Word: archers
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Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is almost indistinguishable from Novelist Macdonald's Lew Archer. Both are wearily honest Los Angeles private eyes, suffering the aftereffects of maimed childhoods but determined to remain loners in a corporate society. Archer's marriage, of course, went on the rocks before we met him, but Harry's is surely heading in that direction. Harry believes his wife (Susan Clark) may be fooling around. He shadows her like a suspect, confronts her like a criminal, and they make an uneasy peace. The main case Harry takes up, however, could have come straight from...
...Atlantic shore at Wildwood, N.J., where the Parents keep a 33-ft. Egg Harbor boat that he uses for deep-sea fishing. When he is not angling, Parent is passionately hunting with rifle and bow and arrow. Tracking mule deer at 10,000 ft. in the Colorado Rockies, Archer Parent bagged a deer the first time...
...ultimate values are never really cynical--if they were he'd be the criminal and not the detective, whether he's Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's insufferable Miss Marples or Alec Guinness playing Chesterton's quaint Father Brown or Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade explaining, after Miles Archer's murder, that you have a duty to your partner...
...work that characterize a good mechanic: "The material and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right." The good mechanic becomes our own down-home counterpart of the Zen archer...
...blatantness of Pirsig's borrowings, his Americanizing of Aristotle and the Zen archer will appear vulgar to some readers. To me the borrowings are signs of a vital writer, maybe a myth-maker. The "good mechanic" resonates in my own experience; he brings to mind a good friend, a mechanic and scientist...