Customer Reviews

The Instant Enemy

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The Instant Enemy is the quintessential Ross Macdonald novel. Why? Because it incorporates so many of the elements Macdonald held near and dear to his heart. These include:

-Family tragedies that repeat themselves over the generations.

-Unexpected familial relationships between characters.

-A young person's journey to claim a birthright unfairly denied.

-The notion that one's destiny is largely determined at birth, if not before.

The book starts out with Lew Archer being summoned to the Woodland Hills home of Keith Sebastian and his wife Bernice. Their 17 year old daughter has run away and they want Archer to find her without involving the police. Archer soon learns that the girl is traveling in the company of a 19 year old delinquent named Davy Spanner. What's more, it appears that they are planning to commit a very serious crime against Sebastian's boss, the fabulously wealthy oilman Stephen Hackett.

Archer wends his way up and down much of the California coast steadfastly seeking to unravel the truth behind the shocking series of events that rapidly ensue. The fast paced narrative unfolds quite smoothly as one unexpected complication after another is brought to light.

And Macdonald's prose is first rate. Whether depicting the scenic landscapes of the California coastline or the changing face of American society as it reflects the turbulence of the 1960s, the writing is remarkably deft and descriptive.

Thoroughly engaging, suspenseful and rich with surprise, The Instant Enemy ranks among the finest novels written by Ross Macdonald. Do yourself a favor and read it.

It seems that the cases Lew Archer takes on are rather straight forward looking at the outset and startlingly complex as he gets into them. This one ranks among the best of the series because of the characters involved. This time, he's hired first by a runaway daughter's father and runs into a plot against the father's employer. A subsequent kidnapping and threat of murder gets him also "hired" by the intended victim's mother. The alert reader will figure out aspects of the whole picture before the revelation, but chances are that reader will run into a few surprises.

The puzzle is definitely an important part of the total story, but it's the depth of character and the implicit tragic developments that make a Ross MacDonald story the rewarding experience that it is.

...and that is actually saying quite a bit, considering that he is one of my favorite detective fiction writers.

Written in 1968, this is Macdonald at the height of his skills. It features all the classic elements of inherited guilt, needless loss, corrupt manipulation and class barriers. Instead of stumbling over 1960s culture (as so many lesser writers seem to do), it makes free love and drug culture just two more things to be misused by the wrong sort of people.

Tough, smoothly written, well plotted. A must read for fans of Lew Archer and a good place to begin with Macdonald if you have not yet discovered his work.

When you read something like The Instant Enemy, you immediately understand the overwhelming praise that has sometimes been given to Ross MacDonald.

From the first chapter, MacDonald tells the story simply and powerfully. A banker summons Lew Archer to find his daughter, who has been missing about 24 hours and who has until recently, according to her parents, been a well-behaved, sedate girl. Of course this isn't exactly true, and before Lew goes very far the case snowballs, the girl has latched on to a possibly dangerous 19 year old who might be murderous, there's a kidnapping, and it grows and grows from there.

This is one of a handful of mysteries written in the English language that can be called a masterpiece. All of the themes that haunted MacDonald's books are here, and what he does with them is never heavy-handed. In addition, the labyrinthine story makes the reader really work to understand the connections between the large number of characters, and how the past events they were involved in interrelate. The resolution of the numerous strands of plot and character result in a conclusion that is sad, painful, and quite powerful (Not to mention surprising. Even for this hardened mystery reader, one revelation at the end was a genuine shocker).

A great book.

If Occam's Razor famously suggests the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one, Occam took the day off when Ross MacDonald sat down to write "The Instant Enemy," a deliciously convoluted tale of deceit, treachery, and murder featuring a baseball programs-worth of characters and more plot twists than a joy ride down Mulholland Drive in the LA foothills where the story begins.

Iconoclastic private eye Lew Archer is called by the parents to retrieve Sandy Sebastian, their seventeen year-old high school senior who as apparently run off with her nineteen-year-old punk boyfriend. Despite Archer's initial distrust of the Sebastians, he takes the case and before too many pages has turned has located the daughter and he wayward Davy Spanner. But the fun is just beginning as pair flip from young lovers to young felons, stealing dad's shotgun and kidnapping millionaire Stephen Hackett, ruler of the business empire in which dad Keith Sebastian is employed. As the plot thickens, so does Archer's expense account as he drives up and down and over and across California at a frenetic pace as Archer seems to have little need for food and less for sleep as he gets beat-up, has guns pulled on him, and even gathers some clues in eventually getting to the bottom of an entire volume of perplexing decade-and-a-half old mysteries. Macdonald spins his tale with colorful prose rising a level above the more typical hardboiled noir scribbler.

Written in the sixties but highly relevant still, besides the thrills, action, and suspense, "Instant Enemy" is an interesting throw back to that tumultuous period in American history when the innocence and prudence of the fifties were giving way - tenuously - to an increasingly permissive society. Ross Macdonald and his smart-talking Lew Archer creation, while overshadowed by Hammetts, Chandler, or Thompson, is a master of Arerican pulp fiction, brooding and complex against the lean, simple lines of his more famous genre-mates. In fact, Macdonald's first Lew Archer novel, "The Moving Target" in 1949, was brought to film in 1966 as Paul Newman's "Harpur."

Bottom line, a fast and frenzied tour through time and deception; an engaging and entertaining page-turner well worth a look.

If you like the other Ross McDonald Lew Archer stories, you will like this one as well.

Recommended!

The critical consensus is that __The Chill__ is Ross Macdonald's best novel, but for my money, this one tops it, if only by a bit. A simple case becomes more complex by the page, as Lew Archer uncovers layer beneath layer of twisted family ties stretching back decades, with crimes in the present having roots deep in the past.

Sandy Sebastian was only a kid-a lost, lonely, unhappy young girl who ran away with another equally lost kid called Davy Spanner. One was a homicidal killer. Both were kidnappers, and Lew Archer was hired to stop them before anyone got hurt. Archer had followed bloody trails before-but never one as bizarre and terrible as this...The Instant Enemy.