Point Books During The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)
| Original Title: | The Goodbye Look |
| ISBN: | 0375708650 (ISBN13: 9780375708657) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Lew Archer #15 |
| Characters: | Lew Archer |
Ross Macdonald
Paperback | Pages: 256 pages Rating: 3.96 | 1283 Users | 99 Reviews
Mention Out Of Books The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)
| Title | : | The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15) |
| Author | : | Ross Macdonald |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 256 pages |
| Published | : | December 5th 2000 by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (first published 1969) |
| Categories | : | Mystery. Fiction. Crime. Noir. Detective |
Interpretation In Favor Of Books The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)
In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is 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 pre-decessors 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.
Rating Out Of Books The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)
Ratings: 3.96 From 1283 Users | 99 ReviewsWrite Up Out Of Books The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer #15)
This felt more complex, more evolved, more psychologically perceptive than any other hardboiled detective fiction I've ever read. I guess it didn't feel like a detective novel at all, a realisation that's easy to get confused with a sense of something lacking, if you're waiting for the usual genre furniture, the wise-cracking PI, the femme fatale, the gaudy poetic narrative voice, I guess all these things are present to a certain extent, it's just that they're not what this novel is about. It isI know your type. You have a secret passion for justice. Why dont you admit it?I have a secret passion for mercy, I said. But justice is what keeps happening to people.
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.Returning to this book after many years, the reader can clearly see Macdonald has become a novelist simply using the genre as a means to an end. He wrote about broken people in need of mending, and perhaps
To keep all the characters straight in my head I needed a program - or at least a trip to ancestry.com to build a family tree. It took more brain power that I was prepared for. Nonetheless, McDonald's Archer series is the model by which hard-boiled detective fiction is often measured, and for good reason. Straight-forward down-to-the-bone investigation; film-noir for the mind writing.
Until now Ive only read two Archer novels (curiously, and coincidentally, the two Paul Newman turned into films) and though I enjoyed them, they didnt make me whoop with joy. I liked them, thought they had good points, but havent rushed on to check out the others.Having read The Goodbye Look I now understand why his fans hold him such high regard. MacDonalds brilliance certainly in this novel lies in taking that Tolstoy maxim that Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy
I love Lew Archer books. They are so meticulously plotted and pacy but with the most wonderful languid, evocative descriptions. They have such a strong sense of mood and style. The world-weary, cynical but vulnerable detective is so my thing, and Archer is almost on a parr with Chandler's Marlowe. The stuff Macdonald does better is in his descriptions of places - so brooding and full of prophecy that you can almost hear ther heavy background music twisting your emotions as you read. His use of
An ornate chest burgled along with the wartime letters it contained, an unsolved John Doe found in a hobo jungle fifteen years before and a pair of recent shootings, the young and disturbed scion who wants to confess to all of them, his family of habitual liars, their violently widowed lawyer and his daughter who has the hots for the suspect rich boy, a professionally compromised psychiatrist and his embittered wife, a Gordian knot of false identities, infidelities and covert illegitimately, and
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.