The Far Side of the Dollar: worth every penny

books:

	• The far side of the dollar Ross Macdonald J. Curley & Associates, 1980 - 538 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews
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highly recommended

A substantive mystery.

Chapter I of The Far Side of the Dollar finds veteran PI Lew Archer visiting a reform school for rich teenagers. Young Thomas Hillman a recent admission to the facility has gone AWOL and Archer has been hired by the school's headmaster to find him. A fairly straightforward case, right? Wrong. As in all Ross Macdonald novels, the plot becomes ever increasingly intricate as the narrative unfolds.
There's plenty of standard Ross Macdonald fare packed into the pages of this very engaging book. Family dysfunction that spans the generations, hidden blood relationships between characters, a young person's journey to claim a birthright heretofore denied as well as jealousy and greed leading to murder most foul.
The "readability" of The Far Side of the Dollar is greatly enhanced by its wonderfully insightful descriptive prose. Another very appealling aspect to this novel is the extremely vivid and at times emotionally wrenching way the characters are developed. Highly recommended.

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Classic and Consistent

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...

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The Far Side of the Dollar: worth every penny

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.

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Disappearing into History

Nobody reads Ross Macdonald much anymore, but this was one of several books Amazion asked me to review this week, so I'm doing my best to oblige them. This partcular June 1984 14th Bantam Books printing has one of the fabulous James Marsh covers I collect, in which the entire series of some 20-plus books were all published as a posthumous tribute to Macdonald, who died in 1983 and whose real name was Kenneth Millar, born an American, raised in Canada, and returned to California to write. Most of Macdonald's books have deep Freudian themes to them, and are old-style hard-boiled literature whose fans included such notable greats as Eudora Welty and the editor of the New York Times Book Review. It's hard to find him in print anymore, but Black Lizard/Vintage is doing a good job of tring to keep his books afloat. Macdonald writes of the promised land, the sunny valleys of California, and the family tragedies and mysteries behind the secret doors. It's best to start off reading him chronologically, with the three non-Archer novels he wrote during World War II, and then slowly move chronologically into the Lew Archer series, which once comprised a TV series starring Peter Graves and the movie "Harper" with Paul Newman as the Archer character (remember, he liked titles that began with "H", like "Hud" (Larry McMurtry's first book, "Horseman Pass By", and also "Hombre." "Dollar" is a great mystery and you should read everything Ross Macdonald wrote and all the great books of essays and one especially superb biography about him.

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MacDonald's masterpiece

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed shoulders with grifters--and where the present clientele includes a brand-new corpse.

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