The three novels collected in this second volume in the Library of
America Ross Macdonald edition represent for many readers the summit of
American crime writing. They remain thrilling for their searing
psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and
their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular
time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). Each reflects
Macdonald's enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing
dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In
The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father's attempt to protect his daughter
from "the complete and utter personal disaster" of marriage to a
troubled drifter sends private detective Lew Archer on a perplexing and
increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and
finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity. In The
Chill, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession
of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as
Archer finds himself "a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment
in the past." Another hunt for a missing person--this time a young man
escaped from an elite reform school--provides the impetus for The Far
Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald's friend Eudora Welty considered
"securely among your strongest and best . . . a beauty that just gets
better."
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
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