“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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