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Lew Archer #3, 6, 7, 8
Four Novels of the 1950s: The Way Some People Die / The Barbarous Coast / The Doomsters / The Galton Case
Revered by such contemporary masters as Sue Grafton, George Pelecanos, and James Ellroy, praised by Eudora Welty as “a more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were,” Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) brought to the crime novel a new realism and psychological depth and a unique gift for intricately involving mystery narratives. For his centennial, The Library of America inaugurates its Macdonald edition with four classic novels from the 1950s, all featuring his incomparable protagonist, private investigator Lew Archer.
Set against the background of a glittering yet darkly enigmatic Southern California, Macdonald’s books are both unsurpassed entertainments and emotionally powerful evocations of an outwardly prosperous, inwardly turbulent America. Macdonald mastered the hard-boiled detective form early on and brought to it a prose style of extraordinary beauty. The four novels collected in this volume reveal him broadening the genre into an intensely personal means of expression, transforming the tragedies and dislocations of his own life into haunting fiction. “My interest,” he wrote to his publisher, “is the exploration of lives.”
In The Way Some People Die, Lew Archer embarks on a missing persons case that starts at a house in Santa Monica “within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea,” and takes him on a violent and twisted journey through Los Angeles high and low. The Barbarous Coast exposes a world of hidden crime and corruption in the movie business, as Archer intrudes on the well-protected secrets of a studio head. A gripping and tightly knit drama of madness and self-destruction, The Doomsters signaled a breakthrough in the Archer novels with its exploration of “an alternating current of guilt” within a family, a theme to which Macdonald would often return. The Galton Case, one of the standout masterpieces of the detective form, is a mythically charged and deeply personal book that traces the calamitous consequences of a young man’s claim to be the lost heir to a fortune. For Macdonald The Galton Case marked a turning point in his career, the realization of his quest to create fiction from “some of the more complicated facts of my experience.”
As a special feature, this volume includes five important statements—among them the famous essay “Writing The Galton Case”—in which Macdonald reveals the autobiographical background of his books and his understanding of his own contribution to the evolving genre of detective fiction.
Set against the background of a glittering yet darkly enigmatic Southern California, Macdonald’s books are both unsurpassed entertainments and emotionally powerful evocations of an outwardly prosperous, inwardly turbulent America. Macdonald mastered the hard-boiled detective form early on and brought to it a prose style of extraordinary beauty. The four novels collected in this volume reveal him broadening the genre into an intensely personal means of expression, transforming the tragedies and dislocations of his own life into haunting fiction. “My interest,” he wrote to his publisher, “is the exploration of lives.”
In The Way Some People Die, Lew Archer embarks on a missing persons case that starts at a house in Santa Monica “within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea,” and takes him on a violent and twisted journey through Los Angeles high and low. The Barbarous Coast exposes a world of hidden crime and corruption in the movie business, as Archer intrudes on the well-protected secrets of a studio head. A gripping and tightly knit drama of madness and self-destruction, The Doomsters signaled a breakthrough in the Archer novels with its exploration of “an alternating current of guilt” within a family, a theme to which Macdonald would often return. The Galton Case, one of the standout masterpieces of the detective form, is a mythically charged and deeply personal book that traces the calamitous consequences of a young man’s claim to be the lost heir to a fortune. For Macdonald The Galton Case marked a turning point in his career, the realization of his quest to create fiction from “some of the more complicated facts of my experience.”
As a special feature, this volume includes five important statements—among them the famous essay “Writing The Galton Case”—in which Macdonald reveals the autobiographical background of his books and his understanding of his own contribution to the evolving genre of detective fiction.
900 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2015
9 people are currently reading
245 people want to read
About the author
Ross Macdonald
160 books813 followersRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
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November 7, 2022
Ross Macdonald in the Library Of America -- The 1950s
The Library of America publishes the best of American writing in many genres. Many works in the series suggest how American writing combines popular and literary elements to produce unique, valuable styles. The combination of popular and literary elements is nowhere more apparent than in the crime novel. The LOA published works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, and followed it up with this collection "Four Novels of the 1950s" by the American writer Ross Macdonald. The volume collects four works that feature Macdonald's famous detective, Lew Archer, each of which is recounted in Archer's inimitable voice.
Ross Macdonald, (1915 -- 1983), the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, was born in California but spent most of his younger life in a wandering existence in Canada when his father abandoned the family. Ultimately Macdonald was able to attend college and to earn a PhD in English literature. He served in the U.S. Navy during WW II. It is easy to see in Macdonald's writings the combination of disparate elements: a wealthy life in California and poverty in Canada, the intellectual world of English literature and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the murky world of crime stories, the abandonment of a child at an early age and its consequences.
Macdonald became famous for his Lew Archer character and the LOA has collected eleven of his Archer novels in three volumes, beginning with this volume of four early novels. Tom Nolan, a biographer and scholar of Macdonald, edited and prepared the contents of each volume together with notes.
Each novel in this volume is set primarily in the suburbs of southern California and shows the tensions, greed, and violence underlying what appear to be prosperous, complacent lives. The volume offers the opportunity to read the novels in a series and to see how they develop. I came to see the novels both as individual works and as part of a developing series.
The first novel, "The way some people die" (1951) is the third in the Lew Archer series and the book in the LOA compilation that owes the most to its predecessors in crime fiction. It is a dark tale that begins simply enough when a mother seeks Archer's help in finding her 24 year old daughter who has disappeared. The book quickly blossoms into a tour of the southern California underworld with its violence, drugs, and sleaze. The book features descriptive, tight writing and outstanding characterizations together with its complex plot.
The second novel "The Barbarous Coast" (1956) is the sixth in the Archer series and features crime and corruption in the movie and gambling industries under the surface of an exclusive private club. A young sportswriter from Canada seeks Archer's help in finding his lost wife. Again, much lies below the surface as the story explodes into a series of killings. To my mind, this book was the least successful in the LOA volume.
The following two novels show a great deal of change as the elements of a crime novel are combined with reflections, influenced by both Freud and the ancient Greeks, on the nature of family life and on the struggle of children to find identities of their own. The books explore broad questions about appearance and reality and the nature of right and wrong.
"The Doomsters" (1958) the seventh of the Archer novels, shows the redoubtable detective drawn into the dark side of the affairs of a wealthy California family, the owner of an orange grove. Archer assists a young man who has just escaped from a mental institution in investigating the death of his father. Several people will meet violent deaths as the investigation runs its course. But the force of the novel lies in its growing reflections on family, on guilt, and on morality. The reflections involve both those involved in the doomed family and Archer himself. "The Doomsters" is the novel in the series that reveals the most about Archer's past and about his motivations for his detective work.
The final novel in this compilation and the eighth in the Archer series, "The Galton Case", may well be Macdonald's masterwork. It begins when Archer is hired by a wealthy California widow and her lawyer to search for her long-lost son who has disappeared 20 years earlier. Archer reluctantly undertakes this seemingly cold case. His work will take him from California to Nevada to Michigan and to a small dilapidated rooming house just over the border in Canada. The story involves two seemingly unrelated murders and, most importantly, the identity of a young man claiming to be the widow's grandson and thus the presumptive heir of her large estate. The book integrates masterfully the suspense features of crime fiction and the broader questions of personal identity, family, and independence. In "The Galton Case", Macdonald succeeds in transforming the formulaic elements of a crime novel to literature.
The volume also includes five essays and letter by Macdonald which cast light on his approach to writing and to the crime novel. Of these, I found his "Writing 'The Galton Case'" and "Down these streets a mean man must go" particularly good.
The novels had a cumulative effect on me as I continued to read. I enjoyed each novel individually as well with the partial exception of "The Barbarous Coast." I find it valuable to explore American literature in all its variety, breadth and depth in helping to understand and appreciate our country and different ways of understanding. Thus, I was glad to read Macdonald through this compilation in the Library of America.
Robin Friedman
The Library of America publishes the best of American writing in many genres. Many works in the series suggest how American writing combines popular and literary elements to produce unique, valuable styles. The combination of popular and literary elements is nowhere more apparent than in the crime novel. The LOA published works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, and followed it up with this collection "Four Novels of the 1950s" by the American writer Ross Macdonald. The volume collects four works that feature Macdonald's famous detective, Lew Archer, each of which is recounted in Archer's inimitable voice.
Ross Macdonald, (1915 -- 1983), the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, was born in California but spent most of his younger life in a wandering existence in Canada when his father abandoned the family. Ultimately Macdonald was able to attend college and to earn a PhD in English literature. He served in the U.S. Navy during WW II. It is easy to see in Macdonald's writings the combination of disparate elements: a wealthy life in California and poverty in Canada, the intellectual world of English literature and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the murky world of crime stories, the abandonment of a child at an early age and its consequences.
Macdonald became famous for his Lew Archer character and the LOA has collected eleven of his Archer novels in three volumes, beginning with this volume of four early novels. Tom Nolan, a biographer and scholar of Macdonald, edited and prepared the contents of each volume together with notes.
Each novel in this volume is set primarily in the suburbs of southern California and shows the tensions, greed, and violence underlying what appear to be prosperous, complacent lives. The volume offers the opportunity to read the novels in a series and to see how they develop. I came to see the novels both as individual works and as part of a developing series.
The first novel, "The way some people die" (1951) is the third in the Lew Archer series and the book in the LOA compilation that owes the most to its predecessors in crime fiction. It is a dark tale that begins simply enough when a mother seeks Archer's help in finding her 24 year old daughter who has disappeared. The book quickly blossoms into a tour of the southern California underworld with its violence, drugs, and sleaze. The book features descriptive, tight writing and outstanding characterizations together with its complex plot.
The second novel "The Barbarous Coast" (1956) is the sixth in the Archer series and features crime and corruption in the movie and gambling industries under the surface of an exclusive private club. A young sportswriter from Canada seeks Archer's help in finding his lost wife. Again, much lies below the surface as the story explodes into a series of killings. To my mind, this book was the least successful in the LOA volume.
The following two novels show a great deal of change as the elements of a crime novel are combined with reflections, influenced by both Freud and the ancient Greeks, on the nature of family life and on the struggle of children to find identities of their own. The books explore broad questions about appearance and reality and the nature of right and wrong.
"The Doomsters" (1958) the seventh of the Archer novels, shows the redoubtable detective drawn into the dark side of the affairs of a wealthy California family, the owner of an orange grove. Archer assists a young man who has just escaped from a mental institution in investigating the death of his father. Several people will meet violent deaths as the investigation runs its course. But the force of the novel lies in its growing reflections on family, on guilt, and on morality. The reflections involve both those involved in the doomed family and Archer himself. "The Doomsters" is the novel in the series that reveals the most about Archer's past and about his motivations for his detective work.
The final novel in this compilation and the eighth in the Archer series, "The Galton Case", may well be Macdonald's masterwork. It begins when Archer is hired by a wealthy California widow and her lawyer to search for her long-lost son who has disappeared 20 years earlier. Archer reluctantly undertakes this seemingly cold case. His work will take him from California to Nevada to Michigan and to a small dilapidated rooming house just over the border in Canada. The story involves two seemingly unrelated murders and, most importantly, the identity of a young man claiming to be the widow's grandson and thus the presumptive heir of her large estate. The book integrates masterfully the suspense features of crime fiction and the broader questions of personal identity, family, and independence. In "The Galton Case", Macdonald succeeds in transforming the formulaic elements of a crime novel to literature.
The volume also includes five essays and letter by Macdonald which cast light on his approach to writing and to the crime novel. Of these, I found his "Writing 'The Galton Case'" and "Down these streets a mean man must go" particularly good.
The novels had a cumulative effect on me as I continued to read. I enjoyed each novel individually as well with the partial exception of "The Barbarous Coast." I find it valuable to explore American literature in all its variety, breadth and depth in helping to understand and appreciate our country and different ways of understanding. Thus, I was glad to read Macdonald through this compilation in the Library of America.
Robin Friedman
January 27, 2016
Ross Macdonald is popularly considered the third figure of the holy trinity of American crime writing, joining Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. To this day, many people call his Lew Archer detective series the greatest of all time (what some folks call: GOAT—I’m talking to you, Kayne West). So it is fitting that the Library of America released a pretty little volume of four Archer novels called Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950’s.
And this book is pretty, it makes you want to slap some lipstick on it, teach it to dance and take it to the prom. A hardback, Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950’s contains along with four essential novels of retired cop, now private investigator Archer; other writings (including Macdonald’s letter to Alfred A. Knopf and some essays on his work and the crime genre) a chronology of the author’s life both personal (there’s some weird stuff going on with his daughter who killed a person accidentally with her car) and literary; as well as one of those cool ribbon bookmark things.
This is my first foray into Lew Archer and the writings of Macdonald, so I was not sure what to expect. Would the stories be dated? Would what seemed so fresh in the 1950’s now come off as trite, clichéd or platitudinous (look it up). Macdonald was praised for bringing a deeper psychological insight to the detective story than Chandler and Hammett ever had. Well, to be honest there is a Werther’s candy giving, plastic squeeze coin purse using, old man smell to the stories. But that is more due to the fact that Macdonald’s themes and stories have been cribbed for decades more than anything else. It’s just that I’m late coming to the party; if this were 1950 I’d be knocking over my extra-large sized jar of Brylcreem. And dropping the newest Sha-Na-Na album in my excitement about the new stuff this Macdonald cat was pulling.
The novels: The Way Some People Die (a missing persons case full of gangsters, crooked boxers and a gun moll who may or may not be trusted); The Barbarous Coast (murder at an exclusive swim club with more gangsters and nefarious Hollywood executives); The Doomsters (proving that a distraught man, locked against his wishes in an asylum was framed for murder) and The Galton Case (discovering if a young man is indeed the missing heir to a dying matriarch’s millions) are all solid and readable. The last two—particularly The Galton Case --are fantastic, true literary works.
In all stories, Macdonald balances riveting narrative with a shockingly flawed grasp of head trauma. Lew Archer gets knocked unconscious so many times that he is sure be a strong candidate for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. To be honest, I surprised the character doesn't need velcro to tie his shoes. The characters, however, are fully drawn, interesting and Macdonald shows an empathy far ahead of the times (though still somewhat dated) for the mentally ill, homosexuals, women’s rights. This is a series that focuses not on the investigator (very little is learned of Archer's history or current life) but on the people he finds while performing his work. It is here he shines a spotlight on society.
If you are interested in detective fiction, particularly in seeing large degree the authors on the current bestseller lists owe the masters from the past, get this book. I hope The Library of America publishes a second beautiful volume.
September 6, 2018
The Canadian-American author born Kenneth Millar spent most of his career writing as Ross Macdonald (not to be confused with suspense writer John D. MacDonald) and most of his novels were told through the eyes of Lew Archer, a detective with whom Macdonald would become as closely identified as Danshiell Hammett with Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane with Mike Hammer. While Macdonald's considerable output drew admiration from authors as disparate as Eudora Welty and William Goldman, comparisons are more closely drawn to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe due to the author's pithy, "hardboiled" detective writing style and greater psychological nuance.
Despite Ross Macdonald's over forty novels, and despite several of them having been made into successful motion pictures in the 1960s such as HARPER starring Paul Newman, his reputation has waxed and waned. This may be because Macdonald eschewed the gritty big cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco where previous California detective writers had set their stories in favor of smaller, frequently pseudonymous locales, such as "Pacific Point" for La Jolla, or "Santa Teresa" (Santa Barbara). It would be a mistake, though, to assume that because Macdonald's novels take place in a more pleasant, suburban locale, that they lack depth. Natonal Public Radio, in a piece originally aired April 21, 2015 and entitled "Revisiting a Suburbia-Gone-Sour" mentioned the thematic influence Macdonald's novels have had on authors such as John Cheever, Tom Perrotta, and even the early seasons of television's MAD MEN. Other critics have commented favorably on the psychological depth of Macdonald's characters and the fact that his novels are a skillful blend of the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. As such, his plot resolutions depend as much on insight into the characters (and their families) who serve as his clients as much as logic.
The Library of America has done the reading world a big favor with yesterday's publication of four Ross Macdonald novels: THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE, THE BARBAROUS COAST, THE DOOMSTERS, and THE GALTON CASE represent MacDonald's finest, though some aficionados might have wished that the theme had been stretched to 1961 to include THE WYCHERLY WOMAN. The generous (900-page) volume also includes some of Macdonald's nonfiction writings and a generous appraisal by editor Tom Nolan. While LoA volumes of this kind tend to feature thinnish paper and smallish type, this new volume is a fine bargain, especially in hardbound issue. It is also happy that the Library of America, in this publication, has put its imprimatur upon Ross Macdonald as a "serious" American writer. While this new issue may not greatly boost Ross Macdonald's readership or literary reputation (one thinks of LoA's two-volume treatment of Dawn Powell nearly fifteen years ago, which did neither), it is greatly welcome.
Despite Ross Macdonald's over forty novels, and despite several of them having been made into successful motion pictures in the 1960s such as HARPER starring Paul Newman, his reputation has waxed and waned. This may be because Macdonald eschewed the gritty big cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco where previous California detective writers had set their stories in favor of smaller, frequently pseudonymous locales, such as "Pacific Point" for La Jolla, or "Santa Teresa" (Santa Barbara). It would be a mistake, though, to assume that because Macdonald's novels take place in a more pleasant, suburban locale, that they lack depth. Natonal Public Radio, in a piece originally aired April 21, 2015 and entitled "Revisiting a Suburbia-Gone-Sour" mentioned the thematic influence Macdonald's novels have had on authors such as John Cheever, Tom Perrotta, and even the early seasons of television's MAD MEN. Other critics have commented favorably on the psychological depth of Macdonald's characters and the fact that his novels are a skillful blend of the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. As such, his plot resolutions depend as much on insight into the characters (and their families) who serve as his clients as much as logic.
The Library of America has done the reading world a big favor with yesterday's publication of four Ross Macdonald novels: THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE, THE BARBAROUS COAST, THE DOOMSTERS, and THE GALTON CASE represent MacDonald's finest, though some aficionados might have wished that the theme had been stretched to 1961 to include THE WYCHERLY WOMAN. The generous (900-page) volume also includes some of Macdonald's nonfiction writings and a generous appraisal by editor Tom Nolan. While LoA volumes of this kind tend to feature thinnish paper and smallish type, this new volume is a fine bargain, especially in hardbound issue. It is also happy that the Library of America, in this publication, has put its imprimatur upon Ross Macdonald as a "serious" American writer. While this new issue may not greatly boost Ross Macdonald's readership or literary reputation (one thinks of LoA's two-volume treatment of Dawn Powell nearly fifteen years ago, which did neither), it is greatly welcome.
February 1, 2017
Ross Macdonald is a master of the private eye novel and his protagonist Lew Archer is a great creation. Unfortunately, good as Macdonald and Archer are they don't quite make it into the very top echelons of the genre. I'm not sure why this is. Probably it's because I don't find Archer as memorable or as compelling as Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe.
January 23, 2017
The editor of this volume, Tom Nolan, had the difficult job of deciding which MacDonald novels not to include (I would have considered The Ivory Grin and The Drowning Pool over the first two titles that Nolan chose). However, these are all superb novels culminating in a masterpiece, The Galton Case.
I've read these novels over the past year. I got hold of a copy of the Library of America edition simply to read the supplementary essays by Macdonald. They are a worthwhile 35 pages of reading - essential for hard core fans, merely interesting for everyone else. In "The Writer as Detective Hero", MacDonald writes:
I've read these novels over the past year. I got hold of a copy of the Library of America edition simply to read the supplementary essays by Macdonald. They are a worthwhile 35 pages of reading - essential for hard core fans, merely interesting for everyone else. In "The Writer as Detective Hero", MacDonald writes:
I see plot as a vehicle of meaning. It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. Which means that the structure must be single, and intended.MacDonald's description of what he is aiming for in his endings will definitely change the way I look at his novels as I continue to devour them.
Read
April 28, 2020The Way Some People Die - 2.5/5
The Barbarous Coast - 3/5
The Doomsters - 4/5
The Galton Case - 4.5/5
The Barbarous Coast - 3/5
The Doomsters - 4/5
The Galton Case - 4.5/5
August 24, 2025
“Trouble is what the word detective means to me.”
And, Lew Archer is what the word detective means to ME!
“The Way Some People Die” - “I’ve seen pretty young girls like her take up with coyotes and live on carrion for the rest of their lives.” This one is a prodigal daughter case. With, “Thieves and murderers and confidence men.” And a mother that believes that her daughter can do no wrong. But she can. And she does. A good read with a solid pacing and decent twist!
“The Barbarous Coast” - Archer is hired to find a missing wife. Around and about the Malibu coast. A case of “remote-control murder”, a phrase I don’t know that I had heard before, but I like it!
“You lit the match that set the whole thing off. Lighting a match can be a crime if it sets fire to a building.”
“The Doomsters” - The Hallman family: father and mother dead under dubious circumstances, one son shot, the second being hunted. Probably my least favorite story in the series so far, but I did like learning more about Archer at the end. “I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.” “The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.”
“… that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.”
“The Galton Case” - Anthony Galton dropped out of sight over twenty years ago and now his family wants him found. He is somewhere between the Red Horse gang and one of the richest and oldest families in California. The bad guys are trying to commit the crime of the century, “…a multi-million-dollar enterprise with no actual harm done to anyone.” With the smooth, crisp writing, this may have been my favorite of the collection, even if I didn't totally love the twist at the end.
“Timor mortis,” he said. “The fear of death.”
“But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.”
And, Lew Archer is what the word detective means to ME!
“The Way Some People Die” - “I’ve seen pretty young girls like her take up with coyotes and live on carrion for the rest of their lives.” This one is a prodigal daughter case. With, “Thieves and murderers and confidence men.” And a mother that believes that her daughter can do no wrong. But she can. And she does. A good read with a solid pacing and decent twist!
“The Barbarous Coast” - Archer is hired to find a missing wife. Around and about the Malibu coast. A case of “remote-control murder”, a phrase I don’t know that I had heard before, but I like it!
“You lit the match that set the whole thing off. Lighting a match can be a crime if it sets fire to a building.”
“The Doomsters” - The Hallman family: father and mother dead under dubious circumstances, one son shot, the second being hunted. Probably my least favorite story in the series so far, but I did like learning more about Archer at the end. “I still don’t like to kill a man. It’s too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one.” “The current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough.”
“… that men and women were their own doomsters, the secret authors of their own destruction. You had to be very careful what you dreamed.”
“The Galton Case” - Anthony Galton dropped out of sight over twenty years ago and now his family wants him found. He is somewhere between the Red Horse gang and one of the richest and oldest families in California. The bad guys are trying to commit the crime of the century, “…a multi-million-dollar enterprise with no actual harm done to anyone.” With the smooth, crisp writing, this may have been my favorite of the collection, even if I didn't totally love the twist at the end.
“Timor mortis,” he said. “The fear of death.”
“But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.”
November 11, 2015
The Way Some People Die in this collection is the MacDonald novel that finally made me a convert, but not at the level of some friends of mine. I've had hardboiled friends who've even gone so far as to say MacDonald is better than Hammett or Chandler - there is even an essay included at the end of this collection where MacDonald explains how he's better & more relevant than Chandler!? Hubris, anyone? I feel like that opinion of your own writing is best left to others to write.
At any rate, I got " it" in The Way Some People Die. Clear, erudite writing, three dimensional characters dealing with ambiguous emotions. My problem with picking up an anthology like this is I get hooked and read it straight through, which for crime novels by the same author is not always a good idea. Similarities began to pop up quite a bit & by the last one, The Galton Case, it almost felt like a MacDonald pastiche but with overwrought plotting.
At any rate, I got " it" in The Way Some People Die. Clear, erudite writing, three dimensional characters dealing with ambiguous emotions. My problem with picking up an anthology like this is I get hooked and read it straight through, which for crime novels by the same author is not always a good idea. Similarities began to pop up quite a bit & by the last one, The Galton Case, it almost felt like a MacDonald pastiche but with overwrought plotting.
June 5, 2015
Interesting detective novels from the 1950s. Lew Archer is Maconald's detective and ,probably, alter ego. Much of The Galton Case derives from his upbringing in Canada and the US. Archer had no back story to tell us. This is like Law and Order; a murder and the footwork to solve it. I much prefer more contemporary detectives like Martin Beck and Easy Rawlins. Currently I'm reading teh Leonid McGill seriues from Walter Mosley. The PIs are more conflicted.
Currently reading
October 29, 2015I was happy to discover that the Library of America will be adding another Ross Macdonald volume in April 2016: Four Novels of the 1960s.
July 7, 2025
Fair Collection
As far as collections go, this is a good collection of some of MacDonald's stories from the 1950s. I read The Galton Case first and remember that least. Undoubtedly I had a good feeling after reading that story because I started reading more Lew Archer stories.
The good: The writing is good. If you're looking for something well written that you can follow along with the detective and solve the mystery as he tells the story, then this is for you. The age these early stories are written are of interest personally to me. They all take place in California and things are cheap; way before the built up California we know today.
The bad: At least three of these novels have murders committed by people who should be in a mental institution. This is too repetitive in my opinion. You could write one of these such stories and it would be unique and interesting; to write three or more of them is not. Another turn off to me is the constant mention of drugs. This was the 1950's. I don't think drugs were a problem back then to this extent. Maybe MacDonald was cutting new ground back then I don't know. Finally, Lew Archer is hit over the head all the time. John D MacDonald (another author), Travis McGee series suffers from the same problem. You can't have your main guy hit over the head this many times. This makes him more stupid in my opinion or at least careless. If the character actually got hit over the head this many times in real life, he'd shortly be suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
This hard cover book is constructed very well. The paper is of high quality. In addition to the four novels, this volume also includes the following short writings from MacDonald. Much of this was a bit high brow for me and rather boring:
- Letter to Alfred A Knopf. 1952. The letter seems to be in response to a request by Knopf for MacDonald to rewrite a book in the style of Raymond Chandler. MacDonald goes off and explains why he doesn't want to go there. He also talks about a title for the book which doesn't seem to be anything published.
- The Writer as Detective Hero. 1965. MacDonald writes about authors from Poe to Hammett and their methods of writing and their connection to the detective hero in their stories.
- Preface to Archer in Hollywood. 1967. No specific point here. MacDonald talks about his life and travels. Archer in Hollywood seems to be a collection of MacDonald stories.
- Writing the Galton Case 1969. Long winded. Seems to have been written for other writers.
- Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go 1977. Unknown purpose. Writes about his favorite writers again, Poe, Hammett, etc.
And also not written by MacDonald:
- A chronology of MacDonald's life. I skimmed this. This is pretty good. This publisher has created chronologies for other collections.
- Notes on the Texts. This is useful for a deeper understanding of each of the writings.
- Notes. As time goes by, understanding these ancient texts becomes more difficult. This explains references in the text to different things like popular perfume, etc. You could Google a lot of this but some things referenced undoubtedly may have no Google reference.
Shifting gears now and going to read something else.
As far as collections go, this is a good collection of some of MacDonald's stories from the 1950s. I read The Galton Case first and remember that least. Undoubtedly I had a good feeling after reading that story because I started reading more Lew Archer stories.
The good: The writing is good. If you're looking for something well written that you can follow along with the detective and solve the mystery as he tells the story, then this is for you. The age these early stories are written are of interest personally to me. They all take place in California and things are cheap; way before the built up California we know today.
The bad: At least three of these novels have murders committed by people who should be in a mental institution. This is too repetitive in my opinion. You could write one of these such stories and it would be unique and interesting; to write three or more of them is not. Another turn off to me is the constant mention of drugs. This was the 1950's. I don't think drugs were a problem back then to this extent. Maybe MacDonald was cutting new ground back then I don't know. Finally, Lew Archer is hit over the head all the time. John D MacDonald (another author), Travis McGee series suffers from the same problem. You can't have your main guy hit over the head this many times. This makes him more stupid in my opinion or at least careless. If the character actually got hit over the head this many times in real life, he'd shortly be suffering from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
This hard cover book is constructed very well. The paper is of high quality. In addition to the four novels, this volume also includes the following short writings from MacDonald. Much of this was a bit high brow for me and rather boring:
- Letter to Alfred A Knopf. 1952. The letter seems to be in response to a request by Knopf for MacDonald to rewrite a book in the style of Raymond Chandler. MacDonald goes off and explains why he doesn't want to go there. He also talks about a title for the book which doesn't seem to be anything published.
- The Writer as Detective Hero. 1965. MacDonald writes about authors from Poe to Hammett and their methods of writing and their connection to the detective hero in their stories.
- Preface to Archer in Hollywood. 1967. No specific point here. MacDonald talks about his life and travels. Archer in Hollywood seems to be a collection of MacDonald stories.
- Writing the Galton Case 1969. Long winded. Seems to have been written for other writers.
- Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go 1977. Unknown purpose. Writes about his favorite writers again, Poe, Hammett, etc.
And also not written by MacDonald:
- A chronology of MacDonald's life. I skimmed this. This is pretty good. This publisher has created chronologies for other collections.
- Notes on the Texts. This is useful for a deeper understanding of each of the writings.
- Notes. As time goes by, understanding these ancient texts becomes more difficult. This explains references in the text to different things like popular perfume, etc. You could Google a lot of this but some things referenced undoubtedly may have no Google reference.
Shifting gears now and going to read something else.
July 3, 2021
Issued for the centennial of Ross MacDonald’s birth (the pen name of Kenneth Millar), along with two decade-spanning companion volumes, Four Novels of the 1950s, collects four of MacDonald’s Lew Archer novels: The Way Some People Die, The Barbarous Coast, The Doomsters, and The Galton Case, supplemented with critical and personal essays and a letter to publisher Alfred A. Knopf in which he responds to pressure from the paperback publisher, Pocket Books, to make his books more action-oriented. The Way Some People Die begins as a missing persons case and involves organized crime, narcotics, and murder. The Barbarous Coast involves a search for a missing high diver and the cold case murder of a teenage girl. In The Doomsters, Archer is approached for help from an escaped mental patient, the heir of a valuable estate, which leads Archer to investigate the deaths of his parents, believed to be an accident and a suicide. In The Galton Case, a lawyer named Sable hires Lou to search for the estranged son of a dying woman, the heir to an oil and railroad fortune. Although stereotyped as a “hard boiled detective” writer, MacDonald’s fiction is more subtle than nuanced than is typical of the so-called “tough school” of detective fiction.
March 18, 2021
Another terrific read from Macdonald's early Lew Archer series. The plot has its twists and turns and the dialogue, character and scenery descriptions are imaginative, clever and engaging.
"I said: 'You're scared stiff aren't you?'
He tried to smile. The effect reminded of a device I read about once for making insane people feel happy. It consisted of a couple of hooks that raised the corners of the mouth into smiling position. Its beneficiaries were forced to smile, and this made then feel like smiling, at least that was the theory."
Archer is tenacious and in the search for the truth, and putting the pieces of the puzzle together which had been sprinkled throughout the mystery.
"I said: 'You're scared stiff aren't you?'
He tried to smile. The effect reminded of a device I read about once for making insane people feel happy. It consisted of a couple of hooks that raised the corners of the mouth into smiling position. Its beneficiaries were forced to smile, and this made then feel like smiling, at least that was the theory."
Archer is tenacious and in the search for the truth, and putting the pieces of the puzzle together which had been sprinkled throughout the mystery.
March 24, 2022
A very enjoyable omnibus of Archer novels.
I had never read any of these before. You can see Macdonald develop here. "The Way Some People Die" has a typical noir opening, with Archer hired for one thing that turns out to be less important than the "real" mystery that emerges in the course of his investigation.
My favorite of these was "The Doomsters." That one had a real dynamism that grabbed me on the first page and pulled me along to the ending, in which Archer has to confront his own responsibility for how things turned out. A very powerful mystery.
"The Barbarous Coast" and "The Galton Case" were both very good. I'm very glad I read these.
I had never read any of these before. You can see Macdonald develop here. "The Way Some People Die" has a typical noir opening, with Archer hired for one thing that turns out to be less important than the "real" mystery that emerges in the course of his investigation.
My favorite of these was "The Doomsters." That one had a real dynamism that grabbed me on the first page and pulled me along to the ending, in which Archer has to confront his own responsibility for how things turned out. A very powerful mystery.
"The Barbarous Coast" and "The Galton Case" were both very good. I'm very glad I read these.
February 15, 2022
Poe, Conan Doyle, Hammett, Chandler all prefigure Millar's "Lew Archer" novels. They are a pleasure to read not as detective fiction, but as a singular epic of ambivalent bildungsroman. The Ross Macdonald books are deeper than their forebears, usually with tidy plots (the Doomsters notwithstanding) and are motivated more by ideas and psychological posturing than by plot or character. Set pieces they are not. Their politics are dated (racially, economically, politically, technologically), but they are noble arts regardless and very undervalued by posterity. A good, even infectious read.
July 28, 2017
Great detective novels.
October 11, 2017
The Way Some People Die: 4 stars
The Barborous Coast: 4 stars
The Doomsters: 3.5 stars
The Galton Case: 5 stars
The Barborous Coast: 4 stars
The Doomsters: 3.5 stars
The Galton Case: 5 stars
May 19, 2019
Milton
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August 16, 2023Very worthwhile for fans of the genre, and comes with a couple of interesting essays
December 31, 2023
Really good books with a fins sense of character, plot and writing style. Can't recommend high enough.
June 3, 2016
Plot is important to me. I try to make my plots carry meaning, and this meaning such as it is determines and controls the movement of the story. I know I have a tendency to subordinate individual scenes to the overall intention, to make the book the unit of effect. Perhaps this needs some correction, without going to the opposite extreme. This opposite extreme is represented by Chandler, one of my masters with whose theory and practice I am in growing disagreement. For him any old plot will do -- most of his plots depend on the tired and essentially meaningless device of blackmail -- and he has stated that a good plot is one that makes for good scenes. So far from taking him as the last word and model in my field, which Pocket Books thinks I should do, it would seem -- I am interested in doing things in the mystery which Chandler didn't do, and probably couldn't.
His subject is the evilness of evil, his most characteristic achievement the short vivid scene of conflict between (conventional) evil and (what he takes to be) good. With all due respect for the power of these scenes and the remarkable intensity of his vision, I can't accept Chandler's vision of good and evil. It is conventional to the point of occasional old-maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism (Chandler hates all women and most men, reserving only lovable oldsters, boys and Marlowe for his affection), and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate. At least it strikes my mind that way. I owe a lot to Chandler (and more to Hammett), but it would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery. My literary range greatly exceeds his, and my approach to writing will not wear out so fast.
My subject is something like this: human error, and the ambivalence of motive. My interest is the exploration of lives. If my stories lack a powerful contrast between good and evil, as Pocket Books points out, it isn't mere inadvertence. I don't see things that way, and haven't since Blue City. Even in Blue City, you may recall, the victim of the murder and the father of the "hero" was also the source of corruption in the city. Because my theme is exploration, I employ a more open and I think subtler set of values than is usual; its background is sociological and psychological rather than theological. I chose the hardboiled convention in the first place because it seemed to offer both a market, and a structure with which almost anything could be done, a technique both difficult and free, adapted to my subject matter, and a field in which I might hope to combine the "popular" and the "sensitive" hero, and forge a style combining flexibility, literacy and depth with the solidity and eloquence of the American-colorful-colloquial. These have been my literary aims; my hope is to write "popular" novels which will not be inferior to "serious" novels. I have barely started.
His subject is the evilness of evil, his most characteristic achievement the short vivid scene of conflict between (conventional) evil and (what he takes to be) good. With all due respect for the power of these scenes and the remarkable intensity of his vision, I can't accept Chandler's vision of good and evil. It is conventional to the point of occasional old-maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism (Chandler hates all women and most men, reserving only lovable oldsters, boys and Marlowe for his affection), and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate. At least it strikes my mind that way. I owe a lot to Chandler (and more to Hammett), but it would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery. My literary range greatly exceeds his, and my approach to writing will not wear out so fast.
My subject is something like this: human error, and the ambivalence of motive. My interest is the exploration of lives. If my stories lack a powerful contrast between good and evil, as Pocket Books points out, it isn't mere inadvertence. I don't see things that way, and haven't since Blue City. Even in Blue City, you may recall, the victim of the murder and the father of the "hero" was also the source of corruption in the city. Because my theme is exploration, I employ a more open and I think subtler set of values than is usual; its background is sociological and psychological rather than theological. I chose the hardboiled convention in the first place because it seemed to offer both a market, and a structure with which almost anything could be done, a technique both difficult and free, adapted to my subject matter, and a field in which I might hope to combine the "popular" and the "sensitive" hero, and forge a style combining flexibility, literacy and depth with the solidity and eloquence of the American-colorful-colloquial. These have been my literary aims; my hope is to write "popular" novels which will not be inferior to "serious" novels. I have barely started.
March 28, 2020
It’s hard to talk about Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) without mentioning Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He took their influences and ran with them, developing Lew Archer into a formidable figure on the hard boiled landscape. It’s not hard, however, to talk about Hammett and Chandler without mentioning Macdonald. He did well extending the genre into the fifties and beyond, but he probably didn’t transcend it.
Fans of the earlier authors will most likely enjoy these stories and find familiar territory. Like Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe or Hammett’s Sam Spade, Lew Archer is a loner and a tough guy who makes some hard choices. He has some history and some baggage that shows here and there. He’s not unfamiliar with taking a stiff drink or a beating from thugs. He can dish it out too, at least as well as Mike Hammer. He has more introspection and self awareness than Spillane’s two fisted gumshoe, though.
This book collects four of Macdonald’s novels, “The Way Some People Die”, “The Barbarous Coast”, “The Doomsters”, and “The Galton Case”. As with all Library of America editions, it is a nice hardbound book with a cream colored slip cover and a bookmark ribbon. It includes their usual chronology of the author’s life and notes on the texts. It also has some ancillary writing that sheds some light on the author’s approach and motivations. It’s a nice package and a good introduction to Macdonald’s work.
Of the four novels, “The Galton Case” impresses me the most. That may be in part because it is the last and so the most recent in memory. It also may be in part, that by this point, Macdonald had come into a good groove with Archer. He writes with confidence and clarity. There is some real mystery to be solved and even at the end there are surprising turns. Archer has put all the pieces together at the conclusion, though it may still leave you wondering what happens next to some of the central characters. It may also leave you wanting more of Lew Archer. Fortunately, at this time Library of America has two more Macdonald collections and there may be more to come. He wrote eighteen Archer novels and nine short stories. Hopefully LOA will gather those as well.
Fans of the earlier authors will most likely enjoy these stories and find familiar territory. Like Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe or Hammett’s Sam Spade, Lew Archer is a loner and a tough guy who makes some hard choices. He has some history and some baggage that shows here and there. He’s not unfamiliar with taking a stiff drink or a beating from thugs. He can dish it out too, at least as well as Mike Hammer. He has more introspection and self awareness than Spillane’s two fisted gumshoe, though.
This book collects four of Macdonald’s novels, “The Way Some People Die”, “The Barbarous Coast”, “The Doomsters”, and “The Galton Case”. As with all Library of America editions, it is a nice hardbound book with a cream colored slip cover and a bookmark ribbon. It includes their usual chronology of the author’s life and notes on the texts. It also has some ancillary writing that sheds some light on the author’s approach and motivations. It’s a nice package and a good introduction to Macdonald’s work.
Of the four novels, “The Galton Case” impresses me the most. That may be in part because it is the last and so the most recent in memory. It also may be in part, that by this point, Macdonald had come into a good groove with Archer. He writes with confidence and clarity. There is some real mystery to be solved and even at the end there are surprising turns. Archer has put all the pieces together at the conclusion, though it may still leave you wondering what happens next to some of the central characters. It may also leave you wanting more of Lew Archer. Fortunately, at this time Library of America has two more Macdonald collections and there may be more to come. He wrote eighteen Archer novels and nine short stories. Hopefully LOA will gather those as well.
August 10, 2016
What a beautifully made book! Lovely to read with the notes & Other Writings. I now have a much better understanding of Ross Macdonald. It was a lot to read of him all at once (4 books) but I enjoyed it so much I reread The Galton Case even though I had read it before. I finished The Doomsters (which I loved for the idea of the Doomsters) & thought, 'welp, I'm done.' But I just turned the page & kept reading. I had forgotten the little details (I love my forgetful mind) & grokked the Case (& its author) much better this time. I'll have to look up some other Library of America editions.
September 1, 2016
The Galton Case *** – This is an excellent mystery and an excellent read – very worthy of its fame as one of MacDonald’s best books. Like his other books, it features literary references from T.S. Eliot to classical Greek mythology. It’s more than a mystery, though. It’s really the story of familial relations and their effect on us. And it has a great surprise ending.
December 7, 2015
I've read the first three of the four novel collection, and am thoroughly satisfied. I'm considering it finished, as I am taking a break from MacDonald, so as to not completely burn out on Lew Archer.
December 10, 2015
Great American detective writing presented by the Library of America (of which I am a huge fan), although I have to say that, despite (or maybe because of) MacDonald's claim to be the more cerebral of the two, I enjoyed the Library of America editions of Raymond Chandler even more. :)
December 17, 2022
Nice collection and gets progressively better
June 22, 2015
First taste of Macdonald. Excellent stuff, right up there with Goodis.
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June 19, 2015Fiction M135f 2015
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