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Lew Archer #13–16
Four Later Novels: Black Money / The Instant Enemy / The Goodbye Look / The Underground Man
“Detective fiction,” Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) wrote, “can remind us that we are all underground men making a brief transit from darkness to darkness.” This third and final volume of Library of America’s definitive edition of Macdonald’s works shows him at his peak, penetrating the shadows and recesses of human behavior and transforming the detective novel into a literary vehicle for extraordinary psychological revelation.
In the four late masterworks collected here, the turmoil of Macdonald’s private life and the inequities, cruelties, and anxieties of the world around him become the seedbed for unforgettable stories whose coiling complexity leads toward explosive endings.
From his vantage point in Southern California—and through the eyes of his great creation, private eye Lew Archer—Macdonald 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 (1966), 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 (1968) 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 1960s.
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 (1969), 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 (1971) 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.”
In the four late masterworks collected here, the turmoil of Macdonald’s private life and the inequities, cruelties, and anxieties of the world around him become the seedbed for unforgettable stories whose coiling complexity leads toward explosive endings.
From his vantage point in Southern California—and through the eyes of his great creation, private eye Lew Archer—Macdonald 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 (1966), 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 (1968) 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 1960s.
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 (1969), 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 (1971) 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.”
902 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
4 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Ross Macdonald
158 books809 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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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 17, 2018
Another fine collection of MacDonald's detective stories. He doesn't write in the style of some of his predecessors, with arch phrases and memorable slang. His prose is much more straightforward, yet no less compelling than that of Goodis, Hammett, Chandler, and others. But his characters are fully-fleshed out and often quite deeply conflicted. If you wish to graduate from the pulp-style writers of mystery fiction of the 20's, 30's, and 40's, here's as good a starting point as any.
August 13, 2024
The more you read Macdonald the more you like him. Terrific. As always, it's interesting reading these famous L.A. detective stories. My mind is in the black-and-white movies, but of course it's in sunny southern California. You also realize things like the counterculture, the Vietnam War and the like that have gotten so much attention over the years were not the all consuming things for people in the U.S. in the 1960s. In fact, in much of Macdonald's world it's not even a factor. Just as today most people aren't affected by the pro-terrorist crowds on campus - most people in the world are too busy trying to live their lives and make a go of it to obsess or think about the nutty fringe.
And what a time that was! At one point, Archer is clipped by a bullet and winds up in a Pasadena hospital. His emergency surgery and overnight stay there? $170!! Today, that would be like $90-$100,000.
Here are some notes on "The Goodbye Look": Archer is in Pacific Point, where we found him in "The Chill." Archer has flashes of humor. At one point, Archer goes to a hotel: "I parked in front of the motor hotel and went into the office. The gray-haired woman behind the desk gave me a bland experienced glance that took in my age and weight, my probable income and credit rating, and whether I was married."
There are also lovely touches of writing, as when Macdonald says some moved "with enormous unwillingness, like a man wading into a cold, deepening sea."
We don't really know any of these detectives - Marlow, Archer, the Continental Op (Connelly has broken with that tradition, giving readers much more of Bosch) - but we learn things in glimpses. Here, Archer is in La Jolla and he mentions what draws him to the work. "The life is its own reward," I countered. "I like to move into people's lives and then move out again. Living with one set of people in one place used to bore me."
"That isn't real motivation. I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"
"I have a secret passion for mercy," I said. "But justice is what keeps happening to people."
I'm not sure exactly what that last bit means, but it's thoughtful. Later, Archer discusses another character, Smitheram: "My feeling about Smitheram, anger deepened now by suspicion, got in the way of any feeling for his wife. And it started me thinking along less pleasant lines: the possibility that I might use her to get back at him, or get at him. I pushed these thoughts away but they crouched there like unwanted children in the shadows, waiting for the lights to be turned out."
And here are some notes on "Black Money":
We get a snippet about Archer right away. In the opening graph he parks at a swanky tennis club which "made me feel like less of a dropout from affluent society." Did Archer come from affluent society? Both Macdonald and Chandler love to throw out Ivy League references, and both Archer and Marlow have *some* learning, it's never clear just how much.
Another snippet much later: "Then the whisk was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway."
There are touches of Macdonald's humor. At one point Archer "waited in a high-backed Spanish chair which Torquemada made with his own hands."
Millar (Macdonald's real name) and his wife got into birding and it shows - Archer is constantly noting different birds.
We also get touches of Macdonald's philosophy, which can be pretty bleak. It's clear, however, he really believed things like this: "There are always secret motivations in life - urges and revenges and desires that people don't admit even to themselves." How many people is that true for? Or, in another instance, Archer muses "The present couldn't alter the past...but it could make you painfully aware of its mysteries and meanings." A few graphs later - "Past and present were coming together. I had a moment of claustrophobia in the phone booth, as if I was caught between converging walls."
And Archer is always getting sized up by women. Here, "the cashier of Mercy Hospital had eyes like calculators. She peered at me through the bars of her cage as if she was estimating my income, subtracting my expenses, and coming up with a balance in the red."
Nice writing touches, too, throughout. "I adjusted my windshield visor against the light as we started down the hill. The city below resembled a maze, put together by an inspired child: it looked both intricate and homemade. Beyond it lay the changing blue mystery of the sea."
"Black Money" also gives us one of the most complete views of Archer and how he sees his work:
"Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on."
"There's no money in that, is there?"
"Money isn't the only thing in life."
"That's what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?"
"I wouldn't say so. I'm working on not being a do-badder."
She gave me a puzzled look. "I don't get you, Archer. What's your angle?"
"I like people, and I try to be of some service."
"And that adds up to a life?"
"It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time."
And what a time that was! At one point, Archer is clipped by a bullet and winds up in a Pasadena hospital. His emergency surgery and overnight stay there? $170!! Today, that would be like $90-$100,000.
Here are some notes on "The Goodbye Look": Archer is in Pacific Point, where we found him in "The Chill." Archer has flashes of humor. At one point, Archer goes to a hotel: "I parked in front of the motor hotel and went into the office. The gray-haired woman behind the desk gave me a bland experienced glance that took in my age and weight, my probable income and credit rating, and whether I was married."
There are also lovely touches of writing, as when Macdonald says some moved "with enormous unwillingness, like a man wading into a cold, deepening sea."
We don't really know any of these detectives - Marlow, Archer, the Continental Op (Connelly has broken with that tradition, giving readers much more of Bosch) - but we learn things in glimpses. Here, Archer is in La Jolla and he mentions what draws him to the work. "The life is its own reward," I countered. "I like to move into people's lives and then move out again. Living with one set of people in one place used to bore me."
"That isn't real motivation. I know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?"
"I have a secret passion for mercy," I said. "But justice is what keeps happening to people."
I'm not sure exactly what that last bit means, but it's thoughtful. Later, Archer discusses another character, Smitheram: "My feeling about Smitheram, anger deepened now by suspicion, got in the way of any feeling for his wife. And it started me thinking along less pleasant lines: the possibility that I might use her to get back at him, or get at him. I pushed these thoughts away but they crouched there like unwanted children in the shadows, waiting for the lights to be turned out."
And here are some notes on "Black Money":
We get a snippet about Archer right away. In the opening graph he parks at a swanky tennis club which "made me feel like less of a dropout from affluent society." Did Archer come from affluent society? Both Macdonald and Chandler love to throw out Ivy League references, and both Archer and Marlow have *some* learning, it's never clear just how much.
Another snippet much later: "Then the whisk was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway."
There are touches of Macdonald's humor. At one point Archer "waited in a high-backed Spanish chair which Torquemada made with his own hands."
Millar (Macdonald's real name) and his wife got into birding and it shows - Archer is constantly noting different birds.
We also get touches of Macdonald's philosophy, which can be pretty bleak. It's clear, however, he really believed things like this: "There are always secret motivations in life - urges and revenges and desires that people don't admit even to themselves." How many people is that true for? Or, in another instance, Archer muses "The present couldn't alter the past...but it could make you painfully aware of its mysteries and meanings." A few graphs later - "Past and present were coming together. I had a moment of claustrophobia in the phone booth, as if I was caught between converging walls."
And Archer is always getting sized up by women. Here, "the cashier of Mercy Hospital had eyes like calculators. She peered at me through the bars of her cage as if she was estimating my income, subtracting my expenses, and coming up with a balance in the red."
Nice writing touches, too, throughout. "I adjusted my windshield visor against the light as we started down the hill. The city below resembled a maze, put together by an inspired child: it looked both intricate and homemade. Beyond it lay the changing blue mystery of the sea."
"Black Money" also gives us one of the most complete views of Archer and how he sees his work:
"Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on."
"There's no money in that, is there?"
"Money isn't the only thing in life."
"That's what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?"
"I wouldn't say so. I'm working on not being a do-badder."
She gave me a puzzled look. "I don't get you, Archer. What's your angle?"
"I like people, and I try to be of some service."
"And that adds up to a life?"
"It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time."
December 24, 2021
I first read Ross Macdonald when I graduated from college in the Eighties. I liked a few, but I basically liked other private eye novels better.
Now, decades later, I appreciate Macdonald more. Lew Archer pierces long-festering problems and has a sympathy for the damaged people he comes across. These are not "fun" novels, or, rather, they are not escapist. They are about young people who have been damaged by older people and the negative consequences of lies and valuing money more than people. Lew Archer is the guy who tears off the scabs, leads to the punishment of the guilty, and tries to help the damaged.
All four of these are good. I think I liked "The Goodbye Look" the best, although there is no huge gap in quality between the four.
I will probably try to find the other two Library of America volumes of Macdonald.
Now, decades later, I appreciate Macdonald more. Lew Archer pierces long-festering problems and has a sympathy for the damaged people he comes across. These are not "fun" novels, or, rather, they are not escapist. They are about young people who have been damaged by older people and the negative consequences of lies and valuing money more than people. Lew Archer is the guy who tears off the scabs, leads to the punishment of the guilty, and tries to help the damaged.
All four of these are good. I think I liked "The Goodbye Look" the best, although there is no huge gap in quality between the four.
I will probably try to find the other two Library of America volumes of Macdonald.
July 7, 2025
There is not an American writer whose prose I enjoy more than Macdonald's. These "later"novels are gems, and Lew Archer is at his mature best in them. In these uncertain times, the sense of loss of collective identity that permeates these stories has resonated deeply with me.
February 25, 2019
Merciful, good-hearted intents, very scant drops of art; only relative depth, with exceptions (the most important ones the notes on an owl and mud hens in The Instant Enemy and on unliving witnesses in The Underground Man.
Millar (or "MacDonald" how he pen-named himself to give his spouse Margaret Millar priority over himself, developed in its two later works here the odd behaviour to at the same time portray women truthfully (as he did everything else) and give them objectivity-indifferent preferential treatment.
This weighs down the afore-mentioned slight art and introduces a jarring element of disharmony in it.
The trend will worsen in his two last novels not printed in this volume.
Millar (or "MacDonald" how he pen-named himself to give his spouse Margaret Millar priority over himself, developed in its two later works here the odd behaviour to at the same time portray women truthfully (as he did everything else) and give them objectivity-indifferent preferential treatment.
This weighs down the afore-mentioned slight art and introduces a jarring element of disharmony in it.
The trend will worsen in his two last novels not printed in this volume.
November 8, 2025
I’ve read seven or eight of MacDonald’s novels and I’ve come to a few (perhaps obvious) conclusions. MacDonald’s mysteries are really family dramas – deeply dysfunctional and sometimes deadly families, but families all the same. The murders, kidnappings, blackmails, etc., are secondary to the underlying family issue. They are the effects, the ripples. The family is fate – undeniable and unstoppable, inescapable and suffocating.
And people have multiple identities. The MacDonald mystery hinges on discovering a true identity, pulling away the mask. Find that person (or persons), and the mystery is typically solved with a climatic reveal at the end.
MacDonald's detective, Archer, doesn’t so much solve cases using his brilliant wit, he wears them down. He doesn’t see a clue that the reader and everyone else misses, instead he doggedly follows every clue, shadows every suspect/witness and sits on every fact – pulling away layer after layer until that climatic reveal unfolds itself.
MacDonald’s writing is good, and he keeps the plot clicking. There are not too many dull moments. There are plot holes, but most mysteries have them. It’s best not to think about them too deeply.
I highly recommend him to the lover of mysteries.
*** Spoiler Alerts ***
The Goodbye Look *** – This is the novel in which Archer famously says, “I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
This is an entertaining read and like any good mystery, it’s hard to put down once you start. This story is a bit complicated. It’s hard to keep track of all the Chalmers, Tuttwells, Swains, Rawlinsons and Randolphs. Writing down the peoples' names and making a family tree would helpful during your read. But do it in pencil … (a clue!).
The whole story unravels from Archer being asked to investigate the theft of a gold box. It’s not particularly valuable. There was nothing of value in it. And by the end of the novel, I’m not sure why the Chalmer’s even cared that it was stolen. But that starts everything. (By the way, Archer finds the box pretty quickly but the case proceeds.)
There are of course many questions I had. Why did the Chalmers hire Archer in the first place or allow him to continue? Why was the first fake robbery performed? When did Archer know the truth about Chalmer’s WWII service? (The scene at the psychiatric clinic was pretty fortuitous/contrived.) Why are the letters and their info sometimes treated as fact and sometimes as fiction? Wasn’t the gun in the safe when the box was stolen?
Anyway, a good, entertaining read. (05/18)
The Underground Man *** – This doesn’t have the typical detective start (“A dame came walking in my office ….”) – it kind of spills out in an entertaining fashion. And unlike most of MacDonald’s books, the murderer(s) were only half his client. (Though I pretty much knew who it was before the end of the novel.)
The plot moves quickly and I was pulled along. As with other MacDonald novels, I was confused by the all the men – I couldn’t keep them straight. A person should really write down the names of the characters and their relationships if you want to avoid confusion. After a while, they all kind of blend together. But making sense of it is not really the point, is it?
The story revolves around a man who is murdered and buried (thus the Underground Man) while searching to find out what happened to his father. The murdered man's son is kidnapped at the time of the murder, and Archer is on the case. It’s largely a story of family dysfunction.
Unlike MacDonald's other novels, there’s no big revelation at the end. There isn’t some hidden clue that only Archer sees that leads to the unraveling of the case. It is his simple doggedness that finds the killer, and the reader is along for the ride.
The writing is good – and he uses the word “deliquescent,” which I found interesting and had to look up. I didn’t see any holes in the plot, and the characters were pretty believable. Archer is certainly sympathetic. But there is nothing that makes this novel stand out from other mysteries. Just a good solid read. (05/20)
The Instant Enemy *** -- This is another engrossing read. It was very hard to put it down. I’ll repeat the advice above that I always fail to do myself: Write down the character names and their relationships (i.e., a family tree). You’ll need it!
Unlike MacDonald’s other mysteries, this has a bit of a surprise ending as someone’s true name is revealed. In most cases, Archer dogs a case so long that the facts become apparent to him and reader at the same time. In this novel, Archer has a surprise to share at the end.
In typical Archer fashion, he solves the primary case right away, but he’s pulled deeper into other related crimes and comes out then other end beat down and poorer.
Overall, another very good Archer mystery. If you like his other works, you’ll enjoy this as well. (11/25)
And people have multiple identities. The MacDonald mystery hinges on discovering a true identity, pulling away the mask. Find that person (or persons), and the mystery is typically solved with a climatic reveal at the end.
MacDonald's detective, Archer, doesn’t so much solve cases using his brilliant wit, he wears them down. He doesn’t see a clue that the reader and everyone else misses, instead he doggedly follows every clue, shadows every suspect/witness and sits on every fact – pulling away layer after layer until that climatic reveal unfolds itself.
MacDonald’s writing is good, and he keeps the plot clicking. There are not too many dull moments. There are plot holes, but most mysteries have them. It’s best not to think about them too deeply.
I highly recommend him to the lover of mysteries.
*** Spoiler Alerts ***
The Goodbye Look *** – This is the novel in which Archer famously says, “I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”
This is an entertaining read and like any good mystery, it’s hard to put down once you start. This story is a bit complicated. It’s hard to keep track of all the Chalmers, Tuttwells, Swains, Rawlinsons and Randolphs. Writing down the peoples' names and making a family tree would helpful during your read. But do it in pencil … (a clue!).
The whole story unravels from Archer being asked to investigate the theft of a gold box. It’s not particularly valuable. There was nothing of value in it. And by the end of the novel, I’m not sure why the Chalmer’s even cared that it was stolen. But that starts everything. (By the way, Archer finds the box pretty quickly but the case proceeds.)
There are of course many questions I had. Why did the Chalmers hire Archer in the first place or allow him to continue? Why was the first fake robbery performed? When did Archer know the truth about Chalmer’s WWII service? (The scene at the psychiatric clinic was pretty fortuitous/contrived.) Why are the letters and their info sometimes treated as fact and sometimes as fiction? Wasn’t the gun in the safe when the box was stolen?
Anyway, a good, entertaining read. (05/18)
The Underground Man *** – This doesn’t have the typical detective start (“A dame came walking in my office ….”) – it kind of spills out in an entertaining fashion. And unlike most of MacDonald’s books, the murderer(s) were only half his client. (Though I pretty much knew who it was before the end of the novel.)
The plot moves quickly and I was pulled along. As with other MacDonald novels, I was confused by the all the men – I couldn’t keep them straight. A person should really write down the names of the characters and their relationships if you want to avoid confusion. After a while, they all kind of blend together. But making sense of it is not really the point, is it?
The story revolves around a man who is murdered and buried (thus the Underground Man) while searching to find out what happened to his father. The murdered man's son is kidnapped at the time of the murder, and Archer is on the case. It’s largely a story of family dysfunction.
Unlike MacDonald's other novels, there’s no big revelation at the end. There isn’t some hidden clue that only Archer sees that leads to the unraveling of the case. It is his simple doggedness that finds the killer, and the reader is along for the ride.
The writing is good – and he uses the word “deliquescent,” which I found interesting and had to look up. I didn’t see any holes in the plot, and the characters were pretty believable. Archer is certainly sympathetic. But there is nothing that makes this novel stand out from other mysteries. Just a good solid read. (05/20)
The Instant Enemy *** -- This is another engrossing read. It was very hard to put it down. I’ll repeat the advice above that I always fail to do myself: Write down the character names and their relationships (i.e., a family tree). You’ll need it!
Unlike MacDonald’s other mysteries, this has a bit of a surprise ending as someone’s true name is revealed. In most cases, Archer dogs a case so long that the facts become apparent to him and reader at the same time. In this novel, Archer has a surprise to share at the end.
In typical Archer fashion, he solves the primary case right away, but he’s pulled deeper into other related crimes and comes out then other end beat down and poorer.
Overall, another very good Archer mystery. If you like his other works, you’ll enjoy this as well. (11/25)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews