Ross Macdonald

The three novels collected in this second volume in the Library of America Ross Macdonald edition represent for many readers the summit of American crime writing. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). Each reflects Macdonald's enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father's attempt to protect his daughter from "the complete and utter personal disaster" of marriage to a troubled drifter sends private detective Lew Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity. In The Chill, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself "a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past." Another hunt for a missing person--this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school--provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald's friend Eudora Welty considered "securely among your strongest and best . . . a beauty that just gets better." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

No matter what cases private eye Lew Archer takes on--a burglary, a runaway, or a disappeared person--the trail always leads to tangled family secrets and murder. Widely considered the heir to Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Archer dug up secrets and bodies in and around Los Angeles. Here, The Archer Files collects all the Lew Archer short stories ever published, along with thirteen unpublished "case notes" and a fascinating biographical profile of Archer by Edgar Award finalist Tom Nolan. Ross Macdonald's signature staccato prose is the real star throughout this collection, which is both a perfect introduction for the newcomer and a must-have for the Macdonald aficionado.

'I can't make your girl come back if she doesn't want to. I told you that on the phone' But something changes... 'The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American' William Goldman

On the home front, two wartime lovers reunite under a cloud of paranoia in this thriller from Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Ross MacdonaldIn 1937 Munich, an American must be careful when he smokes his pipe. Robert Branch, a careless academic, makes the mistake of lighting up when the Führer is about to begin a procession, and nearly gets pummeled for his mistake. Only the timely intervention of Ruth Esch, a flame-haired actress, saves him. So begins a month-long romance between East and West--a torrid affair that ends when the lovers make the mistake of defending a Jew, earning Branch a beating and Esch a trip to a concentration camp.Six years later, Esch escapes to Vichy and makes her way to Detroit. To her surprise, Branch is waiting for her. He is a professor, working for the war effort, and his paranoia about a spy inside the Motor City war board sours their reunion. Once again, a dangerous net is encircling these lovers--a reminder that, in this war, love always comes second to death.

Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case: is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill.The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at poverty, greed, murder and identity.Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

Lew Archer, world-weary private investigator, is hired by Larry and Irene Chalmers when they suspect that their troubled son Nick is involved in their own burglary. But when a fellow investigator - one who's been working with Nick - turns up dead, Archer soon realizes this isn't simply about some stolen loot. To help their son, Archer must uncover the truth about a kidnap years ago, and discover why the handgun from a decades-old killing apparently turns up at every new and terrible murder. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald exposes the damage families can cause one another in the name of love, lies and greed.Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

He was a son who hadn't known his father very well. It was a town shaken by a grisly murder--his father's murder. Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering. When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father's seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors. The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug-dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely. Now Johnny Weatherly was going to solve this murder--by pitting his rage, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.

Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of his parents, Senator Hallman and his wife Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint, but they've has been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid wealth. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty-dealing, the family seem to be on the receiving end of a karmic death-blow. With two dead already and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.Murder, madness and greed grace The Doomsters, where a tony fa ade masks the rot and corruption within.

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as 'crazy for men' and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

Las Cruces wasn't a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone's a victim.

In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands--including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written, Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his pre-decessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

As a mysterious fire rages through an affluent community in Southern California, Lew Archer tracks a missing--and possibly kidnapped--child and uncovers and entire secret history of wayward parents, wounded offspring, and murder. Along with its merciless suspense, The Underground Man possesses a moral vision as complex as that of a classic Greek tragedy.

All clues in the disappearance of a youngster at an exclusive reform school lead detective Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors rub shoulders with grifters and the occasional dead body. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

In The Chill a distraught young man hires private investigator Lew Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer.

When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who's run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. Black Money is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the untanned skin of Southern California's high society.

When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred--and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.