Recommended reading - The Galton Case (1959)

The Galton Case

by Ross Macdonald

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard
Paperback.
 
ISBN-10: 0679768645
ISBN-13: 978-0679768647
 
Description:
 

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.

 

“Exciting and beautifully plotted.” – The New York Times Book Review.
 
“A model of intelligently engineered excitement.” – The New Yorker.
 
“One of his best … The Macdonald depth of understanding and dispassionate charity come out well, and the story … is richly plotted.” – San Francisco Chronicle.

Recommended reading - The Doomsters (1958)

The Doomsters

by Ross Macdonald.

ASIN: 0307279049

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 9780307279040

ISBN-13: 978-0307279040

Description:

“Most mystery writers merely write about crime. Ross Macdonald writes about sin.” – The Atlantic Monthly.

“Ross Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction. He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.” – Los Angeles Times.

Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman’s parents, Senator Hallman and his wife Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint, but they’ve has been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty-dealing, the family seem to be on the receiving end of a karmic death-blow. With two dead already and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.

Murder, madness and greed grace The Doomsters, where a tony façade masks the rot and corruption within.

“Ross Macdonald is one of the best writers of the whipcord thriller.” – The Bookman.

Recommended reading - The Barbarous Coast (1956)

 

The Barbarous Coast

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Paperback.
 
ISBN-10: 0307279030
ISBN-13: 978-0307279033
 
Description:
 
“Ross Macdonald writes like a son of a bitch.” – Anthony Boucher.
 

“Not since the novels of Nathanael West has the theme of American innocence grinding to a stop at the polluted waters of the Pacific so consistently reverberated through a body of writing.” – Detroit News.

 

The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood-money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won't stay hidden.

 

Lew Archer navigates through the watery, violent world of wealth and privilege, in this electrifying story of obsession gone mad.
 
“Macdonald makes a routine story of ocean-side murder among the rich take on a hard-edged, glistening solidity.” – AudioFile.

Recommended reading - The Bearded Lady (1955)

 

The Bearded Lady

by Ross MacDonald.

 

ASIN: B097265SP9
 
Description:
 

In this short story from Ross Macdonald’s The Archer Files, detective Lew Archer stops in town to look in on an old army buddy, an artist, only to find that he has mysteriously disappeared. Seemingly the only clue is a disturbing charcoal sketch of a woman with a thick beard sitting in his studio. As Archer finds himself drawn into the investigation, it soon becomes clear that things are not what they seem. And that no one is above suspicion.

 

A Vintage Short.
 

Recommended reading - The Ivory Grin, by Ross MacDonald (1952).

 

The Ivory Grin, a.k.a. Marked for Murder 

by Ross MacDonald.

 
ISBN-10: 0307278999
ISBN-13: 978-0307278999
 
Back cover description:
 

“Archer-Macdonald are working together at their peak, piecing together a most modern American Tragedy, making literature out of the thriller form, gazing more clearly than ever into the future as it rolls through the smog.” – Newsweek.

 

A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who's mysteriously gone missing.

Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.

 
“Ross Macdonald must be ranked high amongst American thriller writers.” – The Times Literary Supplement.

Recommended reading - The Way Some People Die (1951)

 

The Way Some People Die

by Ross Macdonald.

Paperback.
 
ISBN-10: 0307278980
ISBN-13: 978-0307278982
 
Back cover description:
 

“The greatest American mystery novelist. Macdonald imbued the mystery with the qualities of a full-bodied novel: impeccable plotting, a sense of place, a careful delineation of human psychology, and a perfect fusion of story and character.” – Richard North Patterson.

 

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts. Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

 

“Ross Macdonald gives to the detective story that accent of class that Raymond Chandler did.” – Chicago Tribune.

Recommended reading - The Ferguson Affair

The Ferguson Affair

by Ross Macdonald.
 
Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
First published 1960.

ISBN-10:030774079X
ISBN-13: 9780307740793
 
Description:

It was a long way from the million-dollar Foothill Club to Pelly Street, where grudges were settled in blood and Spanish and a stolen diamond ring landed a girl in jail.  Defense lawyer Bill Gunnarson was making the trip – fast.  He already knew a kidnapping at the club was tied to the girl's hot rock, and he suspected that a missing Hollywood starlet was the key to a busy crime ring.  But while Gunnarson made his way through a storm of deception, money, drugs, and passions, he couldn't guess how some big shots and small-timers would all end up with murder in common...

 

Recommended reading - Meet Me at the Morgue

Meet Me at the Morgue

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
First published 1953.

ISBN-10: 0307740773
ISBN-13: 9780307740779
 
Description:
 

“My favorite . . . [Macdonald] is first among those novelists who raised the genre from its roots in pulp fiction to serious literature.” – P.D. James, from Talking About Detective Fiction.

“[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald.” – New York Times Book Review.

“Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction.  He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.” – Los Angeles Times.

“Most mystery writers merely write about crime.  Ross Macdonald writes about sin.” – The Atlantic.

“Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them.”  –  Anthony Boucher.

“[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries.”

– The Guardian (London).

“[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did.” – Chicago Tribune.
 

Somebody in Pacific Point is guilty of a kidnapping, but what probation officer Howard Cross wants to find most is innocence: in an ex-war hero who has taken a tough manslaughter rap, in a wealthy woman with a heart full of secrets, and in a blue-eyed beauty who has lost her way. The trouble is that the abduction has already turned to murder, and the more Cross pries into the case the further he slips into a pool of violence and evil. Somewhere in the California desert the whole scheme may come down on the wrong man. Somewhere Cross is going to find the last piece of a bloody puzzle – a mystery of blackmail, passion, and hidden identities that might be better left unsolved.

Recommended reading: The Three Roads

The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.
First published 1948.
Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0307740765
ISBN-13: 978-0307740762
 
Description:

[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald. – New York Times Book Review.

Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction.  He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form. – Los Angeles Times.

Most mystery writers merely write about crime. Ross Macdonald writes about sin.

– The Atlantic.

Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them. – Anthony Boucher.

[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries. 

– The Guardian (London).

[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did. – Chicago Tribune.

Silken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at him – that’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine. He was drunk when he married her, stone cold sober when he found her dead. Out on the sunlit streets of L.A. walked the man – her lover, her killer – who had been with her that fatal night. Taylor intended to find him. And when he did, the gun in his pocket would provide the quickest kind of justice. But first Taylor had to find something else: an elusive memory so powerful it drove him down three terrifying roads toward self-destruction – grief, ecstasy, and death.

Recommended reading - The Ross Macdonald Collection

The Ross Macdonald Collection

by Ross Macdonald.

Edited by Tom Nolan.

Published by Library of America.
Box edition.
Published 2017.
Hardcover.

ISBN-10: 1598535528
ISBN-13: 978-1598535525
 
Description:

“The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” – The New York Times Book Review.

“Macdonald brought a new method of psychological construction to the hard-boiled novel … he was in line with many of the important mid-century movements of American literary fiction, and deserves to be seen as a worthy addition to them.” – The Times Literary Supplement.

Ross Macdonald transformed the detective novel into a literary expression of unique psychological depth and drama. Here, for the first time in a deluxe three-volume Library of America boxed set, are eleven of his classic Lew Archer mysteries.

Contents: The Way Some People Die; The Barbarous Coast; The Doomsters; The Galton Case; The Zebra-Striped Hearse; The Chill; The Far Side of the Dollar; Black Money; The Instant Enemy; The Goodbye Look; The Underground Man.

Recommended reading - The Lew Archer Omnibus Volume 2

The Lew Archer Omnibus Volume 2

by Ross Macdonald.

Paperback.

Published 1994.

Published by Allison & Busby Ltd.

ISBN 13: 9780749002015

ISBN 10: 0749002018

ASIN: 0749002018

 

Description:

Omnibus of three novels featuring Lew Archer, "The Ivory Grin", "The Galton Case" and "The Blue Hammer".

Recommended reading - The Lew Archer Omnibus Volume 1

The Lew Archer Omnibus Volume 1

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Allison & Busby.
Published 1993.
Paperback.

ISBN 13: 9780749001094
ISBN 10: 0749001097
ASIN: 0749001097
 
Description:
This first volume of Lew Archer novels presents "The Drowning Pool", "The Chill" and "The Goodbye Look".

Recommended reading - Archer in Jeopardy

 

Archer in Jeopardy

by Ross Macdonald.

Anthology.
Published by by Alfred A. Knof.
Published 1979.
Hardcover.

ISBN 13: 9780394508047
ISBN 10: 0394508041
ASIN: 0394508041
 
Description:

Brings together three of the acclaimed mystery writer's Lew Archer novels – The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, & The Instant Enemy – three winners with the incomparable Macdonald touch.

Recommended reading - Blue City

Blue City

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
First published 1947.
Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0307740730
ISBN-13: 978-0307740731
 
Description:
 
“[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald.” – New York Times Book Review.
 

“Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction.  He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form.” – Los Angeles Times.

“Most mystery writers merely write about crime.  Ross Macdonald writes about sin.” – The Atlantic.
 

“Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them.” – Anthony Boucher.

“[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries.” – The Guardian (London).

“[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did.” – Chicago Tribune.

He was a son who hadn’t known his father very well.  It was a town shaken by a grisly murder – his father’s murder.  Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering.  When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father’s seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors.  The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug-dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely.  Now Johnny Weatherly was going to solve this murder – by pitting his rage, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.

Recommended reading - The Name is Archer

The Name Is Archer

by Ross MacDonald.

Part of the Lew Archer mystery series.

Paperback
Published by Grand Central Pub.
First published 1955.

ISBN 13: 9780446361569
ISBN10: 0446361569
ASIN: 0446361569
 
Description:

Anthology containing the following stories: Find the woman; Gone girl; The bearded lady; The suicide; Guilt-edged blonde; The sinister habit; Wild goose chase; Midnight blue; Sleeping dog.

Recommended reading - The Blue Hammer

The Blue Hammer

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

First published 1976.

ISBN-10: 0307279065

ISBN-13: 978-0307279064

Description:

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.

Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames-each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.

Recommended reading - Sleeping Beauty

 

Sleeping Beauty

by Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
First published 1973.
Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0375708669
ISBN-13: 978-0375708664
 
Description:

# 17 of the Lew Archer Series.

"Ross Macdonald is either part or wholly wizard. . .conjuring the magic of real mystery. . . . A masterpiece." – Chicago Tribune Book World.

"Sleeping Beauty is particularly complex and satisfactory. . . . It is a marvelous formula that Macdonald has found; the wonder is that he keeps improving it." – Newsweek.

"Ross Macdonald remains the grandmaster, taking the crime novel to new heights by imbuing it with psychological resonance, complexity of story, and richness of style that remain inspiring." – Jonathan Kellerman.

In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands – including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written, Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is 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.

Recommended reading - The Underground Man

 

The Underground Man

by Ross Macdonald.

# 16 in the Lew Archer series.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

First published 1971.
Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0679768084
ISBN-13: 978-0679768081
 
Description:

"There are certain books that bide their time, like plants, waiting decades to flower.... If a copy of The Underground Man, a novel from 1971, by Ross Macdonald, has been sitting on your shelf for ages, unread and barely noticed, try opening it now. Suddenly it's a book in full bloom." – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.

"A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were." – Eudora Welty.

"Ross Macdonald is an important American novelist!" – San Francisco Chronicle.

"I should like to venture that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either...Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler." – Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review.

As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder – and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline. The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California's version of the American dream.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet 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.