Reviews

• starts slow, finishes fast

  Macdonald’s overarching theme is the troubled America family, as it often is, but also includes change in general. The novel started slow for me, below average for a Lew Archer novel. It rapidly picks up steam, however, and the last half was terrific. I couldn’t put it down.

• cracking who dunnit

  cracking who dunnit

• Disappearing into History

  Nobody reads Ross Macdonald much anymore, but this was one of several books Amazion asked me to review this week, so I'm doing my best to oblige them. This partcular June 1984 14th Bantam Books printing has one of the fabulous James Marsh covers I collect, in which the entire series of some 20-plus books were all published as a posthumous tribute to Macdonald, who died in 1983 and whose real name was Kenneth Millar, born an American, raised in Canada, and returned to California to write. Most of Macdonald's books have deep Freudian themes to them, and are old-style hard-boiled literature whose fans included such notable greats as Eudora Welty and the editor of the New York Times Book Review. It's hard to find him in print anymore, but Black Lizard/Vintage is doing a good job of tring to keep his books afloat. Macdonald writes of the promised land, the sunny valleys of California, and the family tragedies and mysteries behind the secret doors. It's best to start off reading him chronologically, with the three non-Archer novels he wrote during World War II, and then slowly move chronologically into the Lew Archer series, which once comprised a TV series starring Peter Graves and the movie "Harper" with Paul Newman as the Archer character (remember, he liked titles that began with "H", like "Hud" (Larry McMurtry's first book, "Horseman Pass By", and also "Hombre." "Dollar" is a great mystery and you should read everything Ross Macdonald wrote and all the great books of essays and one especially superb biography about him.

• A substantive mystery.

  Chapter I of The Far Side of the Dollar finds veteran PI Lew Archer visiting a reform school for rich teenagers. Young Thomas Hillman a recent admission to the facility has gone AWOL and Archer has been hired by the school's headmaster to find him. A fairly straightforward case, right? Wrong. As in all Ross Macdonald novels, the plot becomes ever increasingly intricate as the narrative unfolds. There's plenty of standard Ross Macdonald fare packed into the pages of this very engaging book. Family dysfunction that spans the generations, hidden blood relationships between characters, a young person's journey to claim a birthright heretofore denied as well as jealousy and greed leading to murder most foul. The "readability" of The Far Side of the Dollar is greatly enhanced by its wonderfully insightful descriptive prose. Another very appealling aspect to this novel is the extremely vivid and at times emotionally wrenching way the characters are developed. Highly recommended.

• My first Ross MacDonald

  This was recommended by some fans of mystery fiction from the 20th Century. What a good writer! In among all the mystery stuff one expects, you will find some great pithy comments. Based on this book I've purchased a couple more, but have yet to get to them (so much to read, so little time). I thought well enough of it that I also purchased a hard copy as a gift for a relative who also loves to read.

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