Ross Macdonald confronts another time and he does it with commendable beatings given and taken and, here and there, real feelings about the characters. They are not just killers nor evil people, but complex characters caught up in events that overload their circuits.
Is this great literature? Hardly. But it is great fun. It is the stuff that I grew up on for those lazy Saturdays and nights too hot to sleep, or just too boring when there was a mystery with which to be curled up. Guaranteed excitement. No bad taste of cannibalism and dismembered bodies described in tedious detail, no nightmares. The noir was a comforting friend you could rely on. A basically good, tough guy like Lew Archer.
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Article comments
1 - DrPat
You imply a great question here, man - why do we "jade ourselves" with such dark stuff as cannibalism, serial killers, and slasher movies? Is Macdonald just the marijuana to Hannibal's crack-cocaine?
2 - Phillip Winn
These books sound like they'd would be even better read aloud. True?
3 - francisco68
Dr. Pat. The problem is the world has changed over 50 years. It is closer to a "revolution of rising expectations". Macdonald has some fights and 3 murders in
Find A Victim. Today the murder book set needs a series of bodies, something supernatural, or something grotesque. I would say it is more Macdonald's roadside hamburger joint to Hannibal's MacDonald's factory produced sandwiches.
Phillip Winn is undoubtedly right. They would be good read aloud or seen in a 1940's or 50's film noir movie. This one wasn't but its cousins were.
I might have read it aloud but my wife grabbed it first and gobbled it up.
4 - Victor Plenty
Didn't "film noir" start out on paper? The Bogart films and others in that genre were mostly based on the hard-boiled detective novels that had already been popular for decades when they were filmed, if I recall correctly.
So the phrase "film noir on paper" strikes me as odd, like someone saying Errol Flynn swashbuckler movies ripped off George Lucas.