The Far Side of the Dollar (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

Rating:
Summary: Classic and Consistent
Review: Excellent example of Mac Donald's well honed style. Good character developments as well as excellent one-dimensional character 'vignettes' that serve as observation portholes into the seemy underbelly of society. As for its "monosyllabic tone", that's part of the effect, a la Hemingway. For readers (like the one below) who need long obscure words in EVERY piece of literature, there's always the dictionary...

Rating:
Summary: The Far Side of the Dollar: worth every penny
Review: Ross MacDonald infuses eloquence into the lips of his tough detective, Lew Archer. In this mystery, Archer is hired to find the kidnapped son of a couple seriously alienated from one another. The teenage boy has fallen into the wrong hands, partly through his own doing, having run away from a reform school after finding out some startling facts about his background. The mastery the author exhibits as he describes emotions through imagery of the California landscape is poetic and conveys a sense of shattered lives. The reader feels as if the Pacific coast has been transformed into a map of one family's existential angst. This is a powerful mystery worth reading.


Rating:
Summary: MacDonald's masterpiece
Review: Ross MacDonald's (aka Kenneth Millar) Lew Archer novels are probably the greatest modern detective series ever, although the insistence of MacDonald to use the same formulaic elements in his books over and over and over again mean that the novels are better read individually than collectively. With that in mind, The Far Side Of The Dollar is your best bet, as it is the example of MacDonald's formula at its best and most poignant. Other superior Archer novels include The Chill, The Doomsters and The Zebra-Striped Hearse, in addition to the magnificent short story collection The Name Is Archer. Whichever Archer novel you decide to read, make sure to keep a scorecard, because the intricate plots make it hard to keep track of all the various characters and their relationships to one another.

Rating:
Summary: Too simplistic to be realistic
Review: This book may be clean and lack 4 letter words but the writing style does not challenge the reader's mind. Plot is thin and the style is too monosyllabic for me. I prefer books from which I learn at least one new word.