The Drowning Pool (Lew Archer #2) (1950) by Ross Macdonald (pen-name of Kenneth Millar): The second Lew Archer detective novel presents a twisty, psychologically weighted mystery for PI Archer to solve -- and that's before the bodies start piling up. Hired to discover who's blackmailing a Southern California heiress, Archer soon finds that the blackmail is just the beginning. Of vengeance? Of business shenanigans? Of old family grievances? Well, that's what Archer has to discover before everyone ends up dead.
Ross Macdonald's writing is crisp and nuanced, mixing often elegant metaphors with clear and straightforward attention to making the mechanics of a complicated plot seem inevitable. Archer is already a rueful, committed PI at this point, and his first-person narration can alternatedly sing and sear with insight and pithy observations. Adapted in the 1960's into a movie starring Paul Newman. Recommended.
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The Far Side of the Dollar ((Lew Archer #12) (1964) by Ross Macdonald (pen-name of Kenneth Millar): About as dark as the always dark Lew Archer hardboiled-detective novels get, all of it under those sunny Southern California skies. A rebellious teen-aged boy (hey, it's the 1960's) escapes from the psychiatric facility/ reform school his parents have just committed him to. Archer is called in, and soon descends into the underbelly of the family's upper-class American dream. Memorable characters and a fascinatingly twisted path of murders make this Archer novel especially good. Highly recommended.
The Sentry: A Joe Pike Novel (2012) by Robert Crais: Crais takes Joe Pike, sometime-second-banana to his other Southern California PI hero Elvis Cole, out for a mostly-solo spin. A random stop by Pike to check his Jeep's tire pressure leads him, chaos-theory style, into a rapidly escalating series of events centered around an imperiled LA sandwich-shop owner and his niece. Elvis Cole shows up to help Pike solve the mysteries that seem to keep erupting as the novel hurtles along, but much of The Sentry devotes itself to a third-person examination of Pike's thoughts and actions.
As Pike is pretty much a hyper-competent pulp hero, one's interest in the novel depends on how much one likes hyper-competent pulp heroes. I do, but Pike's abilities tend to pull the Cole novels out of the realms of believability when he's just a supporting character. As the lead, he might as well be Doc Savage's occasionally melancholy grandson. The plot hums and whirs like a beautifully constructed machine, and the plot twists are about as twisty as they can get without becoming self-parodic. As seems to be a trope in later novels involving Elvis Cole, at least one female police detective dies. Hmm. An enjoyable entertainment. Recommended.
Red Dreams by Dennis Etchison containing the following stories: "Black Sun", "Drop City", "I Can Hear the Dark", "Keeper of the Light", "Not From Around Here", "On the Pike", "Talking in the Dark", "The Chair", "The Chill", "The Graveyard Blues", "The Smell of Death", "Wet Season", "White Moon Rising." (Collected 1987): Dennis Etchison is pretty much the horror writer's horror writer when it comes to short stories, praised by such genre luminaries as Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell. That he's not more famous is partially a product of his concentration on short stories and partially happenstance and partially the fact that he may be too good and too idiosyncratic to be a mass-market success.
He doesn't write about vampires or werewolves or voracious evil gods from beyond the universe. His style is straightforward without being unornamented, his plot sense as idiosyncratic as everything else about him. It's very difficult to figure out where the average Etchison story will end up. And a mass audience tends to like familiarity and predictability.
What a writer, though, published now for nearly 50 years. This was just his second collection of short stories, released in mass-market paperback during the horror boom of the 1980's. It collects stories from nearly 20 years, all of them fascinating. Etchison sets a lot of his stories in a bleached-out Southern California, but not all. His characters move through a world where explanations are often lacking for what's happening to them. His narrative viewpoint is probably closer to pure noir than any other horror writer I can think of.
This viewpoint makes the subject matter quite startling, as characters who would be at home in a Jim Thompson novel move through worlds that vaguely resemble the worlds of Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick. The closing novella here, from 1984, "Not from Around Here", embodies the narrative and stylistic dissonance that makes Etchison unique: it's like a Philip K. Dick near-future story about movie preservation and weird cults as rewritten by James M. Cain. Or something like that. It's all Etchison.
There isn't a weak story here -- even the earliest, "Wet Season", while more traditionally supernatural, doesn't nail itself down with authoritative explanations for what exactly is going on. It actually is neo-Lovecraftian without reading in any way like a traditional Lovecraft homage. And "Talking to the Dark" is a gem about a devoted horror fan who gets to meet his favourite writer. It's horrible and funny, and one wonders reading it whether Etchison has based that writer on anyone from the real world. And why, if so. This is an essential collection for anyone who likes finely crafted, haunting short stories, genre or not. Highly recommended.
