Things We Lost in the Fire

As wind-blown wildfires continue to swallow homes and woodlands in Southern California, thoughts turn empathetically to the despair being felt by families who must seek shelter from this conflagration. (Unless, of course, you’re right-wing gasbag Glenn Beck, who almost gleefully told listeners to his radio show on Monday: “I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”) Some minds, though, including that of actress-turned-author Melodie Johnson Howe, also fetch up memories of how great fires have been employed over the years in crime fiction.

Writing today in the blog Criminal Brief, Howe recounts how a pair of SoCal wordsmiths, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, incorporated fire and the Santa Ana winds into their fiction. She quotes especially from Macdonald’s The Underground Man (1971), which finds gumshoe Lew Archer endeavoring to solve a case of homicide and extortion in a hillside community, even as a blaze threatens to devour that community. (Macdonald’s story was inspired, in part, by his own battle against a wildfire that had threatened his home years before.) One of the fire references from The Underground Man that Howe does not quote comes from the beginning of Chapter 5:

Before we reached Santa Teresa I could smell smoke. Then I could see it dragging like a veil across the face of the mountain behind the city.

Under and through the smoke I caught glimpses of fire like the flashes of heavy guns too far away to be heard. The illusion of war was completed by an old two-engine bomber which flew in low over the mountain’s shoulder. The plane was lost in the smoke for a long instant, then climbed out trailing a pastel red cloud of fire retardant.

I’m sure there are many residents of San Diego County today who would recognize their own plight in Macdonald’s long-ago work.