When All The World Was Young-In The Pre-Lapsarian Days Before The Boot Out From Eden-When The Late Famed California Private Detective Lew Archer Was “Walking With The King”-The Broadmore Case    

By Seth Garth

[About a year ago, maybe more I did an earlier series of articles on the rise and fall of famed 1950s California private detective Lew Archer who after a really good start to his career wound up on cheap street, wound up working for wages at Sheila Sharp’s detective agency on Post Street in San Francisco doing at first the dregs  repo work and key-hold peeping and then when he fell down on that basically the office go-fer since Sheila had a soft spot for him, or something. Once he started taking dough out of the coffee and crullers till, the petty cash she had to reluctantly let him go. He would wind up working like a dog for the notorious junkie private eye agency run by Kenny Millar and who knows who else before he laid down his head. (I did not know of the Millar connection then but only learned it from Sheila recently).  

I did that series based on the assumption that Lew had passed away many years ago so I was shocked to learn that he had only passed away a few months ago at the age of 104. He was found in a Bunker Hill (L.A.) skid row rooming house head down in a toilet after overdosing on heroin (That description may seem indelicate, but a surprising number of famous and not so famous junkies have been found in that condition.) That renewed my interest in the fate of one Lew Archer who in the immediate post-World War II period after serving in Military Intelligence in the war and forsaking his pre-war public copper job set up his own agency and was ready to give guys like Sam, Marlowe, Phil Larkin and Benny Gold a run for their money.    

In the interest of the current craze for transparency I should mention that I interviewed Lew in person in the early 1970s for the East Bay Other where the editor Ruth Ryan knew Sheila Sharp who had helped set up the interview. Ruth’s idea, mine too, was to focus on what happened to bring Lew low, why was he then reduced to doing repo work and key-hole peeping. I spent considerable time with Lew, and with others like his ex-wife Martha who had an idea of how the big fall down happened. I even found myself drafted onto a couple of committees urging the P.I Hall of Fame nominating committee to put Lew on the ballot in those days for basically life-time achievement and subsequently for changes in the way the profession moved on from just hard-boiled macho types with twists hanging off every arm while a P.I. worked his case against the bad guys. They laughed in our faces on both counts since Lew had less than a decade of first-rate work and the repo stuff was beneath contempt and that to avoid an anachronism Lew had to stand up to the doll-swirling P.I. model of his time.      

Bringing things forward to the almost present as part of that series last year I joined a group which once again was attempting to get Lew in the Hall this time through an end around on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) seeing his sexual disfunction as a qualifying medical condition which would be factored in. The nominating committee this time, given the subject, did not laugh in our faces but could find no reason like sexual dysfunction to bring a guy in when they had one-armed Bart Devine and wheel-chair-bound Chris Lord waiting for induction. Real disabilities is what they really meant. The junkie head in the toilet will preclude any further efforts, no question.]   

Ah, to be young was very heaven as old greybeard poet Wordsworth had it. To be young when hard-boiled private detectives, male mostly, the parlor pink stuff was left for amateurs like Dame May Whitty, took on the bad guys with dolls swinging from every arm and unlike the public coppers closed down the case without shipping it off to the dead water cold case bin. Yeah, in the days when a guy like Sam, Sam Spade, went right about against evil, female evil and sent over his paramour without blinking an eye after the bodies started to rise to block out the sun. Grabbed some other frail the next day and never missed a beat. Take Phil, Philly Dog Marlowe who lammed into a beautiful money pit complete with a couple of wild child doll sisters who couldn’t keep their clothes on for long. And all the Dog had to worry about was a couple of whacks to the head and a couple of off-hand slugs before he did the big kiss off. Starting to round out things how about Phil Larkin who specialized in co-eds and young tail but who cleaned up Dodge when the deal went down. I could go on but one more, Danny Moore, the handsome ex-film star turned P.I. couldn’t show up on Sunset Boulevard without a fistful of lovelies and some serious iron.          

That my friends is the culture, the ethos, if unwritten that the once famous California private dick Lew Archer who I have written about extensively about over the past couple of years, partially in a final last ditch effort to get him into the P.I. Hall of Fame, partially to show how easy it was for a guy to essentially lose his nerve and in the end wind up as a bag man for the notorious junkie fixer man gumshoe Kenny Millar and partially as a cautionary tale for any guys and dolls coming into the shamus grift these days, days when it is not seen as a virtue to have a ton of frail or muscle hanging off your arms. Of late I have spent most of my time, once I found Lew had only this year passed away as a dead weight junkie on skid row, bringing up his failed cases, cases which he fell down on leading to his being  reduced to repo man, key-hole peeper and eventually office go-fer for real private detectives in Sheila Sharp’s Frisco agency and then bag man for the evil Millar and his sleaze ball operations out of darkest Oakland. But today, thanks to some fancy footwork and some archival work by Sarah LeMoyne I have the details of Lew’s last successful caper, the Broadmore case when he was in his prime, when he was ready to take on the whole known shamus world.       

Yeah, the Broadmore case, was classic Lew. Lew, coming like a bat out of hell after Military Intelligence duty in the Army in the Pacific during World War II. Racked up a few classic cases like Galton, Harlan, Hardmore, the last piece of the Sternwood case which brought in dough, glory plenty of referrals from people who could pay the freight or get their hands on plenty of dough from somewhere. The Damask case is what got Lew in the front door of the Broadmore case, his known    
discretion, his getting kidnap victims back alive and when women are involved a little romp in the hay along with that one hundred large and expenses, tax exempt.    

Laura Broadmore, against his husband’s wishes, sent for Lew once it was clear their son had been taken, probably kidnapped, by a couple of lame longhair types (beatniks really but strictly from Corona not the Frisco hardcore), boy and girl who had some kind of agenda which Lew was supposed to solve. All teary-eyed when talking about that son, Ronny, Lew consoled her the best way he knew how (after that quick romp she would admit that relations, sexual relations with hubby, some blowhard named Stanley, were on the ropes. Amazing how many such stories Lew heard, and acted on when he was himself in good sexual health, providing something like a public health service he told one colleague at the time.)        

Lew went through his paces (paces plus in this one) getting on the trail of these bastards, a trail that led to some mountain retreat that belonged to this Stanley’s mother who was the source of the dough from her father who was one of the rancid oilmen who blew the West Coast to smoke and traffic jams. There he found Stanley killed by some force of nature it seemed which left his mother distraught with Lew there to console her. Meanwhile the girl beatnik, Sandy something, was reported missing by her parents and since they knew this Laura he went to interview them and see what was what. As it turned out this Ellen, Sandy something’s mother, was another one of those frustrated 1950s housewives, sexually frustrated, a situation Lew helped tamp down. He eventually worked his way into grabbing that share of the case too (although by rights he should have farmed it out to his ex-partner Willie Brown). To grab the trifecta the male beatnik, some hulky punk named Jerry, was connected to the other two families by some earlier financial dealings and his parents didn’t have a clue as to what to do with this bum of the month. After Martha, Jerry’s father’s second wife, got rid of that pesky husband she and Lew settled down to drinks and silky sheets Lew grabbing all three parts of the deal, great stuff.            

You have to follow the bouncing ball on this one because unlike say the Sternwood case where Lew picking up the remnants, grabbing young Carmen Sternwood for a saucy weekend in the bargain, was not dealing with old-time Los Angles gangsters who were not ready to give in to the new boys like Bugsy and Lucky from the East and who played rough, including the usual spray of orchid-like slugs to keep things interesting this was not about hardened criminals but misunderstood youth who got blended in with plenty of unsavory behavior by their parents and/or friends’ parents. Not worse but different because the bang-bang factor didn’t get much play and Lew got cold-cocked only once. Some experts I have run into think beyond his later sexual dysfunction when his ex-wife gave him the big boot out of the household door that he had gotten a little soft, had begun to look for cases where he didn’t have to run into hard guys, did need to bleed as much as when he was younger. That his career life’s blood was heading south.     

Whatever the truth of that assertion and I don’t necessarily buy the story this was a “soft” case beyond the bewildering number of nubile young to middle-aged housewives who were ready to run him in their racks as part of the play. Okay, okay I will tell you right now Ronnie, sweet little Ronnie got back to his mother safe and sound via the cleverness of one Lew Archer. Here is where things get weird and maybe started the weirdness trend very much associated with California even today. The two beatnik felons despite what looked like a snatch for cash were playing out some weird drama revolving around things their parents had done say fifteen years before. They thought in their demented drug-soaked minds filled with all the 1950s-1960s alienation and angsts which some prosperity created in essentially overindulged and under emotionally cared for post-war youth they were saving the little guy from the tyranny of the past. And Lew, for good or evil bought the argument and let these juvenile delinquents off easy. But that was later, much later.   

Here is the play old man Broadmore was nothing but a ladies’ man and a guy with no dough except through his wife, the one who grabbed it from her oilman father. All this some fifteen years before the snatching of baby Ronnie. If it wore a skirt he grabbed, willingly or not, and on occasion had a couple of these bored housewives doing tricks in one of his buddy Lester’s motels along the Pacific Coast for travelling salesmen. Once the heat was on though thoughts of stir, thought of a world without access to women made him close up shop, got out of the country especially when one friendly copper, public copper asked him if he wanted to play ball with the law to get out from under. Knowing Eddie Mars was the subject of that snitch he decided to blow town fast before Eddie had Mister Brown Suit hang him out to dry. So he took off with this Ellen and that was to be the end of the troubles.  

As it turned out that Ellen was a woman not his wife and that triggered a whole bunch of stuff not so much by her as by her old-time evangelical housekeeper, a woman named Sister Snow who even Lew passed on not because she wasn’t desirable but because he couldn’t take the gaff with her Book of Revelation fire in the lake bullshit. What happened was this Broadmore brought this Ellen to a mountain cabin owned by his wife and that flipped the wife out and Sister too. Wifey killed hubby and put him about sixteen feet under with the help of Sister’s oddball son. Nothing happens for a long time except a wildfire brings out some craziness, brought out the link between Ronnie’s snatching and old man Broadmore’s murder via Ronnie’s father, that dwebb Stanley, who was looking for the father he never knew. To keep the thing tamped down Sister Snow wasted that Stanley when he was up at that very same mountain cabin and anybody else who got in the way, meaning anybody else who was looking for answers about the whereabouts of the old man or Ronnie, or both. Lew finally caught up with the snatchers left them in the care of their parents and blew back to L.A. and some well-deserved rest  

Like I said follow the bouncing ball but know this our Lew didn’t travel back to L.A. alone he had that Laura and little Ronnie riding sidesaddle on the golden calf. Shacked up with her for a while. That would be either the last straw or pretty close to the last straw for his wife Martha. The rest you know. Still, to be young at that time was very heaven.