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.

	US Movie Poster
	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.

Book Covers

	1st edition, dust jacket
	1951 Pocket Books
	1952 Cassell & Company (UK)
	1955 Pan (UK)
	1970 Bantam Books
	1972 Fontana/Collins
	1975 Bantam movie tie-in
	1983 Bantam
	1996 Vintage Crime / Black Lizard