Tuesday, 27 May 2014

"The Galton Case" by Ross Macdonald

“The Galton Case” is the first Ross Macdonald novel I have read, but it won’t be the last. I still get a buzz from discovering an author whose work moves me. Macdonald’s work spans from the mid-forties to the early eighties, but many critics feel that this novel, originally published in 1959, marked a shift into a deeper and more complex phase.

Macdonald was often compared to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Indeed his detective Lew Archer owes his name to Sam Spade’s murdered colleague Miles Archer in Hammett’s seminal work “The Maltese Falcon”. Yet Archer is a very different character to either Spade or Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He might be as hard-boiled, yet beneath his tough exterior he somehow has more in common with a therapist that a traditional detective. In Macdonald’s hands he often makes an initial wisecrack about a character that foreshadows a much deeper truth.

“The Galton Case” is a surprisingly complex and literary detective story. Archer is hired by a dour lawyer to trace Anthony Galton, missing for over twenty years and heir to the Galton fortune, held by Anthony’s dying mother who seeks a reconciliation.  Is Anthony alive or dead and is a man claiming to be his long-lost-son real or an imposter? Archer has to pick his way through a cast of disparate characters, most of whom are not as they first appear. The plot is deliciously complicated and has more red herrings than a Baltic trawler.

This isn’t a simple “whodunit” but a beautifully layered work bout identity, greed and the power of myth. It owes as much to the Oedipus archetype, classical tragedy and Freudian analysis as it does to the tradition of Hammett and Chandler.

It also includes some powerful and timeless writing. One phrase that will stay with me for a long time occurs when Archer opens a dead man’s suitcase. “Its contents emitted a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat and the subtler indescribable odour of masculine loneliness.”

Definitely not your average detective novel.

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