Until now I had never read a Ross Macdonald novel. My loss. For on the basis of The Blue Hammer alone—and there are 19 earlier Macdonald novels in the Lew Archer canon—this writer of cracking detective stories is as good as the more relentlessly "serious" American novelists of the declining years of our 20th century, and better than most. A snap judgment, perhaps, but that's what we're paid for.

And a shameful admission. For Ross Macdonald is as easy to read as he is hard to overlook….

It is [his] perfect blend of style and action that hooks the reader at once…. (p. G1)

[A] tantalizing possibility, hinting of further mysteries neither acted out nor directly revealed, gives Archer his dimension of flawed innocence. Macdonald once described him as "a deliberately narrowed version of the writing self, so narrow that when he turns sideways he almost disappears. Yet his semi-transparent presence places the story at one remove from the author and lets it, as we say (through sweat and tears), write itself."

And so it appears to do, with clarity and brilliance, a stunning use of dialogue and metaphor and, of course, an ingenious, constantly moving plot. The sweat and tears are left back on the office floor in Santa Barbara.

Archer's—and Macdonald's—venue is Southern California, the space between the Sierras and the sea where the past comes reluctantly to rest and the future, blank and inscrutable, plays atop the subterranean fault, waiting for something to slip, as it inevitably will. This is Joan Didion's territory—the world of the Santa Monica Freeway, of moral fatigue, controlled hysteria and raw nerve ends—but with a difference: the nerves are frayed but still intact (Archer has great dignity and never loses it) and redemption is a possibility, however slight. More closely than Didion, Macdonald resembles another artist obsessed with guilt and retribution: Nathaniel Hawthorne, moved ahead a century and waking up in California, there to unravel the tangled past in the hope of exorcising it.

It is an obsession perhaps most novelists have, but a vision only fine novelists can bring off….

In a world where traditional forms of absolution have lost much of their power but the necessity remains, Archer serves as a surrogate priest, without the power to absolve but with the power to bring to light. (The truth may make you free.)…

Archer takes plenty of grief. There are no happy people in this novel, but the possibility of at least a transitory happiness, "a temporary kindness," exists. "The combination of the speeding car and the sleeping woman made me feel almost young, as if my life might have a new beginning after all," which is, at bottom, what mystery novels are all about: old crimes and new beginnings.

Lew Archer tries to believe, like the wiser, tougher altar boy he still is, in "the controlling forces of the world, if any," a vision ultimately theological though not exactly hopeful:

"'It doesn't seem to make sense,'" he says at one point. "'But nearly everything does when you understand it.'

"'You really believe that, that everything makes sense?'" he is asked. And replies, "'I work on that principle, anyway.'" It is the principle of coherence that every writer must work on: that seemingly inexplicable events, small man-made mysteries, can be solved. Figure those out and the rest may take care of itself. (p. G2)