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Seeking Ross Macdonald

All things Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer and Ken Millar

The Drowning Pool

December 27, 2015 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

The Drowning Pool was published in 1950 and was the second Lew Archer novel. It was made into a film starring Paul Newman in 1975.

The Drowning Pool cover

Author John Ross Macdonald
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Publication Date (initial) August 21, 1950

Overview

Originally hired by Maude Slocum, wife to their heir of the Slocum fortune to investigate a letter to her husband that accuses Maude of adultery. Husband James Slocum is an actor and seems from the beginning to be, at the least, bisexual. Before Archer can get to the bottom of the letter, the matriarch of the family, Olivia Slocum, has been found drowned in a swimming pool at the family home.  There are many suspects, from a fired chauffeur to an oil tycoon to family members. Even Archer is kidnapped in his quest to solve the mystery.

Reviews

September 10, 1950: The New York Times — Death By Drowning (New York Times Book Review, Criminals at Large section. The review is by Hillis Mills:

When John Ross Macdonald’s first mystery, The Moving Target, appeared last year, it was greeted with loud critical cheers. The new one is another fast-moving, smoothly written, first-rate whodunit of the hard-boiled school. As he tracks down another murderer, Lew Archer, private detective, matches wits with some highly entertaining low characters. The basic ingredient of homicide is knowingly spiced, in the modern manner, with dashes of adultery, alcoholism, homosexuality and juvenile delinquency. If you like them hard, hot and heavily seasoned, this is your dish.

 

September 1, 2102: The Guardian (London) — The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald – Review

Excerpt:

Few private eye novels would open, as The Drowning Pool does, with a poison-pen letter quoting from Shakespeare’s sonnet 94 (“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”), but in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series urbane literary allusion is par for the course. Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, published his first Archer novel in 1949, after completing a PhD on Coleridge at the University of Michigan. The Drowning Pool, set in California and first published in 1950, is Archer’s second outing and the most formally assured of the series.

 

Observations

“The Drowning Pool” was made into a film in 1975 and starred Paul Newman as Archer/Harper and his wife Joanne Woodward and Tony Francis. Inexplicitly, it was set in Louisiana.

Drowning-Pool-movie US Movie Poster
Drowning-Pool-movie-french French Movie Poster

 

Additional Publication Information

The information is here is accurate to the best knowledge of the site’s author, but should not be presumed to be definitive.

Date Publisher Notes
1951 Pocket Books 2nd edition
1952 Cassell & Company (London) 1st edition, first English printing
1955 Pan Books (UK) 3rd  edition
1970 Bantam Books 4th edition
1972 Fontana/Collins 5th edition
1976 Garland 1st edition, 3rd printing. Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction series
1979 John Curley 6th edition
1996 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard 1st Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Edition
2001 Canongate Crime (UK) unknown

Book Covers

The Drowning Pool original edition cover 1st edition, dust jacket
Drowning Pool 1951 Pocket Book cover 1951 Pocket Books
drowing-pool-front-Cassell 1952 Cassell & Company (UK)
 Drowning-Pool-Pan 1955 Pan (UK)
Drowning-Pool-5 1970 Bantam Books
The Drowning Pool Fontana 1972 cover 1972 Fontana/Collins
Drowning Pool 1975 Bantam movie tie-in 1975 Bantam movie tie-in
Drowning-Pool-83 1983 Bantam
Drowning-Pool-200w 1996 Vintage Crime / Black Lizard

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Filed Under: Novels Tagged With: 1950, John Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer

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My mind has been haunted for years by an imaginary boy whom I recognized as the darker side of my own remembered boyhood. By his sixteenth year he had lived in fifty houses and committed the sin of poverty in each of them. I couldn't think of him without anger and guilt.~Kenneth MillarSource: Writing The Galton Case

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