Customer Reviews

The Far Side of the Dollar

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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.

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.

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.

I have been reading Ross MacDonald novels for over forty years now, and am currently in the process of rereading them all. In my view, he is the greatest of the thousands of American (he was Canadian, actually) detective novelists and the novels seem stronger now than when they first appeared forty or fifty years ago. MacDonald's detective Lew Archer is one of the most interesting of all fictional investigators, tough, smart, sensitive, and all too human. MacDonald is a great storyteller, and the plots are dazzling. What strikes me most after all of these years is the beauty of his very spare style, and his note-perfect recreation of post-war California. Every book from The Doomsters (1958) on is a masterpiece of the genre, and the five early Lew Archer novels are impressive, too, especially The Barbarous Coast. He is really writing Greek tragedies, under the guise of mystery thrillers. The Far Side of the Dollar is one of the gems of the whole series. I can't recommend this work too highly for anyone who appreciates literate detective fiction.

Written in MacDonald's most productive period, Far Side of the Dollar is not his masterpiece by far (as a couple of the other reviewers want to think it is).

It's solid, and compulsively readable, as usual for MacDonald. It doesn't quite take off into the stratosphere, as his best work does, and there are a couple of niggling plot questions that make you close the book at the end with a slightly sour feeling of discontent (The villain's motive is rather sketchy, very rare for MacDonald, and the motive or behavior of one character who aides the villain is also a little head-scratching). A good MacDonald book, not great.

To me, this is an average book by a great author. The writing is good, the pace is fast, the setting is interesting, and the characters are well-drawn. The problem I have with it is that the tension does not crackle nearly as well as it does in MacDonald's other books. The protagonist, Lew Archer, isn't really in personal danger for most of the narrative. Instead, the danger surrounds another character, whom the reader doesn't meet until late in the book. As such, it's hard to keep the tension and suspense going for a character that you don't get to know first-hand.

Don't get me wrong, this is a serviceable book, and for MacDonald fans, it's well worth the read. But it left me a little cold, probably because I couldn't find myself getting as invested in the plot as I would have liked to have been.

It seems that nearly every Ross Macdonald novel involves old family secrets rearing their ugly heads. But then Mozart pretty much used only 7 different notes per octave, so it's the execution that matters, not the tools. And this story of private investigator Lew Archer trying to unravel the apparent kidnapping of a teenaged boy is, as is almost always the case with Macdonald, finely executed.

By the mid-1960s Ross Macdonald had hit his stride as author of the Lew Archer novels. He had broken from the influences of Hammett and Chandler to make a unique impression to the hard-boiled American mystery. The Far Side of the Dollar shows Macdonald near the top of his form.

The plot is "more crooked than a snake's back." A troubled young man disappears from the boarding school where his wealthy family sent him as a punishment for his bad behavior. Archer cannot determine if the young man left on his own or if he was kidnapped. The search turns up old family secrets that lead to murder.

Several aspects of the novel stand out. Macdonald excels at creating atmosphere; the reader feels that he or she is in 1960s southern California. Also, Macdonald creates realistic portraits of depressed, desperate characters whose frustrations create tragedy. The novel skillfully moves the reader from the past to the present without confusing him or her.

The Far Side is good but I do have a few quibbles. Many critics have noted that Macdonald recycled the same plot in all of his novels - someone did something bad in the past and it catches up to them (often through their children) in the present. Also, Archer is often an abrasive character.

I have read almost all of Macdonald's novels. The Far Side of the Dollar is a half-step below his best (The Chill and Black Money). Hard-boiled mystery fans should find a copy of this excellent novel.

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.

This was the third novel I have read by Ross McDonald and it is my favorite so far. The plot is complex and satisfying and the characters are well developed and three diminsional. What makes this novel stand out is that it is not just a good mystery, but it is also delves fairly deeply into the minds of its characters. It explores the complex relationships between the members of a highly dysfunctional family. All in all, very entertaining.