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.