[Ross Macdonald's] novels are well-built, suspenseful, and easy both to read and enjoy. His best work gives equal weight to invention and execution. His intellectual power, social conscience, and bright, crisp style promote both impact and resonance. He has something to say, knows how to say it, and deserves to be heard. (p. 1)

A good example of his ability to write books that everybody can read inheres in his treatment of sex. He never denies the force of sex; sex always plays a large part in the troubled lives he depicts. But because erotic descriptions would cut the range of his readership, they never appear in his work. Nor does he let his preference for searching out criminal causes, rather than merely recording crime's sensations, outrank his sense of mission as a storyteller…. [He] translates motive into both physical and psychological act. In depicting the inner man, he does not forget the outer man—how he looks and what he does. He tells how characters have become the way they are; he reviews his main issues; he will remind you of the main currents of his sometimes highly complex plot. Though most thrillers start quickly, his set their own pace, adding characters and information when both reader and plot are ready for them.

Thus the novels give a great deal—action and credibility, sound plotting and something to think about: the meaning and the mechanism of crime. The crime points to serious issues. Almost all his work shows how far society at large, the family, and the individual have veered from what they should be. The idea is neither original nor profound. Ross Macdonald's strength lies not in idea but in his moral seriousness and power to convert idea into sharply observed and well-integrated details. He convinces us, through his artistry, of both the complexity and mystery of life. While persuading us that life is full of meaning, he does not define that meaning; rather, he invests detective fiction with a psychological dimension that fits well with its traditionally complex plot. More interested in private than in public crime, he uses psychology rather than applied science to probe motives and causes. This turning-away both from the gadgetry of the novel of international intrigue and the secular rationalism of the 'tec-yarn helps him reveal his characters through speech and action. (pp. 1-2)

Ross Macdonald does not analyze or explore motives. He shows, instead, the effects of deeply seated, sometimes obsessional, motives. Characters reveal themselves, if not at their worst, then at their most deeply surprised and tested. What will these nerve-raked souls do next? Who will be their next victims? Ross Macdonald conveys a sense of untold menace lurking behind the reported action. The bipolar pull of conscious and unconscious forces both energizes and controls the blend—the dark subject-matter of the novels resonating against a bright, limber style and Kenneth Millar's use of both a penname and a persona, in his narrator-detective Lew Archer. The tensional field of Ross Macdonald's art hums with imaginative possibilities. (p. 2)

Though Ross Macdonald links detection to psychology, he ignores criminal pathology. Crime in Ross Macdonald is usually murder; its motive, always personal and specific. Each book has only one killer, but he will kill three or four times. His motives? Gain and self-protection. Though the first victim dies because he stands between his murderer and something his murderer wants, the other ones die because they have incriminating information…. [The] killer cannot stop killing.

Ross Macdonald works harder to justify the motives of murder than to supply a conventional ending, where the murderer is caught after a setting-forth of the evidence. He cares about telling a good story because he cares about people—even killers and thieves…. Treating characters with respect, the Archer novels portray wrongdoers but, in recent years especially, no villains. Nobody chooses evil. Violence isn't simple; nor does it lend itself to moral absolutes…. (p. 3)

Ross Macdonald can be rightly accused of stretching probability past the breaking point and also of relying upon contrivances to resolve major issues. Examples to support the charge of implausibility come easily: Archer's habit of eavesdropping on conversations that just happen to deal directly with an important aspect of the case he's investigating; an identity-switch involving two women who look alike; the killing of the Most Likely Suspect soon after he rouses suspicion; the obligatory scene near the end where charges are made, evidence is brought forth, and the killer confesses….

These stratagems, or staples, while not fresh, are usually freshly perceived. What is more, they fit well with both Ross Macdonald's use of narrative form and his overall imaginative intent. Though he documents his settings realistically, Ross Macdonald is not a realist. (p. 4)

The novels magnify rather than imitate or copy. Highly compressed, they are metaphors for stress. The characters stand larger than life, and the crises that claw them would wreck most of us. According to Ross Macdonald, his novels do not break away from reality so much as give a poetic documentary…. Though living in the twilight of faith, Ross Macdonald's characters believe certain truths worth living and fighting—even, sometimes, worth killing—for. These truths are given in everyday experience. Nor are they described in night language, dream symbolism, or hallucination. Though the novels use the same filial-sexual materials as Joyce in the Circe ("Nighttown") section of Ulysses, Ross Macdonald writes objective narratives in straightforward prose. His style obeys the natural controls of conventional syntax and word choice. The inner world of his characters is intelligible. His plots, though full of strange meanings, are continuous. Without trivializing the complex process of causation, the plots transcribe bizarre events accurately.

But, crackling with ingenious twists and turns, they do not develop simply…. A relentless interior logic and a carefully regulated tempo controls the novels. At the same time, the energy building from their robust style, Archer's moral sympathy, and the mood of desperation cast by murder make them human dramas rather than technical diversions. Their strength stems chiefly from their dramatic force—an intensification of existence. Their gyrating plots mesh well with the larger-than-life impressions created by the characters and their crises. The abundance in each book imparts a sense of peopled space, even, in view of the pent-up energies driving the characters on, of overflowing life. The conjuction of Ross Macdonald's plots with the human drives impelling them also dramatizes today's leading concept, in psychology as well as in literature, of the city as maze. (p. 5)

Aesthetically, historically, and socially, Ross Macdonald belongs in the private-eye tradition of pulp crime fiction; early Archer is as much the hard-boiled dick as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. (p. 6)

Ross Macdonald's other work adapts the novel of English village life to American social dynamics. Murder in Ross Macdonald is never ideological or crudely mercenary. The killer will come from the same social set, maybe the same family or street, as his victim and the other suspects.

Archer must find the connection between killer and victim(s). Both the openness and the mobility of America today make his job different from that of the English gentleman-sleuth of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham…. Although Archer's search for the connecting principle can take him twenty-five years into the past, once he finds it his case virtually solves itself…. (p. 7)

Like other good detective writers, [Ross Macdonald] distributes suspicion evenly among the suspects; he displays his clues clearly, so that the reader has the same chance as Archer to solve the mystery; he reasons from the clues. But most of these clues do not come from close study of the physical evidence…. Usually, he reasons a priori from psychological patterns. His clues are based on behavioral rather than material evidence. Any crime occurring during his investigations comes from an earlier one and may cause others later on…. Logical analysis helps Archer less than a generous heart and an imaginative grasp of the moral complexities of daily life….

Finding criminal impulses in all [people, Ross Macdonald] shortens the moral distance between murderer and victim, even between investigator and suspect; a popular murder-motive in his book is blackmail. Because we are all capable of crime, he extends both charity and moral sympathy to wrongdoers. This tenderness gives him more heart-knowledge than any of his counterparts today—not only in the area of the British detective story but also in that of the hard-boiled private eye, reaching all the way from Hammett to Mickey Spillane. (p. 8)

Evil does not win out in Ross Macdonald. The many last-chapter confessions, besides making for artistic symmetry, relax psychic strain. The killers feel relieved, first, to unload their guilt and shame and, next, to stop killing. Despite the greed and violence they describe, the Archer novels often taper to quiet, even peaceful, conclusions. Yet the fast-changing society the novels accept tallies well with the hard-boiled tradition, which is where most readers correctly place them. (pp. 8-9)

Ross Macdonald is one of America's few male novelists, let alone male crime writers, who use women as major characters. What interests him more than the hardiness of the Leatherstocking hero is the egalitarianism stretching from the eighteenth century to our day. The carrier of this tradition is spoken language. "Democracy is as much a language as it is a place," said Ross Macdonald in 1966. Archer's terse, middle-register speaking style confirms his freedom and equality. He communicates easily with witnesses, understanding them and being understood in turn. His street language subsumes both tower and gutter; down-and-outers and college deans come within his linguistic purview. A man who starts out knowing nothing and who knows only what people tell him, he has mastered, in his clear, straightforward speech, the basic working principle of his trade.

And so has his creator. Both the form and the build of a detective novel depend on the give-and-take of dialogue, the checking and rechecking of witnesses' stories, and the exchange of information among investigators. Thus Ross Macdonald writes in an oral, rather than in a literary, register. Fiction, he claims, should be written "more or less" in the rhythms and vocabulary of spoken language…. (p. 10)

Archer's ex parte role makes him more of a deus ex machina than a principal. Though his moral sympathy helps the later Archer cope with banality and grime, his accommodation is not tragic. He doesn't suffer enough and, by withholding both moral and emotional response, doesn't share any heightened perception with us…. Moreover, any literary form leaning as heavily as detective fiction does on dialogue comes under the aegis of social comedy…. Ross Macdonald excels in the skills that count most in social comedy—quicksilver dialogue, trim, inclusive plotting, and the creation of characters who need no reintroducing. The people and their problems range along the arc of comedy. Though Ross Macdonald looks deeply into character, he does not give many-sided pictures; the crimes energizing the plots call for a sharpening rather than a development of character. Character pre-exists Archer; instead of developing or changing, it struggles to survive. Variety comes from the range of character-types; each figure in a novel differs from all the others in age, job, and social-level. (pp. 13-14)

Ross Macdonald's sociological nightmares describe the pitfalls of new world energy. His characters don't understand freedom because they don't respect the freedom of others. Their freebooting individualism, a romantic perversion of the Protestant spirit, overrides secular, scriptural, and moral law. I feel, therefore, I am, is their guiding principle. What they feel most keenly, in Ross Macdonald's best work, is the loss of security; insecurity charges the novels with crisis. Characters deny the reality of both facts and persons; they twist, suppress, even kill. Violence becomes the natural outlet for insecurity; when force is the only social control, chaos, isolation, and despair follow soon after. (p. 16)

Psychology in Ross Macdonald, criminal or otherwise, does not reach us as applied doctrine…. Ross Macdonald uses Freud as an idea-bank. Much of the theory he bypasses as artistically unusable, unsuitable, or irrelevant. What he keeps he varies, even reverses, depending on his needs. Freud's influence, though strong, is implicit and absorbed. The novels do not read like psychoanalytic case studies, and Ross Macdonald does not explore character with the cold eye of the analyst. The hard purity of the doctrine is warmed and reshaped by the artist's imagination, moral charity, and sensitivity to the technical demands of his art. (pp. 21-2)

[Ross Macdonald's] belief in the inescapability of the past has led him to seat his characters in the family. The family, even if it encompasses only two generations, gives him access to one of the few surviving pasts in the instant society of California. This continuity generates force. The family is the greatest single influence on character in his fiction. (p. 23)

The moral equilibrium created by the past and the toil of solid literary craftsmanship weld the rich variety of the Archer novels. Little more can be asked of any novelist than that he control his deeply perceived and clearly realized materials. This strenuously achieved razor-balance of penetration and control, effortless look and all, has made Ross Macdonald an important novelist. (p. 36)

He has the Dickensian gusto—the stamina, curiosity, and genius for organization—both to create a megalopolis and to pull it together. For all its variety and sweep, California rides easily on the narrative rigging of the Archer books. The job of communicating with the reader claims equal rank with subject and idea—that which is being communicated. The bestowing of equal priority upon different narrative elements is, in fact, one of his leading aesthetic tenets…. Ross Macdonald's well-built books glow with bright interscenic commentary. We are never put into a room without knowing how we got there and what the room looks like. The room takes shape through well-observed details carefully chosen both for atmosphere and idea. The rundown frame shacks, the stucco ranch houses, and the elegant mansions Archer visits have the same authenticity. Often Ross Macdonald will insert a retrospective passage which reviews and summaries the plot for the reader's benefit. (pp. 36-7)

At the top of their form, [the Archer novels] vibrate with suspense, undertones, and classical inevitability. The success of most crime fiction depends on plot, and nobody builds a plot more ingeniously than Ross Macdonald…. Everything before [the conclusion] is so unforced that the resolution surprises us. The form of an Archer stays hidden until the novel is over….

The beauty of the narrative construction lies more in its process than in its conclusion. The inclusiveness of the dialectic—the many-sided plot and Archer's method of finding out and then using information—depicts the vitality of life. The cases move forward with the precision, gait, and confidence of Bleak House or a Simenon. They make us feel we are in the hands of a master; we may be tricked but not mocked. (p. 37)

[Ross Macdonald's] style has flaws and blemishes, some of which come from his use of stage, rather than narrative, techniques of plot-structure. These, built into the brickwork of the novels, could not be smoothed without a major dismantling. The novel is not a stage play; it uses different rhetorical conventions to generate a quite different illusion of life. The need for the detective to collect evidence from many different people crams most detective fiction with more dialogue than it can bear. Ross Macdonald, too, has a topheavy proportion of dialogue to narration. This imbalance squeezes the characters into the shrill, small spotlight of present time, a handicap offset in part by the presence of old letters, old photographs, and old people…. A flaw just as serious is that the characters sometimes talk like novelists. The too-sharp eye for detail, the encompassing summation, the measured speech—these all violate the realism of spoken language. (p. 44)

An aesthetic contribution … that reaches past the purview of detective fiction, is … [the use] of Archer as an "open narrator." The open narrator is a corollary of the continuing detective. He is easily recognizable and needs no reintroducing; since we know basically what to expect from him, we can watch his personality unfold in its own good time without growing anxious…. By adding to him in each book, Ross Macdonald keeps options alive; Archer reveals himself over many novels and remains fluid, besides. As with Anthony Powell's Nicholas Jenkins (A Dance to the Music of Time) and C. P. Snow's Lewis Eliot (Strangers and Brothers), a real self emerges from the Archer novels without dominating any single action. (p. 47)

A licensed private detective, [Archer] stands for authority, or the father. His reordering of time to the logic of detective-work enables him, first, to stop time and, supremely, to connect far-flung events; he becomes both the connecting principle and justicer in the lives of people he has only known for two or three days.

Some of Ross Macdonald's projections of him as God or man-God are … pointed. At different times, he is called altruist, do-gooder, Crusader, a zealot in his trade, even Mr. God. (pp. 47-8)

Archer's fate is that of all man-Gods. Though physically damaged, he stays spiritually whole; his professional honor and compassion, if dented, will serve him again. Though he pays compliments graciously, he doesn't like to receive them. Though he stops crime, he often gives the police the credit. His clients do not know how hard he has worked or what risks he has taken for them. Yet his modesty and professional stoicism do not wane into quietism. The West's twentieth-century man-God cannot reign or preside. Of our time, he must certify his divinity in movement and action. (p. 48)

Ross Macdonald's early tendency to judge can convert dramatic events into moral issues…. Archer loses us when he does … moral calisthenics or when he turns a case into a crusade. He is a much better Leatherstocking than an evangelist.

Always ready to sermonize, the early Archer doesn't shrink from reminding people of their moral duties or from telling them, especially policemen, how to do their jobs. But one wonders whether some of his cocksureness comes less from within than from his author's artistic unreadiness. If Ross Macdonald has become an important novelist, his growth has been slow. His first seven or eight titles, though rich in lively characters and scenes, creak with implausibility. Archer's double role as narrator and plot-mechanism makes him, unfortunately, the focus of the novels' structural flaws. (p. 57)

[Not] all Archer's personal failings come from problems in narrative form. He is often priggish in his own right; he stretches and even breaks the rules. Known to bully and to threaten witnesses, he is capable of brutal sadism…. At least once a novel he will blunder badly—misjudging a witness, mixing sentiment with detection, even exploiting people. (p. 58)

Archer acts from conviction, and his work, like that of God, mirrors him. Lew Archer has a firm sense of himself—moral integrity as well as moral passion. He has tried to heal himself by fitting his needs to those of others. His charity is rooted in pain. Born too of pain, Lazarus-like, is the overarching virtue irradiating the novels. (p. 67)

[The four novels] published between 1944–48 under the byline of Kenneth Millar introduce the family as a major influence; both family conflict and the repetition of obsessive behavior by members of the same family in The Dark Tunnel and The Three Roads prefigure similar struggles in The Underground Man and Sleeping Beauty. Introduced, too, in these four fledgling works is the idea that crisis engulfs whole families, not just individuals. Any unit comprising sub-units will be controlled by the least stable one. Accordingly, anybody drawn into a crime will draw in others. As his family rallies round to protect him, normal work routines break, trips are made, and long-dormant relationships revive. The nightmare reunion of Dr. Herman Schneider and his son, a Nazi intelligence officer in The Dark Tunnel, causes the same havoc as that of the elderly Macready sisters in The Chill, a work published twenty years later.

The first quartet of novels also establishes the importance of the Midwest in Ross Macdonald's thought…. Besides storing many indelible memories, the Midwest, because of its conservative tradition, also symbolizes the buried past where the California detective sometimes digs for answers to old mysteries. (p. 68)

Tunnel is both a spy thriller and an academic novel. The two fictional strains don't fit well because [the voice of Branch, the narrator] wavers between the bookish and the hard-boiled…. Branch has a literary quotation for every occasion. Many come at dangerous moments, when his instincts should turn to survival, not to Shakespeare. He also has the habit of working a literary reference into a sarcasm or a private joke with the reader; at times, he'll display the academic temper and then belittle it.

The reason for all this? Ross Macdonald conceived of Branch as an all-purpose man—an impromptu patriot-sleuth with the fast fists and street sense of the private eye and also the thoughtfulness of the college professor…. Ross Macdonald's own attempts to confer superiority upon Branch fight the plot. (p. 77)

Ross Macdonald's handling of Sam Drake [the narratorhero of Trouble Follows Me], reflects a maturity in technique, if not in attitude and outlook. In principle, anyway, the intellectual and the athlete in Drake do not obtrude as in Branch. Drake is touched but not tainted by commonness; he doesn't parade his humanism or patriotism as Branch did. He is a journalist by trade, not a Ph.D. in English; in fact, a career officer in the U.S. Navy, he may never have gone to college. His crime-hunting takes less agility, endurance, and physical strength than Branch's did. Yet, in spite of this restraint, Drake, too, comes across as an all-purpose man, gratifying the reader's moral superiority. He says, "I'm an intellectual among roughnecks and a roughneck among intellectuals." His choosing duty over love affirms his manliness as do his Hemingwayish references to Midwestern towns, as if the Midwest had a corner on tough-minded, grainy honesty. (p. 78)

Hector Land, ex-prizefighter, ship's steward, and Black Israelite [in Trouble Follows Me] remains Ross Macdonald's only portrayal of a black American. Much of his brawn and biddability stems from the pseudo-scientific notion of post-Darwinian man. Like O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Hairy Ape, Land shows more intellectual development than a gorilla, but less than a human. Even more important than Ross Macdonald's conception of him as an evolutionary throwback or "missing link" is his place in the plot. Land is a good bad man, whom Ross Macdonald neither patronizes nor uses as a peg on which to hang his views on racial injustice. But without intending it, he makes Land his main character. Drake's ubiquity makes the book's title a misnomer. Drake is not singled out for trouble or bad luck…. Because he is no fugitive, Trouble lacks the tension and drive of Tunnel. The suspense it does rouse comes largely from Land. Although neither hero nor villain, he's the novel's title character, embodying both the heroic and the base. (p. 81)

The morality of Trouble is not cheap or trite. Ross Macdonald never presents Negroes or Jews as the oppressed noblemen of nature…. Though Ross Macdonald doesn't sympathize with the methods they used to get into the political mainstream, neither does he favor the white Christian society that made communism and black nationalism last refuges for the powerless. This complex political attitude he conveys as a novelist should—through character, incident, and setting rather than manifestos. (p. 82)

But [his] indirect plea to look for meaning and value in neglected places leaves out women…. [Their] moral lapses determine the characters' worth for Ross Macdonald. The moral identity he foists on his women is as shabby as the political identity he accuses the white establishment of foisting on blacks.

But no lowering comes from Ross Macdonald's style. The bright, crisp language of Trouble reflects both a sharp eye and tender heart; the narrative materials are well selected, imaginatively perceived, and carefully arranged. (pp. 82-3)

Blue City mars its verismo; the slice of life it serves up is locker-room fare. Though it has a rough strength, it lacks any offsetting humor, irony, or comparison. The wit is malicious, not affectionate, absurd, or funny. (p. 91)

[The cynicism of the narrator, John Weather, and his] breakneck life style rob the book of a humanizing perspective. Blue City is too closely tied to the cult of the hardboiled. Its evil characters are neither understandable nor sympathetic. Though it has some good scenes, its characters lack life…. And though Weather's stepmother and dead father give Weather more family background than Branch or Drake had, the background exerts no psychological force. Weather's individualism has no ancestry.

The move from hyper-masculine police drama to psychological realism brings both a slowing of pace and more introspection. The Three Roads (1948) includes only two killings, one of which is done by the police…. Like John Weather, Bret Taylor is an actionist, a doer rather than a thinker or talker…. Like his brutal counterpart, Weather, Taylor finds out more in a day than the police do in months. Yet, though police corruption is no issue in Roads, other similarities between the two books come to mind. The characters, if not sexually determined, are sexually explainable; most of their problems springing from a troubled libido. This sexuality isn't treated commercially, as in Tunnel. Though there's a mystery whose solution depends on sex, the book is no whodunit, either. The solution forms but part of the hero's search for wholeness. Again following Blue City, the family crisis and unsolved murder carry the action into the past. The most overtly Oedipal of Ross Macdonald's novels leans most heavily on events that took place before the dramatized action begins. (pp. 92-3)

The Three Roads is his first California novel and also his first novel which stresses the vitality of the past…. Endorsing eternal recurrence, the novel has a classical flow, in which acts of passion and retribution occur. (p. 96)

Rich in character, setting, and style, [The Barbarous Coast] is a strong book. But its strength lacks coordination. Ross Macdonald's marvelous material suffers from vagueness and lack of dramatic follow-through. Notably weak is dramatic selection. We don't move close enough to the characters to imagine ourselves capable of their crimes. Instead of finding pieces of ourselves in the book, we examine the motives of strangers…. Coast is a driving good novel. Had Ross Macdonald sharpened its motivation, he could have supplied the conviction to make it a memorable one. (pp. 166-67)

The writer was right to view The Galton Case (1959) as both "a turning point" and a personal favorite among his books. Though he had already written about exile and semirecovery, two of the crucial problems of his own American-Canadian life, he hadn't given them the power that pulsates through Galton. The novel, the only one Ross Macdonald has singled out, in "Writing The Galton Case," for critical discussion, sustains a higher level of inspiration than any previous work from his pen. Though well planned, it doesn't look preconceived, alternating smoothly between California and the northern Midwest, rich and poor characters, simplicity and complexity…. This elaborate dialectic, no technical self-indulgence, imparts truths too sheer for straightforward presentation. If not an attack on reason, Galton has little faith in intellectual systems. Characters with formalized plans for the future meet bad ends; recurring blunders by Archer and the police break with the assumptions of the Sherlockian tradition; also humanizing the cosmopolitan scope of the book is the primitivism underlying it: people want families they can call their own. (pp. 178-79)

Ross Macdonald's calling Galton "a breakthrough novel" refers not only to aesthetic distance and control; the book also probes the deep meanings of the author's life…. This highly personal novel cried to be written. Coping with the deprivations of not-having and not-belonging, it confronts "the poverty and brokenness" of Ross Macdonald's "worst days." He never dug deeper for material than in Galton. The threat of dispossession and displacement lurking behind the action shows in early ideas for titles like "A Matter of Identity," "The Castle and the Poorhouse," and "The Impostor." Ross Macdonald's "Preface to The Galton Case" yokes this alienation to the Oedipus myth. The essay repeats the workpoint from his notebook that was to give shape to the novel: "Oedipus angry vs. parents for sending him away into a foreign country."…

Subjects like dual citizenship and the lost father (Kenneth Millar's father left the family when Ken was three) makes Galton a landmark for Ross Macdonald both as a writer and a person. The novel did for him what Sons and Lovers did for Lawrence, allowing him to face and understand his past. (p. 187)

Galton is less of a parade of Ross Macdonald's obsessions than an artistic expression of them. Craftsmanship tempers feeling throughout. Resisting any temptation to identify the auctorial self with young John, Ross Macdonald scatters bits of himself into other characters. Archer mirrors him as accurately as ever; in fact, the detection done by Dr. Howell, relieving Archer of some mechanical sleuth-work, lets him live more fully and generously; Tony Galton, whom we never meet, was born in 1915, the same year as the author; and, though he studied engineering, his real work was the writing of imaginative literature. Finally, Ross Macdonald has explained how Tom Lemberg both foreshadows and serves as an opposite number to John, his own boyhood double: Archer's meeting with Tom in Chapter 5, when Tom steals the detective's car, "prefigures Archer's confrontation with the boy impostor John." The parallels continue…. The ability to express deeply felt subject matter would go to waste unless Ross Macdonald worked John smoothly into the plot. Again, artistry modulates obsession. Ross Macdonald only puts John before us long enough to certify his reality; the youth has no marked personal style, quirk, or skill other than his acting. He is kept colorless for a reason. His character is developed from the outside, through the complex reactions of others to him. Maria Galton, Ada Reichler, and Dr. Howell, all having a vested interest in him, read their needs into John; he expresses their hopes and fears. Had he been portrayed with psychic depth, he would have blocked this variety. The plot thrives on his indefiniteness. Ross Macdonald hides his identity as long as possible. Even Archer can't make up his mind about John—doubting, challenging, being both puzzled and impressed…. Ross Macdonald keeps changing Archer's mind and bringing in new evidence in order to mystify us. The more we learn about John, the less we know. Our curiosity rises accordingly. His shifting role amid several developing dramas keeps us wondering and, what is more important for any writer, reading. (pp. 188-89)

Galton is richer than either Target or Grin; the love triangle … has a far more complex effect, both dramatically and structurally, than anything like it in the past; its three participants struggle blindly to bring on the calamity that destroys them.

Archer also helps make Galton the writer's most moving and intense work to date. He doesn't let what he might be, the ideal, blot out what he is—a fallible person working at a hard job…. Ross Macdonald challenged himself deeply in Galton and, thanks to the introspective effort the challenge posed, grew as an artist. (p. 190)

An apposite successor to Galton, The Ferguson Affair (1960) contains many moments worthy of Ross Macdonald's later work and none of the easy cynicism riding his early fiction. The book, a non-Archer, is deeply imagined: its probes the anxieties of Ross Macdonald's life as doggedly as Galton; it delivers action, suspense, and atmosphere; it balances hidden fears and ingenious warmth. (p. 191)

[The Ferguson Affair] shows how completely, if unconsciously, a writer can reveal himself in his work. The likenesses between [the title character] and Ross Macdonald's forerunner, Raymond Chandler, are too glaring to overlook…. Chandler and Ross Macdonald both set their novels in greater Los Angeles, use Oedipal materials, and couch their rhetoric within the hard-boiled literary tradition. But Ross Macdonald had all but given up hard-boiled fiction in Doomsters. Why should Chandler exert such a strong spell on him two novels later? The laying-to-rest of the literary father looks pointless. Ross Macdonald had to make the gesture, even though he did it without malice. Chandler influenced him more than any other writer…. For most of the 1950s, Ross Macdonald was a better writer than the more celebrated Chandler. Knowing this, he lets Ferguson, whom he likes, gain his hopes, but only after putting him through the direst ordeals inflicted on anybody in the canon. (pp. 200-01)

Ferguson stands closer to traditional detective fiction than do most of the Archers. Many of the riggings of the sleuth novel are here—the legwork, the red herring (Pike Granada), the laborious but necessary work of checking old out-of-town telephone books, the all-purpose secretary…. The book also includes scientific detection….

Ferguson is a rich, robustly told novel that exerts force at several levels. Gunnarson allows Ross Macdonald to include things that wouldn't fit into an Archer. Yet because the book has too much material, some of these things lack definition. The domestic subplot doesn't fuse with the main action. Some events occur out of view…. The ending is clogged and contrived…. The unveiling of criminal motives counts as much in detective fiction as the catching of the criminal; the one wouldn't make sense without the other. Structurally, Speare plays a role as bogus as that of the deus ex machina of classical drama.

Most of the way, the structure is trim and smart. Though the novel ends badly, it has a strong start. (p. 203)

In its way, the book breaks as much new artistic ground as the more admired Galton Case. Strewing its red herrings discreetly and using solid police work to unravel the mysteries, Ferguson relies heavily upon the conventions of standard literary detection. These it rubs to a deep, mellow gloss. The detective novel has more sinew and suppleness thanks to The Ferguson Affair. (p. 205)

The books from The Wycherly Woman (the earliest and least successful of the group) to Black Money deal with tragic sexual passion. Some of the tragedy is caused by money; money cuts across the passion in all the books…. In no case is a relationship or commitment inviolable. Price tags appear on human hearts everywhere; the sacred and the precious becomes items for barter. (p. 206)

The plots raise both moral and sociological questions, with characters of all backgrounds joining in the investigations. This inclusiveness promotes a realism usually reserved for the mainstream novel of manners and morals. Yet Ross Macdonald holds his ground. Literary conjurer as well as psychologist of repressed feelings, he builds plots expressive of the tensions undergirding them. The works published between 1961–66 grow more elaborate and complex. Red herrings abound; options spring open and slam shut; characters surprise us while acting in line with their ruling passions. Some of these, it needs saying, are women. As he gains artistic seasoning, Ross Macdonald imparts new depths and shadings to his female characters; women bear more and more of the narrative burden. What is more, the killer in three of the five novels in the group is female.

The years have brought other changes. Titles like The Chill and Black Money show Ross Macdonald's vision darkening with the years. Reality has become tougher; experience offers more pain than it does joy, and we feel the pain more keenly. Desperation becomes more common. Middle-aged and elderly women now kill as well as adolescents (Pool) and wives in their early twenties (Way and Doomsters). Whereas the soldiers and sailors in the four pre-Archers were men of derring-do, their older counterparts in The Wycherly Woman, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Far Side of the Dollar all invite pity. The harshness of routine living also accounts for Archer's frequent mistakes, hesitations, and acts of compassion; the recent works are both tougher and more tender-hearted than their predecessors. One reason why people need compassion and charity is the growing danger of living a dream. In the earlier works, a fantasy might become a fact without causing widescale damage…. The fantasies spun by the heroes of the novels published between 1961–66 end in isolation or death. No longer livable, the dream bursts, its fragments, often storing a twenty-years' charge, shattering violently. Dreamers use up their options quickly in these dark novels. The past tears away their disguises and smokes them out of their hiding places; in The Wycherly Woman and The Far Side of the Dollar, the killers end up as suicides.

But gloom and waste don't engulf all. To recognize darkness is not to sink into it. The later works of Ross Macdonald express more than despair. Resisting cynicism and moral quietism, he maintains moral balance, stylistic flair, and control of his characters. To write about evil constitutes an honest attempt to cope with it. Unlike most American novelists, he improves with the years. Evil bores, inhibits, and confines. On the other hand, the Archers published between 1961–66, broadening their human base, display new strengths, with The Chill and Black Money pushing to the top of the canon. (pp. 206-07)

The thriller is an action story, a narrative with a drive and moral simplicity lacking in most mainstream fiction; suspense, movement, and the intellectual exercise of naming the killer replace character analysis and subtle moral discriminations. Ross Macdonald's contribution to the genre consists of bringing depth and resonance to plots depending on swiftness of execution. In thrillers, action usually supercedes character. The Archers maintain a brisk tempo without allowing the crisis to dominate. They keep action and character in healthy balance by seating many of their key events in the past; channeling a dramatic event through a twenty-year shaft of time creates intensities that safeguard rather than blur individuality. The presence of psychiatrists, social workers, and policemen helps create a forum where the meaning of these intensities is debated. Because detection isn't an exact science, it thrives on discussion and debate; the detective writer's need to conceal both the killer's motive and identity till the end invites speculation, much of it historical or psychological, in the Archers.

Murder brings the tensions undergirding the Archers into the material world. Ross Macdonald said in a 1972 radio broadcast in London that his books try "to take the psychic event which has occurred in all of us, the guilty loss of togetherness and innocence, and put it back in the external world where it has had its repercussions." One of these repercussions is a craving for security, which usually translates in the late Archers to an urge to find and then reunite with a lost parent. The shuttle between chaos and order forms one of Ross Macdonald's basic narrative rhythms…. Murder energizes the rhythm. Unlike killing, which is often accidental, murder has roots in relationships that go back in time. Because it usually happens close to home, its solution will lie in the home life of the murderer. But this life depends on secret ties. The detective's discovery of these ties includes both intellectual challenge and bodily risk. Murder taking place in a close-knit social structure becomes harder to detect because, based on motives deeper than money or political differences, it is more desperate.

Archer's job in Ross Macdonald's four latest books [The Instant Enemy, The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty] is his usual one—that of finding the connection between the people, places, and motives informing the crisis…. Rather than describing reality realistically, the Archers are metaphors for crisis. Ross Macdonald doesn't inform so much as he creates and communicates the shatter-effects of crisis.

The four latest Archers maintain the sharpness of their predecessors while broadening and strengthening their thematic base. The forest fire in The Underground Man and the oil spill in Sleeping Beauty, by fusing moral guilt and ecological disaster, bring Ross Macdonald's inventiveness new scale and dignity. The lesson of these last two works hinges on the dangers of urbanization: cutting yourself off from nature causes almost all your troubles. (pp. 274-75)

Enemy extends the scope of [Archer's] mind. He surprises us by recognizing a Klee, a Kokoschka, and a Picasso in Jasper Blevins's private art gallery; later, we wonder where he acquired the learning to identify Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, and Edgar Z. Friedenberg as "the freer spirits" in social science today. This learning doesn't enter the investigation, though, as it would in an English detective story featuring a highly informed gentleman-sleuth…. His best insight, which owes little either to formal learning or the mechanics of detection, comes when he explains Sandy's leaving her diary where her mother could find it as an indirect plea for help.

But even insights like this can't humanize Ross Macdonald's most ingeniously plotted novel to date. The writer plants his clues fairly, sets forth his subjects clearly, and reminds us tactfully of the shifts and changes taking place in the fast-moving action. But the mixture of events is too rich. Though brilliantly observed and organized, the novel isn't lifelike; it has more material than it can assimilate…. The book is too thickly worked. Missing is the openness and good-natured indeterminacy that left unexplained the deaths of Ronald Jaimet in Hearse and Roy Fablon in Chill. The logic of the plot is the only logic the characters obey. Without being rushed or coldly analytical, Enemy is all execution. Besides Laurel, who dies early, none of the other murder victims matter to us…. Weak characters mean weak resolutions. Archer's last-chapter demonstration of the evidence gives only mild intellectual pleasure. The evidence comes from a tape recording. Furthermore,… the hunt for the killer isn't a race to stop him from killing others.

The narrative curve of the action expresses negation. Enemy opens at daybreak, everything looking "fresh and new and awesome as creation." It ends in darkness; Archer is eating cold, stale chicken as he looks out of his office window…. The final image of Enemy settles nothing. Nor is it meant to. The people who pass under Archer's office window portray urban futility. Archer's floating the torn yellow flakes of Ruth Marburg's $100,000 check onto their heads neither redeems nor blesses them. Solving the Hackett case has drained Archer. Lonely, bitter, and tired, he is one with the passers-by he describes in the urban barrens.

The elaborate narrative mode sought in Enemy emerges brilliantly in The Goodbye Look (1969). The plot runs in tangents and oblique lines; it splits into parallel strands which cross and recross; spanning four generations, it attempts new turns and variations with time (one character accuses Archer of having a tortuous imagination). This flashing silver neither blinds nor tarnishes, thanks to the book's well-regulated style and sensitive, thoughtful narrator-hero. In short, Look has found a controlling voice for the intricate narrative technique of Ross Macdonald's maturity. The superiority of Look over Enemy, in fact, makes the later work the cornerstone of a technical achievement new in the history of crime fiction. (pp. 288-90)

The last chapter [of The Goodbye Look] is a sad comedown. Ross Macdonald hadn't left a loose thread up to the finale…. [The] first thirty-five chapters of Look are nearly flawless. The novel resembles Chill, Dollar, and Money more than it does Enemy, which stands closer to it in time but not in quality of performance. Look has the elaborate design of Enemy, and its plot begins with a childhood trauma. But Ross Macdonald infuses it with more understanding than he did Enemy; Archer's greater thoughtfulness in Look giving the other characters added warmth and insight. Look also has more detection. (p. 301)

The Underground Man (1971) is Ross Macdonald's most ambitious book to date…. Serious and thoughtful, Man both absorbs and reflects experience with a high degree of sensitivity. Ross Macdonald doesn't merely conjure up emotions but, rather, helps us understand them. (p. 306)

[The finale of Sleeping Beauty] lacks force because it isn't prepared for. Ross Macdonald hides Marian Lennox most of the way; her murderousness doesn't flow from any observed set of traits or human values…. The problem she raises is more structural than motivational. The novel's design is out of tilt. We don't know Marian well enough to care about her guilt. (p. 331)

Ross Macdonald's unswerving eye for detail and fine timing gives the well-turned plot [of Sleeping Beauty] a temporal and spatial structure that adjusts easily to the many changes in the action. This interplay of logic, structure, and incident represents a high-order achievement…. Ross Macdonald is challenging himself with new ideas and putting detective fiction to new uses. His imagination grows wilder, stronger, and more mystical with the years. Steady in focus, ever-burgeoning in range, the Archers form a cumulative masterpiece. No student of American detective fiction can imagine the development of the genre without them. (p. 337)

Peter Wolfe, in his Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald's Novels (copyright © 1976 by The Popular Press), Popular Press, 1976, 346 p.