Given his background, he thought himself well-suited for Intelligence; and the powers that be agreed. Archer served – mostly in the South Pacific, then briefly in Europe – under a colonel named Peter Colton (who later became the Los Angeles D.A.’s senior investigator). Lew himself earned the rank of lieutenant colonel[37] – which mainly gave him the right, he’d note drily, to take orders from a brigadier general.
In a way, war was a lot like civilian life, lived at a much more intense level. And if he squinted, out there in the South Pacific, Lew Archer could almost see the L.A. jungle. Later he’d tell the story of a brigadier he met in Colon (“a very shy man for a general”), whose hobby was hunting sharks in the open sea with only a mask and a knife: “He said that it gave him background for dealing with human beings.”[38]
War being an extreme condition, Lew acquired extreme memories, even some good ones – including, at an abandoned island staging-point in the far west Pacific, more stars in the brilliantly clear night sky than Archer had ever seen in his life.
Also good to remember was a liberated Paris.
On the far-minus side, there was Okinawa, where Archer was present on the ground during that island’s “green and bloody springtime.” [39] The experience seared itself into his brain. In years to come, when he had cause to fall to his knees and elbows in a combat position, the South Pacific came back to him in a sensory rush: “the odors of burning oil and alcohol…the smells of cordite and flamethrowers and scorched flesh.”[40]
—
There was another singular trauma he took home from the war: the mutual glance of men locked in mortal combat, each seeming as if he wanted both to kill and to be killed. Archer called it “that goodbye look”[41] – and he would see it, too often, in America, after the war.
But such dark thoughts and deeds were far from his mind in the first flush of his return to the States. Archer, now working solo, hung out his shingle as a freelance private eye in late 1944 or early ’45, in an office on the unincorporated Sunset Strip, almost next door to the celebrated Ciro’s night-club and within shouting distance of any number of Hollywood talent agents.
The Santa-Ana-swept L.A. air was heady with the promise of imminent postwar prosperity and pleasure; and Lew Archer had a slick mental Kodachrome picture of himself as a suave new player in that coming world: “the rising young man of mystery,”[42] squiring peroxide-blonde starlets to private beach clubs, reading about his own exploits in the Los Angeles Times and the Herald-Express and the Hollywood Citizen-News…
Then he met Sue.
—
Archer claimed not to trust blonde women, but he was drawn to them – not to the “dumb blondes” who “cluttered up the California landscape”[43] of his late teens, but to blondes with signs of intelligent life behind their pretty eyes. Ash-blondes, with full and tender figures – like the one named Sue, whom he was introduced to (perhaps by mutual friends at an L.A. party) shortly after coming home from Europe.
They must have gone dancing a lot, in the clubs along the Strip or in the hotels on Wilshire. Lew loved to dance, back then. He would have especially liked nestling into Sue for slow numbers like “Sentimental Journey,” a hit in 1944 as sung (with Les Brown’s band) by the young Doris Day, who maybe looked not unlike Sue, with her bewitching gaze of puzzled innocence. “Sentimental Journey” became “their” song. Even twenty years later, Lew couldn’t hear it without feeling a pang of sorrow.
Buoyed on a wave of physical attraction, they soon married. Helped no doubt by the GI Bill, they bought a house: “a two-bedroom stucco cottage on a fifty-foot lot off Olympic,” in West Los Angeles. It was big enough, and quiet.
Big enough for a new bride to feel lonely and neglected in. Quiet enough for loud quarrels, and then for lengthening silences.
When the wave of their first romantic passion receded, they found they really didn’t know each other too well – except it was clear to both that they were quite different people, with not all that much in common.
Sue didn’t like the company Lew kept – the surfing and fishing buddies from his past, the Hollywood types from his present – and, more important, she didn’t like his trade: grubbing around in the gilded gutters of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, consorting with lowlifes from the Strip to Santa Barbara. Lew didn’t much like those parts, either; but despite its seamy aspects, he loved his work – though he couldn’t make it clear to Sue just why or how that should be, or how he could get so caught up in a case he’d sometimes neglect to come home.
It didn’t help that he wasn’t good at talking about what was most important to him – be it the long-smothered sadness of his childhood, or the fresh details of a breaking case, or how much he was still in love with his unhappy young wife.
Sue felt the man she’d married had turned into a stranger, someone she could never reach. When she came home once and he was gone on a surveillance job and she had to leave again, she wrote him a note in which, instead of putting “where,” she Freudian-scribbled “who”: – so worried – wish I knew who you were –
When at home, Lew often did and said all the wrong things, in angry scenes that came echoing back to him during sleepless nights over the years to come:
Sue said she couldn’t stand the life he led, that he gave too much to other people and not enough to her. Lew fought back however he could. Meaner and meaner words were traded. “Eventually the quarrels reached a point,” he’d remember, “where nothing hopeful, and nothing entirely true, was being said.” After that, Sue would just sit and stare at him without blinking, for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. He’d lost his wife in those long silences, Lew later saw.
One day she walked out. A lawyer sent papers: Sue’d filed for divorce in Reno. Soon – sometime in 1948 – Lew was single again.
For the first week, he felt he was “living in a vacuum, without a future or even a past.” Then the past made itself felt, as “an onion taste of grief”[45] that rose without warning at the back of his throat when he was alone in that now-too-big house. For a long time after the divorce, he never went home until sleep was overdue. And for years – maybe forever – he couldn’t even utter Sue’s name without pain.
—
In the first sorrowful, self-pitying months of his separation, Lew spent many alcohol-soaked nights in bars, including the Gilded Galleon, a nautical-motif saloon on his old home turf of Long Beach, far from the Hollywood rat race.
But during the days, Archer threw himself wholeheartedly into the Hollywood whirl. With a mixture of melancholy, bitterness, and ambition, the young Archer did what the older Archer would continue to do for different reasons: he lost himself in his work.
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