Hard Boiled Birthday!

Today Ross MacDonald would be 101!

I am actually pretty new to his writing. However, a year ago Spencer and I read The Chill together, and recently my friend Pam borrowed the book. She's a fan of all things mystery and when she returned the book yesterday I was reminded of how much I enjoyed it. Lew Archer is a terrific detective and the story is a complicated one. One thing Pam pointed out was how refreshing it was to read a detective story that didn't involve forensics or CSI or some kind of high tech methods so popular today. Instead, Mr. Archer just asked a lot of questions and figured things out.

Ross Macdonald (1915 – 1983) is, with Hammett and Chandler, the other member of "the big three of the American hard-boiled detective novel," as scholar Matthew Bruccoli has called them. His detective Lew Archer still resembles Spade and Marlowe – he's single, a brawler who smokes and drinks and likes women -- but the roots of his cases run deep into family dramas and generational conflict. The seventeen Archer novels develop what was implicit in Chandler's The Long Goodbye: the genre's capacity for social analysis and criticism.
excerpt taken from "Hard-boiled Fiction" by William Marling

--Kate