Though I have read nearly a dozen Ross Macdonald novels, this was the first one that wasn’t in his Lew Archer series. In this one the protagonist is John Weather, a young veteran returning to his hometown after a decade’s absence. No sooner does he arrive than he learns that his father, from whom he...
I'm not the hugest fan of noir, but there is something about the mid-century hardboiled mysteries set in L.A. that is just so evocative. It's a place I've never been, but that I recognize from dozens (hundreds) of depictions in book and film, to which Harry Bosch is the rightful heir. I was comple...
Clarence Bassett, the manager of an exclusive Malibu country club, has a problem. To solve it he hires private detective Lew Archer, who is initially asked to drive off a young man named George Wall before being asked instead to search for Wall’s wife, Hester. Archer soon finds himself emerged in a ...
When I began reading Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels last year, I built my acquisitions around the three-volume collection published by the Library of America. These bring together many of the Archer novels that Macdonald published over the span of a quarter century, encapsulating nicely the corp...
As a private detective Lew Archer is used to cases coming to him. But when he encounters a dying man on the side of the highway between Los Angeles and Sacramento, he quickly finds himself enmeshed in the investigation of a hijacked shipment of bourbon, the question of a missing woman, and the hosti...
When millionaire oilman Ralph Sampson goes missing, his worried wife hires a private detective to track him down. Lew Archer soon discovers, though that what initially seemed a matter of a man on a bender may in fact be a case of kidnapping. As he investigates further, he encounters an eclectic grou...
Though this is the third of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels that I’ve read, it’s the first one from the early years of his series. As such it was an especially interesting read, as I could see all of the elements that I’ve come to enjoy at an early stage of their development. Not only did it help...
I really need to write down my thoughts and impressions about a book sooner than two months after having read the book. Whatever, this is pretty much classic noir, private-eye fiction. Ross Macdonald is a worth successor to Raymond Chandler. So, Lew Archer is hired by John Truttwell, a lawyer, to h...
How should one read an author's series? This is a question for which the answer would seem obvious: from beginning to end. Yet while this is certainly true for many series nowadays which are basically one story stretched over multiple volumes (e.g. Harry Potter), there are plenty in which authors us...
This was my first Ross Macdonald novel, and it's definitely not going to be my last. The plot was amazing, with Macdonald's merciful detective Lew Archer called in to investigate the theft of a gold box and the letters contained. What followed was an intricate tale of decades-old crimes, long-buried...
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