books:

	The Drowning Pool Ross Macdonald Vintage, 1996 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Archer's hired to discover who sent his client's husband a letter accusing her of infidelity. Introduced to the family and friends at a party as a Hollywood agent, he is sensitive to the growing tension and explosive atmosphere. The reader knows of course that somebody's going to be murdered, but these early chapters are among the most skillfully written to build suspense that I've ever read.

Written in 1950, the inclusion of a homosexual couple was quite daring although there is not graphic description, and isn't significant enough a factor of the plot to either offend or attract a reader.

Read this and I'm sure you'll find it on your own list of crime classics.

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Hardboiled Masterpiece.

In this skillfully written tale of murder and intrigue, Ross MacDonald manages to "out Chandler" Raymond Chandler. It's Southern California, circa 1950, and hardboiled detective Lew Archer finds himself traversing the same landscapes Chandler's Philip Marlowe does in The Big Sleep, High Window and The Long Goodbye.
The plot of The Drowning Pool is complex enough to be interesting without being convoluted or forced. Greed, blackmail, homosexuality and family dysfunction all play roles in advancing the nicely paced narrative. Thrown in for good measure are seductive women, a number of action scenes and a Lolita like teenager named Cathy.
MacDonald's very descriptive prose is quite effective. And there's plenty of memorable dialogue. My personal favorite: "Your reminiscences fascinate me. May I take notes?"
You'd be hard pressed to find a more satisfying example of noir crime writing. An enthusiastic 5 stars.

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Good vintage Ross Macdonald

A different Lew Archer here than THE BLUE HAMMER Lew Archer. The tone is in TDP is more gritty and hardboiled. Lew is less the romantic toward the ladies he meets. I like Macdonalds' writing in TDP. A less polished and more direct style has its appeal. There's less psychological development of the characters, more emphasis on plot.





Hard-boiled prose at its very best

Of all the classic heroes in hard-boiled fiction (Spade, Marlowe, etc.) I've always found Lew Archer to be my favorite. Maybe it's because MacDonald does such a superlative job illustrating Archer's flaws, doubts and shortcomings. Rather than some iron-jawed superhero, he's a compellingly complex person whose battered conscience ultimately makes him more heroic. Many readers consider The Drowning Pool to be the best Archer book and it's hard to argue that contention. If pressed, I might rank The Way Some People Die just a little bit higher, but both books are so good it's stupid to quibble. I haven't read The Barbarous Coast yet, but look forward to diving in soon.. and afterward I might have to revise my opinion regarding Archer's best case once again.

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Not typical of his later work, but still quite good

There is no such thing as a bad Ross MacDonald novel, but while this is good, it isn't typical of his best work. MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are correctly judged to be the great successor works to the great stories and novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Together the three writers constitute the Great Triumvirate of the American hardboiled school. While MacDonald doesn't write prose quite as brilliant or memorable as his two predecessors, he created characters of greater depth and complexity. He also wrote a larger quantity of great novels than either Hammett or Chandler.

Despite all this, THE DROWNING POOL does not stand out very far from what Hammett and Chandler had achieved and it did not really put on display MacDonald's later innovations. If there is a theme running through MacDonald's best books like THE CHILL or THE INSTANT ENEMY or THE MOVING TARGET is it this: "The sins of the fathers will be visited unto the second and third generations." In almost all of his mature novels Lew Archer starts off investigating some incident in the present that ends up having roots 20 or 30 or 40 years earlier. His novels always puts me in mind of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," where the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan inevitably leads to the tragedy of the Trojan war: "A shudder in the loins engenders there/The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/And Agamemnon dead." There is an intricate causality in the Archer novels. Things happen not because of anything happening right here and now, but in almost foreordained fashion because of actions in a previous generation. THE DROWNING POOL has a smidgen of this, but not much. The causality developed here is the later view of causality in embryonic form.

The amazing thing is that even though this is not quite as breathtaking as later MacDonald novels, it is still absolutely first rate. Ironically, this is one of his best-known novels, even if it isn't one of his very best. The reason is easy to identify: it was made into a movie starring Paul Newman. In fact, though MacDonald is clearly one of the Big Three hardboiled writers, unlike Hammett and Chandler -- both of whose novels have been turned into several great films -- MacDonald's books simply do not lend themselves to conversion to movies. Paul Newman did play Lew Archer as Harper in two movies, but they were not of the same quality as the best films based on Hammett and Chandler books. HARPER was a film version of THE MOVING TARGET, so both the title and the main character underwent a name change. Unbelievably, MacDonald's best book -- and one of the two or three greatest hardboiled novels ever written -- THE CHILL has never been made into a movie. The film that is closest to the world of Lew Archer has no connection to any novel by MacDonald, Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN, which is much closer to MacDonald in spirit than to either Hammett or Chandler.

Still, this is must read MacDonald. His books would get better, but that isn't to say that this isn't a good, even a great, novel.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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