Once Again -The Case of Lew Archer vs. The Private Eye Hall Of Fame Nominating Committee- And Let’s Put It To Rest After This-Please

By Sam Lowell

Some guys want to bleed all over you. Some guys think just because you have by-line on-line that you are running a lonely- hearts club. Some guys want to bend your ear for no particular reason except they have some whacko special pleading they need you to hear about before they go under what the Monk, Allan Ginsberg, in a very famous called the knife. But what the hell do you do when one guy, a guy named Tom, Tim, Ted Nolan he used all three in his endless e-mails felt he had to send my way tries for the trifecta, tries to rush your better nature all three wrapped up in one tight package. Of course some wiseass is going to say I have brought it upon myself for bringing up the subject after such a long time when I casually mentioned earlier this year (2019) that I was still puzzled why the California private detective Lew Archer who ruled the night in the late 1940s and 1950s never made the P.I. Hall of Fame. Had failed twice to get in.

In that piece I not only mentioned that I was surprised Lew never made the Hall after his first blazing successes in the Galton kidnap case and the Hartman murder spree but since that fate bothered me I dug deeply into the now musty files to try to figure out why. And came up with a perfectly plausible reason-Lew was firing blanks, couldn’t cut the mustard, you know, couldn’t make it under the sheets with women (and it was always women, young, old, good-looking or a drag in those days at least in public since no private detective would openly confess to same-sex preferences which nobody cares about much these days but would have been the kiss of death then). There was no evidence then anyway that Lew was gay, or asexual which is what I originally was looking at so that was what I was able to find out from his ex-wife’s children from a later marriage and a few of the women who he ignored for lack of better word while on a case.

Today nobody cares whether a private eye is gay, lesbian, transgender, black, Latino, a woman. Look at who has gotten into the Hall over the past twenty years or so but back in Lew’s heyday that was a big issue which I will get into in a minute. While I am thinking about it though what got me started many years ago on the Lew Archer case was that I was fortunate enough to do the introduction when San Francisco P.I. Shelly Devine became the first woman to make the Hall. Shelly for her own reasons had picked Lew Archer up from the back alley wino gutter in North Beach and given him a job when he sobered up doing “repo” work, a little key-hole peeping when that was a lucrative part of the business before “no fault” divorce became the norm and you could get a divorce on the filmiest grounds. When he fell down again, went back on the bottle, when he would come int the office on Post Street smelling of wine and urine she made him the “go-fer” until the D.Ts got too bad to have him around. Then he fell off the earth and nobody heard anything about him until somebody read that he had been found in a tidal pool down in Big Sur country. Too bad and forgotten.

Not forgotten though by me (and apparently by Tim Nolan who I will get to in a moment) was the idea that maybe we could get Lew in the Hall by some kind of Lifetime Achievement route. I proposed that in these pages before I thought better of the matter and remembered that in the acting profession giving somebody say like Paul Newman such an award was like the kiss of death, a stab in the heart that he was not able to suck it up enough for one miserable performance in a long career to get a real Oscar (no parentheses needed). I dropped the idea particularly after I found out the disturbing information about Lew’s apparent sex drive problems. Look I did not make the rules but guys like Sam Spade, the lovely Phil Marlowe, the divine Phil Larkin and Jim Lawson set the standard for what a P.I., a male P.I. whether that was right or wrong then should do beyond tilting his head at windmills, taking a bunch of punches or slugs for the client’s cause and actually solving the crime at hand unlike the public coppers with their ever-expanding cold files.

I cannot help it if writers, press agents really, flak-catchers if necessary like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Larry Dover went overboard with the exploits, the sexual exploits of that generation of private eyes which set a pretty high bar for what a prime private detective should be. Christ Sam Spade had dames falling out of every pocket, hanging off of every arm even before he homed in on some femme. Maybe it was an alpha male thing at the time but Sam was the very first unanimous choice for the Hall (Philo Vance got all but three votes previously) based on one thing-when it was a choice between him and his lover, Mary Astor, he sent her over without looking back. Marlowe, Jesus, Marlowe hardly was able to find time to solve the crimes (he did though) what with having to fight off two wild sisters, a whacko housewife, a couple of female cabbies, a Bryn Mawr graduate and a few unrecorded liaisons. Phil Larkin probably didn’t solve every crime what with his bedroom time in overdrive and Larry Dover was nothing but a sex fiend working as a private eye who almost couldn’t work without some femme in the automobile with him doing whatever.

When Lew’s poor press agent, fresh out of college I think, maybe a little older Kenny Millar, I think that was the poor bastard’s name, tried to work a little ink for the boss after the Galton and Hartman cases where everybody was calling him up to interview Lew he got the proverbial cold shoulder, the busy signal and no invitations to Hollywood cocktail parties, invites which signaled that your P.I. had arrived. Personally I thought it was the Dreen case, a case I will discuss a little sometime, that did Lew in. The dame in question, missing, had been a huge Hollywood up and coming starlet sex symbol when that meant something. Lew found her up in Spokane shacked up with some surfer she had met in La Jolla and who was bleeding her dry with some compromising photographs he had of her in deep nude before she made the silver screen. Lew wasted the perfect wave surfer boy but when this Breen doll tried to show her appreciation that way things counted then he passed. A fatal mistake once she blabbed to Louellla Parsons and Hedda Hopper about his “problem.”        

That was then though and now in 2019 enter one Ted Nolan who somehow had seen my various pieces mourning the fate of a once promising gumshoe. This Nolan claimed to have met me a bunch of years ago when I was introducing Shelly Devine for her entry into the Hall. I vaguely remember a guy going on and on about the injustice done to Lew Archer and shouldn’t somebody do something about it. (Subsequently I did try that silly Lifetime Achievement gag as I just mentioned.) When I did the recent Lew Archer series I was only trying to see what happened to make him fall down after so much early promise and came up with the impotency material.

As it turns out this wannabe Archer press agent Tom Nolan claims to be a grandson of Lew’s ex-wife whom he had divorced shortly after a messy couple of years of marriage. There was no relationship with Lew but Ted Nolan mentioned that his grandmother would always, bitterly, mention how when they were married (during the Galton and Hartman cases which made his initial fame) Lew would be dogged in digging right into the cases leaving her alone. But she would also grudgingly admit that Lew was probably the best private eye in California before his fall and she would regale Tim with the good and bad cases that she was aware of as long as she and Lew kept in touch before his wino fall. So Tim Nolan decided that he would go on a crusade to get Lew some recognition and told me in his e-mail that he literally jumped at the opportunity once he saw that I was taking an interest in the case for getting Lew in the Hall.

Here is what I didn’t know and Ted clued me in to try to recruit me to the cause. Every P.I., dead or alive as we found out, has three chances to make the Hall. Lew only got two before he went to oblivion and even I didn’t think he could get in. Tim idea was that we would build up a new biography of Lew and load it up with sad sack stories about his childhood, his military service, his wrecked marriage and so on. What he was proposing was that we give the Hall nomination committee a “fake news” bio and see what flew. I balked at that, although in a minute I will present what Tim had to say in an attachment he sent me that he had already worked up. In the alternative Tim proposed that we try to get Lew the coveted Harry Dean Stanton award based on his work as a “repo” man. I almost flipped out and stopped communications with him when I heard that proposal. Jesus, a guy who can lay claim to the Galton, Hartman and a few other lesser but solved cases before he fell down then being dragged from a wino piss dumpster by Shelly to do some repo work for her out of the goodness of her heart being remembered as some low-life repo man was beyond belief. I would rather be remembered as the wino piss dumpster guy and I am sure Lew would too.     

Once I settled down over that one and Tim withdrew his suggestion I started thinking that maybe he was right to see if Lew could sneak in with a third chance. Right now, Tim and I are working the mechanics of getting Lew that third chance vote for the Hall. What Tim had done first before he wrote his screed was see why Lew was rejected the first two times so as not to go to ground on stuff that had already sunk his case. One thing about an organization like the National Academy of Private Investigation which controls the P.I Hall of Fame and whose nominating committee culls the various candidates for yearly inclusion on the ballot sent out to members and announced at the National Convention is that like a good individual detective they take and keep notes of their proceedings. Normally the first round of nominations is culled from the lists of all practicing P.I.s and some nominations by a so-called Veterans Committee of those who have passed on in times before the Hall was established. That is pro forma stuff and the vote went against Lew for the practical reason that looking at his record produced only a few cases that were solved and nothing in his personal file that said he was an outstanding private eye for his time period. (That time period would do Lew in since he had “forgotten” to bed a few loose women while he was solving the cases, especially in the Galton case where the grandmother’s care-taker practically begged him to bed her according to the report.)

The second time out is what really sunk Lew since he did not get an automatic review like on the first round. Although this nominating process was a few years later it was still the era of the tough guy, hard-boiled male detective who had a femme in every hand and a few slugs and bruises for his efforts to solve the crime in front of him. Whoever did the pleading and I don’t remember who it was because by then I was looking to get Phil Larkin in (he made easily based on a dozen big name cases and a serious reputation for nailing down every woman, well, not nailed down) tried a little end around. Tried to parlay those few good years together with the repo work for Shelly Devine, cobbled with that key-hole peeper stuff and then what was called “office support work,” getting coffee and crullers for the real detectives and running errands for Shelly like picking up her laundry and walking her dogs in Golden Gate Park. The problem was that the nominating committee sent out a very live investigator and found out the real stuff- the real dirt that Lew hadn’t worked for years in the industry until Shelly found him one night accidentally sleeping in a back alley near Post Street next to a dumpster drunk as skunk on wine and piss all over his pants. Didn’t even get a hearing from the nominating committee.         

That is the background, the tidal wave we are fighting against to get Lew a third and final chance at glory and immortality. Tim’s idea, reflecting a decent instinct about what might fly these days in the private detection world, was to play on the committee’s “looking at the whole picture,” looking at every aspect of his life and not just the rackful of solved cases. (A committee reflecting the diversity of the profession now and not steeped in the hard-boil tough guy high bar set by Phil Larkin, Larry Larson, maybe Sam Spade on his good days, and extolled by guys like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler back in the days when such heavy-lifting work was done by squirrelly guys with windmill eyes, big rough-hewn shoulders and Johnny Walker Red in their bottom desk drawers for twenty-five dollars a day and expenses. With that in mind perhaps the reader would be interested in Tim’s little fluff in the wind bio of Lew. The thing can’t fly, I won’t put my name to such a bullshit tale but some parts maybe could be used. Otherwise Lew’s third bid will be sunk.

I will say that Tim has pulled out all the stops on heartstring stuff so he did his homework, no question but the damn thing reads like some defense attorney looking to get his client a reduced sentence on a murder one conviction. You judge though:

Lew was born in 1915 into a dysfunctional family where his immigrant father, surname changed, anglicized from Archimedes to Archer when he got off the boat in New York Harbor after being thrown out of Greece in 1910, some Podunk hole fifty miles outside of Athens for stealing goats (a major offense in a goat-dependent country). It was exile or be hanged so the start of Lew’s long journey already showed ominous. The old man, Louis to give him a name, after failing as a fruit vendor on Canal Street in New York City decided to head west, head to California where he would eventually get work at the Del Rio Ranch in the Valley picking fruit for cheap wages and a basket of whatever he was picking. That is where he met Delores, a half-starved Okie girl whose family had headed to the Garden of Eden out of dust and wind-blown Oklahoma long before the horrible 1930s migration. Louis begat seven children, a slew of boys and girls of which Lew was the second oldest. This child-bearing would bring Delores almost to the brink of death, the brink of sanity and in effect leave Louis as the manager in charge of the brood of kids. Louis, old school Louis, knew only one way to discipline his charges, the belt. Lew, as an adult would cringe every time he heard of some bastard waylaying his kids with some strap since he was the number one victim of his father’s easily stirred wrath since “trouble was his middle name.” He took so many welts that it would eventually affect his urinary tract (and that cheap Tokay wine would do the rest). Lew would be about thirteen when he forced, physically towering over the man, forced his drunken sot of a father to stop belting him.

By then the personal and social damage was probably done, or far advanced. Lew a piss-poor student skipped school more than attended, hung around the usual pool halls instead of school although there is some evidence that Lew liked to read, read on the side, mostly comic books but some serious stuff too like Balzac and Hugo out of the French stables. With this lead-in no wonder Lew got caught up in the inevitable juvenile crime scene appearing before more youth board judges that it would seem possible until one day he got caught attempting an armed robbery of a gas station in broad daylight and an off-duty copper had been passing by. The copper, a detective, after taking his cut from Lew decided not to turn him over, told him to get another racket since he, the detective would be watching for him. 

That proved to be the medicine Lew needed to stop armed robberies and he went back to clipping stuff from department stores, extorting the neighborhood kids, and jack-rolling in the dead of night old ladies and drunken men. Tough way to go in the world with no guidance and a bastard of a father, no doubt. Sometime around sixteen he started drinking rotgut wine, chain-smoking cigarettes bummed from winos in Delano where he moved his act to after taking the breeze from that grafting copper and developing a nice little jones sucking up codeine cough syrup when he was short of cash for his wines and Johnny Walker Red whisky.   

None of this stopped until World War II came along and gave Lew something to do since he had long ago dropped out of high school and free-lance junior league gangsters and book-readers were a dime a dozen just then. After batteries of aptitude tests the Army found a niche for Lew decoding enemy messages and checking out bomb damage assessment information. That is also the time period, after finding a soaked matchbook on the ground when he was on KP, when his interest in becoming a copper perked up. The matchbox gave information about becoming a private eye in ten easy lessons and so Lew sent away for the kit (for more dough than it was worth, another scam, downbeat thing in his struggle for life). Lew would study being a P.I at night but would wind up learning more about what to do with sets of information during his day job than anything else.

After the Army, footloose and fancy free, Lew tried and got on the Bay City coppers. This way an eye-opening experience since he had that old grafting public copper as his only model. Lew wanted to do a good job but the pecking order commands said keep your head down and so Lew spent more time walking the midnight beat out in the edges of Bay City than anything else until he saw a crooked cop was more valuable than a cop who only took his share of coffee and crullers on the QT. After a furious internal battle, Lew left the force, a decision he always regretted later when he figured that twenty and out with a nice pension was better than living at some Sally hostel and hustling cigarette butts from perfect strangers.

After Lew failed yet again at a profession he met Susan, who in the end would become his wife and who in the end would nail him to a cross of gold. Lew had a strange young adulthood; he was pretty good-looking for a petty thief but none of the girls would give him a tumble. Reason: and this may have been harder to take than the old man’s beltings they though he was low-rent from the wrong side of the tracks, a street bum with no future so he never had any dates in high school, none, except some favor for a younger girl next door who he felt sorry for and took to the sophomore mixer. She dumped him when she got the word that he was low-rent from the older girls. Nice, right. So Lew, except maybe sleeping with a few whores or “loose” girls during his Army time knew nothing about women, didn’t know what made them tick, or really want to know. As we know that would prove fatal but who knew then that Lew would always thereafter be shy and stupid really around women, especially foxy women.

Susan and Lew were madly in love, for a minute, anyway. See they met and married when Lew was just getting his feet wet as a private P.I. and was getting some cases which kept him out until all hours. When the Galton, Hartman, Dreen and Bones cases came suddenly and successfully Susan could not handle being alone and not sure whether Lew would come back in one piece that night. Or had been out with another woman while “on the case.” They soon divorced after Lew started drinking more heavily and taking bennies to keep awake. He also would have wicked mood swings when he had to deal with possessive or snotty women and dip into the old cocaine bags. Not good. Later after reading himself to sleep he would rue the day that he never had a son, somebody to care for and protect. By then he was exposed for the drunk and anti-social to women cad that would be the death knell of his career. Done.  

Tim has caught something here, some good social worker, defense lawyer stuff but I found I didn’t have wet eyes reading the stuff since I knew it was all bullshit. I suspect the nominating committee would too. Maybe that being browbeaten by girls for not being cool or having the right clothes and moves would be an angle though. Help explain why he had that deep-freeze for women.