For Macdonald completists only, but they'll cherish every word.
Macdonald, the dean of American hard-boiled writers at his death in 1983, once said that his short stories didn't "belong with my mature work." And this slender volume, which reprints three early stories Macdonald didn't even think worth collecting in Lew Archer, Private Investigator (1976), marks yet another step down. Even so, the tales are full of interest as milestones in the gifted author's development. "Death by Water" (1945), starring a bland private eye named Joe Rogers, is a neat, tidy whodunit with scarcely a trace of the emotional depth of Blue City (1946), let alone the Archer novels. "Strangers in Town" (1950), though only a few pages longer, packs a world of sad disillusionment into its tale of a gangster's moll on the run. And "The Angry Man" (1953), at once the most economical and the most deeply felt of the three, moves with an unerring swiftness from its opening scene, in which an escaped mental patient confronts Archer in his office, to its murderous denouement with all the efficiency of an Archer novel—and no wonder, since Macdonald used it, like "Strangers in Town," as the basis for a novel. In his informative introduction, which runs longer than any of the three stories, Macdonald biographer Nolan identifies the novels in question; readers with a taste for surprise may want to save the introduction till after they've savored these last crumbs from the master's table.
For Macdonald completists only, but they'll cherish every word.Pub Date: March 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-885941-51-X
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Crippen & Landru
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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