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Ross Macdonald (1) (1915–1983)

Auteur van Motten om de Kaars

Voor andere auteurs genaamd Ross Macdonald, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.

Ross Macdonald (1) via een alias veranderd in John Ross Macdonald.

104+ Werken 12,753 Leden 320 Besprekingen Favoriet van 54 leden

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Fotografie: Courtesy of Allison and Busby

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Werken van Ross Macdonald

Titels zijn toegeschreven aan John Ross Macdonald.

Motten om de Kaars (1950) 811 exemplaren
The Moving Target (1949) 754 exemplaren
The Chill (1964) 726 exemplaren
De man onder de grond (1971) 717 exemplaren
The Blue Hammer (1976) 691 exemplaren
Losgeld voor een list (1959) 683 exemplaren
Black Money (1966) 566 exemplaren
The Goodbye Look (1969) 545 exemplaren
The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) 528 exemplaren
De glazuren grijns (1952) 528 exemplaren
The Far Side of the Dollar (1965) 506 exemplaren
Sleeping Beauty (1973) 506 exemplaren
The Way Some People Die (1951) 486 exemplaren
Find a Victim (1954) 441 exemplaren
The Wycherly Woman (1961) 430 exemplaren
The Barbarous Coast (1956) 417 exemplaren
De instant vijand (1968) 391 exemplaren
The Doomsters (1958) 383 exemplaren
Meet Me at the Morgue (1953) 312 exemplaren
The Name Is Archer (1955) 289 exemplaren
Blue City (1947) 243 exemplaren
The Ferguson Affair (1960) 218 exemplaren
The Three Roads (1948) 196 exemplaren
The Dark Tunnel (1944) 166 exemplaren
Trouble Follows Me (1946) 137 exemplaren
The Archer Files (2007) 118 exemplaren
Archer at Large (1970) 107 exemplaren
Ross Macdonald: Four Later Novels (2017) 86 exemplaren
Archer in Jeopardy (1979) 72 exemplaren
Ross Macdonald Selects Great Stories of Suspense (1974) — Redacteur; Medewerker — 69 exemplaren
Archer in Hollywood (1967) 63 exemplaren
Archer, P.I. (1977) 61 exemplaren
The Drowning Pool [1975 film] (1975) — Original novel — 20 exemplaren
On Crime Writing (1973) 16 exemplaren
Midnight Blue (2010) 14 exemplaren
Der Drahtzieher. (1999) 13 exemplaren
The Imaginary Blonde (1953) 13 exemplaren
The Guilty Ones (2009) 11 exemplaren
Einer lügt immer (1999) 11 exemplaren
Famous Edinburgh Crimes (1981) 7 exemplaren
Guilt-Edged Blonde 6 exemplaren
Find the Woman (1995) 4 exemplaren
O alvo móvel (2007) 3 exemplaren
The Faulkner Investigation (1985) 2 exemplaren
Pozegnalne Spojrzenie (2007) 2 exemplaren
Sunset boulevard (1992) 2 exemplaren
Lew Archer story (1991) 2 exemplaren
Potępieni 1 exemplaar
Chłód 1 exemplaar
El escalofro̕ 1 exemplaar
A Costa Maldita (1987) 1 exemplaar
Barbarské pobřeží (2000) 1 exemplaar
Alguns Morrem Assim 1 exemplaar
Los malignos (2013) 1 exemplaar
Retrato fatal, Um 1 exemplaar
Wild Goose Chase 1 exemplaar
Lewe pieniądze 1 exemplaar
ROMANZI 1 exemplaar
Lew Archer 1 exemplaar
The Singing Pigeon 1 exemplaar
Gone Girl 1 exemplaar
The Bearded Lady (2021) 1 exemplaar
The Suicide 1 exemplaar
The Sinister Habit 1 exemplaar
The Lew Archer omnibus (1997) 1 exemplaar
Sämtliche Detektivstories (1976) 1 exemplaar
La mineure en fugue (1971) 1 exemplaar
Okrutne wybrzeże (2007) 1 exemplaar
Liikkuva maali 1 exemplaar
Must raha : [romaan] (2002) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

Titels zijn toegeschreven aan John Ross Macdonald.

The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (2015) — Medewerker — 137 exemplaren
Great Short Tales of Mystery and Terror (1982) — Medewerker — 79 exemplaren
A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories (2002) — Medewerker — 78 exemplaren
Great American Mystery Stories of the 20th Century (1989) — Medewerker — 73 exemplaren
Harper [1966 film] (1966) — Novel — 43 exemplaren

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From the looks of other reviews, mine is a minority viewpoint, so be warned: but I found the first two-thirds of this book boring—something I would never have said about any of the previous eight books in the Archer series. The main characters are flat and uninteresting. The minor characters are (mostly) described without the zing that I'm used to supporting characters getting in other of Macdonald's books. The commentary is cookie-cutter wry rather than witty or surprising. And too many conversations read like depositions.

Then, around chapter 20, the author wakes up and remembers who he is. The characters start to live like real people and the similes start to fly like they should in a good noir thriller:

"A fuller moon than last night's was rising behind the trees. It gleamed through their branches like a woman's breast pressing against wrought iron."

"I glanced up at her tense small face: she looked like a bunny after a hard Easter."

The solution starts coming into place and it's admirably complex, surprising, yet right and believable. A four-star ending after a three-star beginning.
… (meer)
½
 
Gemarkeerd
john.cooper | 10 andere besprekingen | Mar 7, 2024 |
Many critics consider this to be Ross Macdonald's finest book, and Macdonald himself professed to agree...perhaps because of the general consensus among critics. I love his work, and this is a good book, but it's not in my top three (The Wycherly Woman, The Chill and The Underground Man, in that order). The fact is that critics are partial to Black Money because it nods self-consciously to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and such allusions are considered the height of sophistication in the literary world. In a very real sense, Macdonald wrote this novel for the critics after a couple of them had disparaged certain elements of The Chill. Artists are sensitive, and I guess it's not surprising that Macdonald responded to criticism by trying to prove that he could produce a "serious" book, but he needn't have bothered. He was already a first-class writer, and didn't have to demonstrate that to a bunch of stuffy literary people whose readership was a tiny fraction of his own. Like I said, Black Money is good, but I think Macdonald may have overvalued it a little falsely. (Even as he proclaimed this his best novel, however, he had to concede that The Chill contained his finest plotting.) Also, there are a few instances of editorial sloppiness--a rare phenomenon in Macdonald's oeuvre--which deny this book a place among the top tier of his work, in my opinion.

The back cover synopsis for Bantam's 1973 paperback edition tries hard to convey the impression that Macdonald had suddenly turned into Mickey Spillane, and is downright hilarious: "Lew Archer made a deal with fat little Rich Boy at the posh Montevista Tennis Club. Seems Rich Boy had lost his beautiful fiancée to a stranger with a suspiciously phony French accent. So Rich Boy hired Archer to retrieve the runaway fiancée. Sounded like a fast, clean bundle for old, broke Archer..." You have to wonder who wrote that. (It certainly wasn't Macdonald.) Maybe the publisher was apprehensive about the book's literary pretensions and felt the need to compensate with an overtly hard-boiled teaser?

Black Money is a standard Archer novel in nearly every measurable sense. (And it happens to contain one of Macdonald's most painfully beautiful sentences: "His expression turned faraway, further and further away, as if his mind was climbing back over the curve of time to the source of his life.") The casual reader probably won't even notice the allusions to Gatsby, and those who have enjoyed Macdonald's other books will like this one, too. But it's emphatically not the best thing he ever wrote.
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½
 
Gemarkeerd
Jonathan_M | 15 andere besprekingen | Feb 18, 2024 |
Start the year off with a bang! I had picked this up in a bookshop on a whim last month. I had never heard of the author nor the book, but the tagline referencing Hammett and Chandler meant I could not pass it up.

Fast-paced and well-plotted, with a resolution that had me yelping out loud in disbelief (in a good way!) I foresee more MacDonald in my future. And maybe more hardboiled private eyes too. I shall have to browse the Edgar list more carefully.

Aside 1: Has the golden age of hardboiled detectives passed already or are there some great modern ones? Did they just evolve into something new, like Scandinoir, which are much darker and intentionally uglier? Is it even possible in the internet age to have these sorts of gritty yet light, bantery run-arounds?

Aside 2: whilst I was reading this, my partner had been in the middle of his first Sue Grafton. Since it's been a couple of years since I wiki'd Grafton, I thought I'd brush up. And lo and behold in the opening paragraph: "she said the strongest influence on her crime novels was author Ross Macdonald." What synchronicity.
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kitzyl | 20 andere besprekingen | Jan 5, 2024 |
"His living room was the kind of room you find in back-country ranch houses where old men hold the last frontier against women and civilization and hygiene. The carpets and furniture were glazed with dirt. Months of wood ashes clogged the fireplace and sifted onto the floor. The double-barreled shotgun over the mantel was the only clean and cared-for object in the room."
 
Gemarkeerd
Mark_Feltskog | 14 andere besprekingen | Dec 23, 2023 |

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Statistieken

Werken
104
Ook door
8
Leden
12,753
Populariteit
#1,838
Waardering
3.9
Besprekingen
320
ISBNs
843
Talen
23
Favoriet
54

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