The Drowning Pool: A Lew Archer Novel - Softcover

MacDonald, Ross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446358894 ISBN 13: 9780446358897

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1993

Synopsis

Caught up in a romance with an amoral woman and his benevolent efforts to help a severely dysfunctional family, Lew Archer barely has time to stop a brutal murderer from killing again. Reprint.

About this title

Review:

Most writers who work in a specific genre such as science fiction or detective stories write with a comfortable narrowness, their ambitions constricted by well-worn conventions; a rare few attain something much deeper, as the scope of their explorations and the originality of their prose operate in a kind of tension with the genre's confines. Ross Macdonald is one such writer. In a series of 25 novels written between 1944 and 1976, all but five featuring Lew Archer as protagonist, Macdonald picked up the baton dropped by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and took the genre to new heights.

The Drowning Pool, first published in 1950, is the second Lew Archer novel. It opens in classic hard-boiled fashion, with a well-dressed woman hesitantly engaging Archer's services at his L.A. office. Soon he's digging up secrets in her oil-rich hometown, and the themes that preoccupied Macdonald throughout his career begin to emerge: tormented families, buried secrets that fester through multiple generations, environmental destruction, concealed paternity, and the brutal contrast between rich and poor. Macdonald's later novels--including The Galton Case (1959), The Chill (1964), and The Underground Man (1971)--showed increased maturity and a tone less tied to tradition, but The Drowning Pool returns to the virtues that are the hallmarks of Mcdonald's work: complex and compelling plotting, psychological depth, just enough mayhem, and highly economical prose that routinely rises to something near poetry.

From the Inside Flap:

When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face-down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred--and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Pub
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0446358894
• ISBN 13: 9780446358897
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224