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Seeking Ross Macdonald

All things Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer and Ken Millar

The Novels of Ross Macdonald

October 27, 2015 By Suzanne Leave a Comment

The Novels of Ross Macdonald by Michael Kreyling.

Novels-of-Ross-Macdonald-cover

In his examination of Ross Macdonald’s eighteen Lew Archer novels, Michael Kreyling suggests that this widely read author elevated a popular genre from the plateau reached by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to a level of sophistication yet to be surpassed. Including in his study such early volumes as Ivory Grin and Meet Me at the Morgue, Kreyling takes a fresh look at forgotten works as well as Macdonald’s better known novels. Kreyling proposes that the literary merit of the Macdonald corpus calls for a closer, more discriminating reading than scholars commonly accord the genre. Kreyling moves beyond the usual critical focus on the internal structure of the works – the disclosure and hiding of clues, for example – to provide a fuller assessment of why Macdonald’s writings deserve the same critical attention afforded serious novels. He considers the “mutual bond” of structure and life that informs Macdonald’s work, the Freudian theories he has adopted to advance his genre, and the place his novels occupy in the larger literary canon. Illumining the ways in which Macdonald’s writing engages reality, Kreyling stresses the importance of reading Macdonald in his time. He looks with particular interest at the life of Ken Millar, the man who adopted the pen name Ross Macdonald, and relates the author’s experiences to the storylines surrounding hardboiled detective Lew Archer. Kreyling shows that instead of presenting a static protagonist, Macdonald forces Archer to mature and change by incorporating themes drawn from the travails of the novelist’s own family life, the social and moral upheavals of the 1960s, America’s and California’s obsession with race, environmental sins associated with unreflective development, and the difficulties of aging.

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The downtown streets were brightening into tunnels of colored light under the darkening sky. Its quick nightly tumescence was turning Las Vegas into a city again. Far behind to the east a slice of moon floated low in the twilit sky.~Ross MacdonaldSource: The Drowning Pool

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