The Galton Case (1959).
by Ross Macdonald.
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard
Paperback.
ISBN-13: 978-0679768647
Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony
Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several
thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back
and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a
boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that
someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, tersely poetic,
The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.
If any writer can be said to have inherited
the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald.
Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel
a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only
hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private
eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal
guilt and human sin.
Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries rewrote
the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and
with Macdonald’s insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability
for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler.
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