Once Famous California Private Detective Lew Archer Passes At 104 (1915-2019)-Found Dead In An L.A. Skid Rooming House Of An Overdose

By Seth Garth

I don’t write obituaries. And if I did write obituaries it would not be about has-been private detectives who started out like a house on fire in the business and wound up head down in some common rooming house toilet after a heroin overdose at the age of 104. (Started out by the way via U.S. Army Military Intelligence during World War II and settled in nicely right after   the war cracking cases.) I have written about plenty of junkies, guys and some gals, who were the drug lords of their ages like the always stoned Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in their prime, Sadie Hawkins the painter not the poet, Doctor Gonzo, Hunter Thompson who made a profession and a good living out of his experiences, Sid Levitt, Sally Devine the chanteuse, and a few other morphine addicts like Frankie Machine but they all had their resumes up to date, were doing their thing when they were “walking with the king.” Wrote, painted, sang some of their best stuff high as kites, maybe higher. Funky flunky Lew Archer fell down, went into the nether land after his fifteen minutes of fame. So, no, no obituaries for yet another American ninja private detective failure who couldn’t even make the P.I. Hall of Fame on a pass, on some bogus lifetime achievement basis (a campaign I regret to say I was part of in my wooly youth). Jesus, what a bum, him and that last so-called P.I. partner of his, a guy named Kenny Miller, no, Millar who introduced him to low-life crime and the junk.*

[* I was going to save the fire-branding of Millar if that was his name he used many from Stan Lappin to Ross McDowell, no, McDougal, I understand before they kicked him out of the club, tossed his ass in stir I think when he conned a bunch of guys, private detectives mind you, into giving him dough for  a surefire scheme he had to take Vegas dough, casino dough, like low-hanging fruit. All of it ending up his nose, a cousin cocaine addict before that was cool, and dragged dregs time Lew into his scheme as the punching bag fall guy since he had no other place to fall.

This Millar was working out of the Tappan Building in the Bunker Hill section of town, of L.A. skid row really. That building was filled with failed junkies like him, sleaze ball repo men with worn threadbare suits and rounded heels, a few working girls using the place for their assignations, winos pissing in the tacky carpeted halls, ambulance chasing lawyers whose last successful case was when FDR was president, failed dentists who had taken too much of their own medicine, doctors who had their licenses pulled for eighty-six degrees of malpractice, three card Monte artists on the lam, small bit life insurance guys selling low-priced premiums to poor folk with no return address, and the usual flotsam and jetsam of underground L.A., Hollywood.

The report was that Lew was so down on his uppers he grabbed Millar’s lapels to get “back in the game” after Sheila Sharp gave him the boot when he started taking a cut of the coffee and crullers money. This Millar bastard just wanted to use Lew as a front, a name from the past when he offered his services to old ladies looking for lost heirs and grabbing the dough, short money as it was since most of them who would deal with Ken had lost or used up all their serious money by living too long. Lew in his prime would have had this bum for lunch and had time to go bowling. The minute I saw the Millar name attached to Lew’s in the obit I cringed because even back in the East, even among the younger aficionados of the private detective racket his name was infamous for bullshit on a stick. Yeah, if as reported they put his ass in stir as much as I hate to say it about any man against the fucking coppers good riddance.]     

  

Frankly I was shocked when fellow writer and crime detection devotee Sarah Le Moyne told me she had read in one of the Los Angeles newspaper of Lew’s death when she was doing some research for a movie review she is planning to do on old-time Hollywood, the times when movie stars and all the way down the food chain were practically enslaved by the movie moguls like Harry Golden and Jimmy Wallace. (A measure of Lew’s fall can be gauged by his various receptions in the studios. When he was riding high he was as welcome as spring, had all kinds of starlets hanging off of all arms. Harry and Jimmy, other executives too were glad to send business his way since he was known to be stone-cold discreet while working a case. When he fell down, when he hit the skids, working some panhandle thing after kindly Sheila Sharp had to give him the boot orders were left to call the coppers if he even tried to hang around the front entrance of any studio.)     

I had thought that Lew had passed away long ago since I lost track of his whereabouts in the early 1980s. I guess this is the time in the interest of the current fade for transparency, or statements that make it seem that way, that those were the days when I had been involved with a committee of private detection devotees and private detectives to get Lew Archer into the P.I Hall of Fame the first time, the life time achievement time. I also admit that later egged on by Sarah that I acted to attempt to get him into the Hall  under a modern-day version of the idea that today we are more tolerant of asexuality as an attribute of a detective than the various nomination committees were back in the 1970s when every hardboiled detective, mostly male but increasing female too, had to bed anything in sight, client or stander-by. Lew fell down and the committees laughed in our faces since half of them were clueless about who Lew Archer even was, and why were they being bothered about some two-bit gofer who by then Sheila would not even let do repo work.                  

I will get to Lew’s early resume when it looked like he would join Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Phil Larkin, and Fester Dolan in the pantheon in a minute but that “two-bit gofer” is no exaggeration. I had been working in the early 1970s for the East Bay Other, now long gone with many other well-done journals and newspapers in the Bay area when the editor, might have been Sam Lowell, no, Ruth Ryan, knowing my schoolboy days interest in private detectives heard that a guy named Lew Archer was working for up and coming female private detective operator Sheila Sharp over on Post Street in Frisco town. (Sheila would make the Hall on her first try and I was there for her induction.) Ruth knew I had mentioned him one night when I was going on and on about great private detectives, real and literary, and those who could have been great but fell down like Lew who had solved the famous Galton and Harlan cases and a fistful of lesser ones before he hit the skids.      

Based on that information Ruth told me there might be a story there if Lew would consent to an interview. That was arranged through Sheila (whom Ruth had gone to school with) and we did the story which was nominated for a couple of prizes although no wins. In that interview I tried to get Lew to help me figure out why a guy whose name was still recognized in some high-end P.I circles for the Galton and Harlan cases was at that time serving them off the arm, serving the real detectives in the office their coffee and crullers (his hand in the till getting him canned from even that task). How he had at some point in the mid-1950s lost it, stopped trying to grab every female in the room as part of the overhead of his job just like Sam, Phil and the others. Started that long trip downhill so he messed up the Phillips case, got the girl he was supposed to save killed and her father committed suicide after in despair.

Worse mucked up the Jamison case so bad the public coppers had to bail him out (bad, very bad for the profession when “cold file it” after three days public coppers get involved in a serious case in any way). Reading about that case later gave me the chills. I didn’t claim to know his state of mind at the time, but something snapped. Lew went off on a tangent that cost half a dozen innocent people their lives just because he couldn’t let go of the fact that a few gangsters were in the background of the case (dumping money out of the casinos via a couple of “mules”) and only zeroed in on them. Couldn’t figure that some airhead professor who had a thing for young girls couldn’t pull a gun trigger. After the professor winged Lew the public coppers had to come in and pick up the pieces. Jesus, I would have blown town after that.      

How Sheila took pity on him for old time’s sake and let him do repo and keyhole peeping work when he was down and out I don’t know. Sheila was pound for pound one of the smartest operators around but her soft spot for Lew took some of the luster off a shining career. And when he bungled a big case on that latter skill, had some U.S. Senator in some hotel room with some woman not his wife on the hot seat but forgot to get the photographs brevetted him to the donut and sub sandwich detail.     

I supposed I could, if I still have them in the attic, look at my notes from that interview (those were the days when you took notes on yellow legal pads and wrote with pens) to piece together what he had said. (I tried to see if there was an archive for the East Bay Other on the Internet but no luck.) The gist of the downfall was two things-one a woman not his wife and the other Harry Daley, the famous psychologist. The woman not his wife part, when he had a wife, was Vera, the aide to that Mrs. Galton whose grandson he found after he had been kidnapped for serious ransom. He went on and on about her although when I checked later it was not clear if there was a Vera involved in the Galton case. What was true was that his very real wife divorced him, took all his money and whatever she could grab when she won that big adultery case against him leaving him busted.

This maybe Vera, some kind of gold-digger dumped him flat, left him high and dry. Literally dry. After Vera left he developed serious sexual impotency problems, couldn’t get it up. Lost his nerve with women after he couldn’t stand the gaff in the Sternwood case where the younger beautiful daughter Carmen put the whammy on him because he couldn’t “get it up.” Made him make a fatal mistake when the guy he was tailing, big-time gangster Eddie Mars, was not the guy who he killed in an ambush he had set up to impress Carmen. Jesus.       

Harry Daley entered the picture a few cases after this when his women clients were willing to throw something in beyond fifty dollars a day and expenses, he balked, and his business was beginning to die. Guys like Larry Larkin and Jack Vance were grabbing dough, expenses and whatever else was thrown at them. Harry had been recommended by Danny Harlan the guy he saved from a serial killer wife who wanted it all, all his dough that is, but not him. After a few sessions under Harry’s guidance Lew turned a new leaf, began to look at each case not as a puzzle to be solved by looking at hard facts, gluing them together and be done with it but looking at the motivation of the parties involved, the perp’s too. Jesus Lew as totally out of step with the rules of the road for hard-boiled detectives. Didn’t help his sexual impotency but didn’t solve any cases either. The notorious Norris serial killer case he had Jimmy Norris, a women hater, in his sights just after one murder, and let him go figuring maybe something his mother did long ago set him on the wrong road. The public coppers stopped Jimmy after three more murders.     

Like I said this is no obituary and I don’t write them but just thinking about the dismal spiral downhill to working with a sleaze like Kenny Millar who was disbarred from the profession after Sheila had to let him go and then dropping down further to the junk to ease whatever pain was causing his pain and a no name end in some Bunker Hill skid row rooming house filled with pissed halls and wasted needles is no way for a guy to end. I guess I can say this though-RIP, Lew Archer, RIP.