“There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them.”

Recent events have got me thinking about the Ross MacDonald novel the Underground Man which takes place against the backdrop of a massive wildfire and gives us some idea how Californians thought about fires fifty years ago.

Though critics now tend to hold MacDonald's late Fifties books in higher regard, this novel and its predecessor, the Goodbye Look represented the peak in the author's literary standing. Friend and admirer Eudora Welty wrote this in her review in the New York Times.

Time pressing, time lapsing, time repeating itself in dark acts, splitting into two in some agonized or imperfect mind— time is the wicked fairy to troubled people, granting them inevitably the thing they dread. While Archer's investigation is drawing him into the past, we are never allowed to forget that present time has been steadily increasing its menace. Mr. Macdonald has brought the fire toward us at closer and closer stages. By the time it gets as close as the top of the hill (this was the murder area), it appears “like a brilliant uniform growth which continued to grow until it bloomed very large against the sky. A sentinel quail on the hillside be low it was ticking an alarm.” Then, reaching the Broadhurst house, “the fire bent around it like the fingers of a hand, squeezing smoke out of the windows and then flame.”
Indeed the fire is a multiple and accumulating identity, with a career of its own, a super character that has earned it self a character's name—Rattlesnake. Significantly, Archer says, “There was only one good thing about the fire. It made people talk about the things that really concerned them.”