McNally's Secret (Archy McNally Novels) [Mass Market Paperback]

In McNally's SECRET, the pilot to this series, we're informed that the pater McNally is not an old-money man. (That's not the secret.) I had accepted the face value of the Palm Beach mansion and the genteel lifestyle of pater Prescott McNally, Yale graduate, leather-bound-Dickens-reading, attorney-at-law. Upon reading the illuminating passages of Archy's grandparent's ways into money, I began to wonder what other Secrets this novel might expose.

The opening of this novel was classic, and felt to be the initiation of what Sanders was born and itching to write, beyond the sagas of his other fine works. The introductory remarks were exquisite in mapping the reasons for, "Can't you ever be serious, Archy?"

Comparing himself to S. Holmes, Archy says: "I can't glance at a man and immediately know he's left-handed, constipated, has a red-headed wife, and slices lox for a living. I do investigations a fact at a time. Eventually they add up -- I hope. I'm very big on hope."

Archy's description of the start up of the Pelican Club was the best type of soul food. This is how and why such a club should be started: "We were facing Chapter 7 when we had the great good fortune to hire the Pettibones, an African-American family who had been living in one of the gamier neighborhoods of West Palm Beach and wanted out."

They wanted out and they deserved a chance where their skills could and would save not only themselves, but those who hired them. Isn't that the type of win/win the world needs now?

The first lines in SECRET, the sipping of champagne from a belly button would snag the attention of even the most sexually skittish reader of the nose-raised, neck-cricked, personality persuasion. But, truly and honestly, what sunk me with every hook were the few lines exposing why Archy could never be serious. On page 1 chapter 1, one of the main selling points of the series bursts through:

"I had lived through dire warnings of nuclear catastrophe, global warming, ozone depletion, universal extinction via cholesterol, and the invasion of killer bees. After a while my juices stopped their panicky surge and I realized I was bored with all these screeched predictions of Armageddon due next Tuesday. It hadn?t happened yet, had it? The old world tottered along, and I was content to totter along with it."

I'd bet my fortune (which is based on a skill of "make do"; there are no bananas in it) that the above passage is what captured a collection of readers so absolutely in a "right on" agreement that this series spanned the grave of the author and is still spewing pages and stretching shelves. And, of course, this attitude of "if you can't lick 'em; flick 'em" which Archy aimed toward kvetch-ers as he terms them, continues from the above, with relish accumulating, throughout the book.

Archy is a rare sane person swimming along nicely within the insanity of a last-gasp-culture (which is "drowning in The Be Careful Sea" as I described and termed that syndrome in one of my sci fi manuscripts titled MORNING COMES).

To Jennifer, of the champagne sea in her belly button, Archy answered why he wasn't an attorney: "Because I was expelled from Yale Law for not being serious enough. During a concert by the New York Philharmonic I streaked across the stage, naked except for a Richard M. Nixon mask."

That answer brought to mind the bright side of Howard Roark (from Ayn Rand's FOUNTAINHEAD, who was arrogantly unconcerned about his and the Dean's reasons for Roark's being expelled from architectural school. You'd be right to wonder where I got that comparison, since Roark could never be accused of being anything but serious. Syncopated irony? Assonance?

You be the judge. Get the SECRET of the McNally collection.

As I relished the final chapters and pages of SECRET, I had a thought about the beauty, warmth, lovely literary melancholy, and subtly complex richness radiating from those concluding textual treasures:

In retrospect, this novel doesn't feel like a planned pilot to a mystery series. It feels to be a singular novel, like but not like, the ones Sanders had written prior to it. What it feels like to me is that Lawrence hit upon a "soul speak" story which couldn't halt the cultural conversation it had initiated, however serendipitous that initiation may have been.

I had speculated on something which could seem contradictory to the above mentioned thought. I had wondered if Parker's Spenser series might have been somehow a spark for this McNally series. I continued to see references to Boston in this book, which, of course, is the city for which Spenser did the Walkabout. So possibly SECRET was somewhat an antithetical homage to Spenser, possibly even a hat doff with a friendly, competitive, one-better attempt, meant only to be a single novel rather than a never-die series.

Based on Agatha Christie's official web site, Miss Marple was not originally intended to be another Poirot, and look what happened there.

To me, Archy appears to be a gatekeeper for pure and primal, hidden wishes and dreams. Living home comfortably, guiltlessly at 37, on the top floor of his parent's mansion in Palm Beach; eating drool-food from a house chef; having established a club like The Pelican as a side atmosphere to partake in daily; working at a cushy, just challenging enough, engaging career for discreet inquiries ... If an author's (or reader's) going to retire that would be da place (or at least an entertaining option).

This pilot is a rare find in a rare series.

Linda G. Shelnutt