve read Dante, have you?” a man in the 1960s asked him, in some surprise. “I’ve read at him,” Archer replied.)
Maybe he signed up for extension classes at a nearby college, such as UCLA. Archer acquired some familiarity with the terms and figures of modern psychology (Karen Horney, Rorschach tests, gestalts). He liked paintings and over time showed a considerable knowledge of the visual arts, from the Herculaneum murals to Henry Moore to Henri Matisse. (Lew was especially taken by a Paul Klee work showing a figure in a geometric maze; it seemed symbolic of so many suspects and victims a detective pursued, not to mention the detective himself: “The man was in the maze; the maze was in the man.”[34]) He enjoyed music, in person and on records, especially traditional jazz. Poetry didn’t interest him much – though his own descriptions of people and things were often incisively poetic.
His eventual vocabulary was impressive and contained such autodidactic trophies as corybantic, gauleiter, comitatus, coracle, tetany, and matins. Off and on, he played chess (the autodidact’s game of choice). Sometimes he went to La Jolla or to San Onofre with old buddies, for the surf or to snorkel. Sometimes he bet on the horses at Santa Anita. He still fished. He liked to golf. Most of all, he loved to swim in the Pacific Ocean he’d first waded in with his father in Long Beach, so many years ago.
Here’s how he’d describe the pleasures of such an ocean swim, a few years later:
Such was Lew Archer’s life, with its frustrations and small pleasures, in December of 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II. Like millions of other U.S. males, Archer went into the service – in his case, the Army.
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