“The Chill” by Ross Macdonald: Six characters have “doubleness,” ranging from detective to murderer, but multiple personality is unacknowledged.

In this Lew Archer novel, many of the characters—ranging from private detective Lew Archer to the triple murderer—are implied to have multiple personality.

But since multiple personality is never mentioned by name or explicitly raised as an issue by the narrator or any character, it is hard to find reviews of this novel that mention it, or to know the extent to which the author recognized that this is what he was writing about.

Throughout the novel, it is taken for granted that maternal Mrs. Bradshaw and college dean Roy Bradshaw are mother and son. But it is revealed at the end that they are wife and husband, and that she is the one who has committed the three murders. As to their both having multiple personality, the closest the text comes to acknowledging it is when it concludes: “…she had a doubleness in her matching Roy’s…” (p. 277).

The multiple personality of several other characters is implied by passing comments. Lew Archer says he is “telling myself in various tones of voice that I had done the right thing” (p. 48). Helen Haggerty’s “handsome body seemed to contain two alternating persons” (p. 47) and her home looked like “two different women had taken turns furnishing it” (p. 68). Lew Archer describes Dolly Kincaid as changing “physically before my eyes…I’d hardly have recognized her as the girl I talked to on the library steps that day” (p. 58). And Lew Archer says of Alice Jenks, “I had the sense of doubleness again…” (p. 101).

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” for past posts related to other writers.

Ross Macdonald. The Chill [1963]. New York, Vintage Books, 1996.