![]() ![]() Shortly afterwards Culligan is stabbed to death and Archer’s car is stolen at gunpoint by the apparent murderer.Īrcher hates coincidences and decides to work both cases simultaneously, eventually finding a link between Culligan and Tony – they both were at Luna Bay, a small San Francisco coastal area, at roughly the same time. Right from the start, it is clear that Archer is more interested in Sable’s dysfunctional domestic situation than in the case he has been ostensibly hired to do – the lawyer seems to be caught in an obscure triangle involving his mentally unstable wife and their openly hostile manservant Culligan. Since then his father has died and his ailing mother now wants to reconcile before her weak heart finally gives out. Twenty years earlier the newly married and father-to-be Anthony ‘Tony’ Galton had walked out on his well-to-do parents to begin a new life in San Francisco hoping to make it as a writer. In addition its structure – an investigation into the past and its lingering effects on the present via a quest for personal identity – would serve as a template for all the remaining Macdonald novels, right up to and including The Blue Hammer (1976).Īrcher is hired by lawyer Gordon Sable to find the long-lost heir to the fortune of the Galton family of Santa Teresa (a thinly disguised Santa Barbara). Although the plot (lawyer in love with a younger and highly unsuitable woman hires Archer on behalf of an ailing and cantankerous wife of a very rich man to solve a missing person case) is a partial re-write of the first Archer novel, it is deepened by being given a strong autobiographical spin. The eighth Archer novel, THE GALTON CASE, was first published in 1959 and in many ways can be seen as a turning point in Millar’s career. Macdonald in fact was quickly heralded as the natural successor to Hammett and Chandler in the hardboiled genre, a serious author using the crime genre with literary intent and not just a purveyor of tough guy pulp fictions. MacDonald, the pseudonym quickly transmuted into ‘Ross Macdonald’ as the books grew in critical acclaim. Following complaints from fellow mystery writer John D. Private detective Lew Archer (known in some editions as Lew Arless, and in the cinema, as played by Paul Newman, as ‘Lew Harper’) first appeared in THE MOVING TARGET (1949) by John Macdonald, a pseudonym for Margaret Millar’s husband Kenneth (named, not insignificantly as we shall see, after his father, John Macdonald Millar). The Alphabet of Crime community meme over at the Mysteries in Paradise blog this week reaches the letter G, so I nominate … ![]()
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