Recommended reading - The Galton Case (1959):

The Galton Case (1959).

By Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Vintage Crime / Black Lizard

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0679768645

ISBN-13: 978-0679768647

Description:

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, tersely poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald’s insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

“Exciting and beautifully plotted.” – The New York Times Book Review.

“A model of intelligently engineered excitement.” – The New Yorker.

“One of his best … The Macdonald depth of understanding and dispassionate charity come out well, and the story … is richly plotted.” – San Francisco Chronicle.