The Galton Case (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) [Paperback]

Ross Macdonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 26, 1996

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Galton Case, published in 1959, was Ross Macdonald's breakthrough book. Its predecessors are craftsmanlike, highly literate, hard-boiled detective stories; The Galton Case and most of its successors are literature that happens to inhabit the detective-story form. For Macdonald the man, Galton was the first book in which he explored his deepest personal concerns (he was the child of a broken home who was passed from relative to relative in his youth). For readers, it's the book in which he first perfected the balancing act that became his trademark: a tightly written page-turner that also probes profound themes and frequently rises to something like poetry.

The tale opens with detective Lew Archer visiting the swanky offices of a lawyer acquaintance, who engages him to hunt for a long-missing scion of the rich Galton family. Though the case seems fruitless, Archer begins digging. Soon a seemingly unrelated crime intrudes--but Archer tells us, "I hate coincidences." As he roams California (and, briefly, Nevada) following leads and hunches, he gradually uncovers a long-buried tale of deception, hatred, and the power of illusion. As usual, Macdonald can accomplish more with three lines of dialogue and a simple description than most writers can in three pages. The connection between Archer's two cases finally clicks about three-quarters of the way through the book, and the moving denouement, with its final plot twist, takes place in a hardscrabble Canadian boarding house much like those in which Macdonald spent parts of his childhood. The Galton Case is an exceptionally satisfying read on several levels. --Nicholas H. Allison

Review

The Galton Case, published in 1959, was Ross Macdonald's breakthrough book. Its predecessors are craftsmanlike, highly literate, hard-boiled detective stories; The Galton Case and most of its successors are literature that happens to inhabit the detective-story form. . . . it's the book in which he first perfected the balancing act that became his trademark: a tightly written page-turner that also probes profound themes and frequently rises to something like poetry. . . . Macdonald can accomplish more with three lines of dialogue and a simple description than most writers can in three pages. . . . The Galton Case is an exceptionally satisfying read on several levels. --Amazon.com Review

Exciting, beautifully plotted, and written with taste, perception and compassion. --New York Times Book Review

A model of intelligently engineered excitement. --New Yorker

One of his best. . . . The Macdonald depth of understanding and dispassionate charity come out well, and the story. . . is richly plotted. --San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (November 26, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679768645
• ISBN-13: 978-0679768647
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Lost Boy, January 22, 2002

By 

IA (San Francisco, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Galton Case (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback)

This novel was also anthologized in the "Archer At Large" omnibus, which contains a revealing, fascinating foreward by MacDonald, who stated that The Galton Case was his "break-through book." And then he diclosed the numerous--and poignant--autobiographical parallels he had with the novel.

The Galton Case has a realistic, painful and angry intensity not present in any other Archer novels I've read--perhaps because MacDonald had put more of his life and sorrows into this book than in any other; into the examination of how the sins of the fathers ruin their sons' lives. For MacDonald every family is riddled with moral cancer: skeletons can never be fully shoved into the closet, especially because Archer, relentless and haunted, will bring them back to life.

It's true that MacDonald basically wrote the same work throughout most of his novels. All work out the same issues of buried identity, familial guilt and moral corrpution. This is not an entirely damning fact--it just means that Archer was a limited, minor artist (like Hammett and Chandler) and that he was fixated with a primal story that he retold continually. "The Galton Case" may be the finest version of that story--the most wounding, convincing and saddening.

As a stylist, MacDonald lacks Hammett's laconic grace and Chandler's brilliant flamboyance. Parts of this book can be awkward, while other parts display figurative language of uncommon acuteness and insight. MacDonald chose to work with a sparer, elegantly economic and less sensationalistic style--his sentences literally work up a quiet storm.
As a storyteller MacDonald is deeper, more human and more interesting than either Hammett or Chandler--because he is genuinely intersted in other people besides his detective. He doesn't make Lew Archer cooler(Sam Spade)or simply better (Philip Marlowe) than his clients. Archer is more like a hard-boiled, tough detective-shrink dealing with clients whose neuroses can be dangerous. His plots are neither ingenious displays of dedeuctive/inductive insight (a la Sherlock Holmes) or outrageously complicated messes (as in Chandler). Instead they resemble the gradual construction of a scandalous family tree, with hidden connections and relations acumulating into a damning account of old sins.

Unlike Spade and Marlowe, Lew Archer genuinely gives a damn about and sympathizes with his clients, who must deal with the horrible buried truths he discovers. MacDonald's true subject is in how families and friends are capable of hurting and crippling each other. The Taiwanese film director Edward Yang once gave a chilling coment on human relationships:"The bombs we plant in each other are still ticking." That quote goes striaght to the heart of MacDonald's mystery novels. They possess a fundamental humanism that's often missing not only from most crime stories, but from most novels and movies period.

You'll notice that I really haven't said anything in specific about "The Galton Case." The less you know about it before reading it, the better. Enjoy the story, and how it pierces straight into its target.

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars classic noir mystery, November 22, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Galton Case (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback)

Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer series is the pinnacle of the private eye novel. In many ways, it is the greatest series of American novels, period.

In The Galton Case, Archer is hired to look for Anthony Galton, who disappeared twenty years earlier. Now Galton's dying mother wants to be reconciled with him & bequeath him her considerable fortune. Archer's suspicions are raised when all the pieces of the mystery fall into place a little to quickly.

With a lone wolf investigator, wanton women, mobsters, millions, beatings & shootings, The Galton Case has all the elements of a classic noir mystery.

GRADE: A+

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly, the ultimate Ross Macdonald novel, July 7, 2003

By 

Neal C. Reynolds (Indianapolis, Indiana) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Galton Case (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback)

Fairly new to Ross MacDonald, I am finding his books superb dramatic novels told as mysteries...the pieces of the poignant story are given to you jigsaw style, but you still experience the power of the story as they are pieced together. Lew Archer's role is that of the puzzle solver, and you are not as involved with him and his character development as you are with the characters.

This is possibly his most satisfying story and like most of the other reviewers, I choose to let you discover the story for yourself. If you have read previous MacDonald, you may spot elements of the story before they're completely revealed, but this hardly will diminish your enjoyment of the book. It might even enhance it. There's much more of interest here than just the identity of the murderer. There's a lot of figuring out the essences of the people involved, and they do act consistently.

There is one minor stretch of credibility in this particular book, one rather unlikely coincidence, but it's a realistic coincidence, one which fits nicely as one of the coincidences that do occur in real life and does not seem like the author's contrivance.

I don't think it makes any appreciable difference whether or not you've read any other MacDonald works or not. This will read well as the first one or the later one.

One of the great mystery novels, for sure.