In Ross Macdonald's novels, the past is always falling in on top of the present. Lew Archer, a wise, tired, divorced and lonely private eye, is hired to investigate a theft or a kidnapping or the disappearance of a child, and immediately, as if released by Archer's appearance on the scene, murky old cats begin to leap out of poorly sealed bags. Archer uncovers guilt wherever he goes, and his job, once the cats are all out and howling, is to put them together into a theory, to tie the past to the present, and to catch the whole case in what Macdonald calls, in an early novel, "the final amber." In Macdonald's new book, "The Blue Hammer," Archer tracks the past more obsessively than ever, and the result is the best work Macdonald has done in a number of years….

All detective fiction is fairly theological, given to displays of ultimate coherence, but what interests Archer is the first hint that there may be a coherence….

"I was in trouble, and Lew Archer got me out of it," Macdonald wrote of his early career. Archer, a figure he could hide behind, rescued him from an autobiographical novel and "sloppy feelings and groping prose." The resulting work was "The Moving Target," published in 1949, and Archer has helped Macdonald to nineteen novels since then. A few years ago he seemed to have got Macdonald back into trouble, and "Sleeping Beauty" (1973) was full of sloppy feelings and groping prose, and Archer was offering shabby and easy consolations to himself and others….

I'm happy to report that Archer and Macdonald, in "The Blue Hammer," have pulled themselves together and are out of trouble….

The risk of writing novel after novel within the same convention is that you will come to understand your methods too well, and your preoccupations and your style will then turn simply into a program or a recipe…. [There is, perhaps] an excess of self-consciousness, but in "The Blue Hammer," it is not at all a crippling excess, and this intricate tale of multiple murder and transposed identities moves fast and is full of surprises. There is one flaw in it, and I think I am not giving too much of the story away if I say what it is, since it arises from what is a sort of occupational hazard for writers of detective fiction…. [In] "The Blue Hammer," even the least suspicious of readers is going to be ahead of Archer, who is still waiting for the earth to move, waiting to make his first connection.