From his vantage point in Southern California--and through the eyes of
his great creation, private eye Lew Archer--Ross Macdonald (the
pseudonymn of Kenneth Millar) fashions a haunting, startlingly immediate
vision of modern America: a swirling mix of sexual exploitation,
intergenerational conflict, racial animosities, and ecological disaster.
In Black Money, Archer is hired to find a wealthy man gone missing
and soon finds himself investigating a suspicious seven-year-old
suicide. The case becomes a peeling away of many levels of deception,
delusion, and false identity. Exploring themes of immigration and
border-crossing central to Macdonald's own life, Black Money also pays
homage to The Great Gatsby, one of his favorite books.
The Instant Enemy begins with Archer's search for a runaway teenage
daughter and her troubled, possibly murderous boyfriend, a search that
uncovers a morass of hidden wrongs. In an emotionally intense work that
reflects the chaos and conflicts of his family's troubled past,
Macdonald gives indelible and ultimately tragic expression to the
generational conflict and drug culture of the DJHCs.
An investigation into "a rather peculiar burglary" takes a drastic turn
with the discovery of a body in an abandoned car on a beach in The
Goodbye Look, the book that sealed Macdonald's reputation as the
preeminent crime novelist of his time. Tracking a stolen heirloom,
Archer follows a trail of violence that lays bare a miasma of buried
secrets and unforgotten traumas.
"In our day," wrote Eudora Welty, "it is for such a novel as The
Underground Man that the detective form exists." A raging wildfire
stirred by the Santa Ana winds serves as prelude to a chain of
kidnapping and murder. Youthful rebellion is pitted against the
hypocrisies of the older generation in a novel, in Welty's estimation,
"not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving."
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