Forgotten Books: THE DROWNING POOL -- Ross Macdonald
The Drowning Pool
(1950) is the second novel to feature private-eye Lew Archer. I have
several copies of it, but when I saw one for a buck the other day, I
couldn't resist picking it up. And then I figured it might be fun to
read it again. It was.Ross Macdonald was still feeling his way with this one, so the style isn't what it would be come, but The Drowning Pool
has the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career:
dysfunctional families, the sins of the fathers setting their children's
teeth on edge, the changing face of California (Ross Mac saw the same
sorts of things happening there that John D. Mac saw happening in
Florida), the conflict of the generations, and the widening gap between
the rich and poor.
Lew Archer's
client is a woman who's received a blackmail letter. She doesn't want
to tell Archer anything about herself or her family, but he takes the
job. Working pretty much in the dark, he begins to turn up plenty of
secrets that everybody would like to keep covered, secrets that lead to
murder. Typically, even when Archer is supposed to be off the case, he
keeps on digging. He can never let go until he finds all the answers.
Macdonald
isn't as popular now as his progenitors, Hammett and Chandler. Some
readers complain that the plots develop too slowly, and The Drowning Pool
doesn't have a murder until more than 60 pages have gone by. Macdonald
is more interested in setting up the characters than in presenting a
murder on the first page. Other readers might find the book a bit
dated. It's not, certainly, in its environmental concerns, though the
treatment of homosexuality is a bit off-putting to modern eyes. Still,
the narrative works just fine for me, pulling me a long as easily as it
did the first time I read the book, nearly 50 years ago. There's even
some snappy patter that Spenser would envy.
8 comments:
Ross MacDonald is my favorite writer of private detective fiction after Raymond Chandler. I reread several of his novels each year. I find them to be a good palette cleanse after a few disappointing or difficult books.
I do like MacDonald's work, Patti. I haven't read his stuff lately, but this is a good reminder to get back to it!
I think Bill Crider wrote about Ross Macdonald in his PhD. dissertation. I know Bill loved THE CHILL.
I thought of that too, George.
THE DROWNING POOL, THE MOVING TARGET, THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE, THE BARBAROUS COAST, BLUE CITY, TROUBLE FOLLOWS ME--great Hardboiled classics.
One of the best--both Bill and Ross Macdonald.
I don't know Macdonald's work at all well, having read only The Dark Tunnel, The Three Roads, and The Drowning Pool, and so I was interested to learn that some complain about slow plot development. I must read more Macdonald! This is the very thing that I like about wife Margaret Millar's writing. As with Macdonald, characters are the focus in the early pages of her novels.
I'm right now reading The Weak-Eyed Bat. It isn't until the last sentence of the fourth chapter (of eighteen) that the reader learns a character has died. The end of chapter five gives some suggestion as to who it might be. The identity is revealed in the sixth chapter, accompanied by evidence that the character has been murdered.
These discoveries come early for a Margaret Millar novel, but then The Weak-Eyed Bat was only her second. Clearly, she was still finding her legs.
Still, it is long enough for Millar to introduce and flesh out a dozen or so characters, my favourite being wealthy Miss Emily Bonner, a 65-year-old woman who pretends to be older so as to receive compliments on her appearance. It's a neat trick.
This review from Bill Crider reminds me I need to read more books from this series. The thing I especially liked about this book was the very dysfunctional family. I liked the film even with a different setting, New Orleans and surrounding areas.
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