The Goodbye Look

Rating:
Summary: Chandleresque
Review: I picked this one up because of the numerous good reviews that Macdonald has received over the years, and his obvious prolificity. The Goodbye Look is supposed to be his best, and while it is very good, it is a style of mystery that isn't quite to my taste. Macdonald is very much like Raymond Chandler. His hero is a rough, ready, and usually untalkative type who goes through a mystery case as gently as he downs a fifth of scotch. The mystery is also very Chandleresque--several dysfunctional families, incestuously lying and cheating their way to unhappiness. If you like Chandler, you'll like Ross Macdonald. However, based on my impression of this book, if you want more characterization, try John D. McDonald.

Rating:
Summary: Macdonald offers solid fare in this Archer mystery.
Review: Lew Archer works for the sleaziest rich people in California on a consistent basis. Their concealed pasts go back 20 years, sometimes longer, and in the process of the plot's unravelling several dead bodies usually turn up (including fresh ones). In this novel, his first national bestseller in 1969, two broken families have intertwined tragic pasts that Archer ends up disclosing. By the end they're not happier, but have faced the ugly truth about themselves. This book is compact, unified in time and setting, and has nice plot twists. Macdonald has been criticized for rewriting the same book, and there is a consistency of character and milieu in his work. But hey, if it's not broke... The end is a lift from Macdonald's The Galton Case, widely regarded as his best book. When you've read that one--and if there's a better PI novel written since WWII I don't know of it--try this one. It's a good read by a good writer.

Rating:
Summary: Macdonald offers solid fare in this Archer mystery.
Review: Lew Archer works for the sleaziest rich people in California on a consistent basis. Their concealed pasts go back 20 years, sometimes longer, and in the process of the plot's unravelling several dead bodies usually turn up (including fresh ones). In this novel, his first national bestseller in 1969, two broken families have intertwined tragic pasts that Archer ends up disclosing. By the end they're not happier, but have faced the ugly truth about themselves. This book is compact, unified in time and setting, and has nice plot twists. Macdonald has been criticized for rewriting the same book, and there is a consistency of character and milieu in his work. But hey, if it's not broke... The end is a lift from Macdonald's The Galton Case, widely regarded as his best book. When you've read that one--and if there's a better PI novel written since WWII I don't know of it--try this one. It's a good read by a good writer.

Rating:
Summary: Detective Fiction with Psychological Depth
Review: THE GOODBYE LOOK is one of Ross MacDonald's most complex and stylish novels. In it, PI Lew Archer is hired to recover a family heirloom that has been stolen from the home of Larry and Irene Chalmers. The heirloom, a gold Florentine box dating from the Renaissance, was used by the Chalmers to hold letters written by Larry during the war to his mother, Estelle. The evidence points to the box having been stolen by the Chalmers's troubled and suicidal son, Nick.

In a surprising and somewhat unconventional twist, MacDonald has Archer locate the stolen box a mere twenty pages or so into the story. Far from running out of steam, however, from that point on, the narrative picks up speed and becomes downright engrossing. From the moment he sets eyes on the heirloom Archer intuits that there is more to the case than merely recovering a stolen object. As he puts it, "I was tempted to walk in and take the box ... {but} ... I was beginning to sense that the theft ... was just a physical accident of the case. Any magic it possessed, black, white or gold, was soaked up from the people who handled it." What Archer correctly perceives is that the key to the case lies in the murky and tortuous history of the family that possessed the box and in the sordid past which it comes to symbolize.

While the past plays an important role in each of MacDonald's novels, in THE GOODBYE LOOK it almost becomes a living, breathing character in its own right. But make no mistake; this is a violent and demanding character with a "rap-sheet" spanning a quarter-century and boasting duplicity, psychosis, patricide, murder and embezzlement. For Archer, "solving" the case comes to mean more than dispassionately satisfying the demands of justice in a merely legal sense. Rather, it entails bringing himself and his clients to grips with the past through the process of acknowledgement and integration. After all, and as Archer himself admits, it is a "secret passion for mercy" which drives him. At the same time, he is forced to recognize his own and society's limitations when he laments, "justice is what keeps happening to people."

While some readers might be turned off by the overtly psychological elements of THE GOODBYE LOOK, others will find that they give the narrative a depth and profundity that is all-too-often missing from more standard crime fiction. Here, as in his other outstanding novels, MacDonald both pays homage to and, at the same time, expands the sometimes-narrow conventions of the genre. (James Clar - MYSTERY NEWS)