Grizzled ex-cop P.I. Lew Archer is called in to the principal’s office when a boarding school student runs away after less than a week in class. But this is no ordinary school. It’s something of a school for wayward boys, and the runaway in question had just apparently stolen his neighbor’s car and wrecked it. Archer sinks his teeth into the case when no one will give him a straight answer, not even the boy’s distraught parents. Ignoring orders to cease his investigation, Archer stumbles across a few leads stretching back twenty years to the end of World War II, […]

Ross Macdonald’s plots are just as intricate as Raymond Chandler’s, but somehow he manages to tie it all together with no loose ends. (Who did kill that chauffeur anyway?) The only way I can imagine Macdonald putting together his mysteries is by writing a straightforward novel without a detective, then putting all the events in the wrong order for his detective, ex-cop Lew Archer to discover one at a time. All the staples of the Lew Archer series are on display here, the post-war California setting, the miserable rich people, the people desperate for money, the psychological trauma underpinning it […]

I’ve apparently decided to read all of Ross Macdonald’s works this year (stay tuned) which means diving into his non-Archer novels. The Ferguson Affair hardly misses the pugnacious Lew Archer, with attorney Bill Gunnarson making for a suitable investigator. If Gunnarson seems to go an awfully long way for his client it’s an acceptable stretching of artistic license. Gunnarson is a private attorney asked to represent a young nurse caught trying to sell stolen jewelry. When he tries to verify her story about being given the ring by a charming suitor, Gunnarson finds himself caught up in a confusing kidnapping […]