The Underground Man: A Lew Archer Novel: 16 - Softcover

Macdonald, Ross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679768084 ISBN 13: 9780679768081

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1996

Synopsis

As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder--and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline. The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California's version of the American dream.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet 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.

About this title

Review:

"A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were."- Eudora Welty

"Ross Macdonald is an important American novelist!"- San Francisco Chronicle

"I should like to venture that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either... Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler."- Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author:

Ross Macdonald's real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the President of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award, as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain's Silver Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679768084
• ISBN 13: 9780679768081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288