Reasonable Facsimile

FIND A VICTIM (215 pp.)--John Ross Macdonald--Knopf ($2.75).

For most purposes of fiction or journalism, the man who minds his own business has the same handicap as a happy family: no story. But the hit-him-again-he's-breathing mystery writers have created a whole gallery of private-eye heroes whose most exciting cases come along when they are winding up a tough assignment and contemplating a little bruise-healing solitude.

It was that way with Lew Archer, quick-thinking, fast-moving hero of John Ross Macdonald's Find a Victim. Tooling along a California highway on the way to Sacramento, he saw "the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me. He rose on his knees in the ditch. His eyes were black holes in his yellow face, his mouth a bright smear of red like a clown's painted grin." Archer got him to a motel, but when the fellow died at the hospital, Archer had no intention of calling it quits. Almost before Tony Aquista's body had cooled, the detective was poking into as sordid a mess as hardened mystery addicts could reasonably ask for. Macdonald's blend of sex and sadism includes marijuana, incest and adultery. That the mixture stops well this side of disgust is a tribute to his nice sense of realism, an adult way of conveying that life is sometimes like this, but no need to leer at it.

Macdonald, who also has written as Kenneth Millar, is one of the best of the hard-boiled school now practicing. A student of the work of a fellow Californian, Old Master Raymond Chandler, he has learned his lessons well, even to the similes: "His face was like a worn saddle ridden by circumstance.'' He has the same intelligent regard for settings: "It was a good residential suburb, where people turned their backs on small beginnings and looked to larger futures." With Dashiell Hammett no longer producing and Raymond Chandler showing signs of weariness, Macdonald is just the man for fans who like those original brands.

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