The Zebra-Stripe Hearse [Paperback]

Ross Macdonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 1992

Lew Archer wouldn't normally touch a case like this, not even for money. But he is a little in love with the wife. The husband has run off with a blonde teenager and has taken the six-year-old son with him. He reluctantly agrees to search for them - last seen in a Californian canyon.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Published in 1949, 1961, and 1962, respectively, these three titles find gumshoe Lew Archer up to his neck in murder, kidnapping, and blackmailAjust another day at the office. This is hard-boiled detective writing at the top of its form.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

Strictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all Archer is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep crossing the son-in-law's--and Archer's--in a powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Allison & Busby (June 18, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0749001453
• ISBN-13: 978-0749001452
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,571,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another stellar novel in a spectacular series, October 12, 2004

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback)

The bad news about this wonderful novel is that it is not Ross MacDonald at his very best. The good news is that it is still far better than most mystery novels that have been written. Of the three great masters of the American hardboiled detective novel, MacDonald never achieved the brilliant prose style of Hammett and Chandler, but neither of those two came close to the meditations on the vagaries of the human soul that MacDonald made his subject over and again. All of MacDonald's novels deal with the consequences of original sin, of an evil that seems to be greater than any individual human being, an evil that constantly threatens to overwhelm human beings when they least anticipate it. Frequently, we discover in MacDonald that, as in the Old Testament, the sins of the fathers have been visited on the second and third generations. Often in his novels, the roots of the crimes of the present lay twenty or thirty or forty years in the past. In this novel, Lew Archer at one points explains to his client, "The past is the key to the present," thus stating explicitly one of the fundamental principles underlying all of MacDonald's fiction. Ironically this novel extends less into the pass than almost any of his other novels. One of his truly great novels such as the incomparable THE CHILL or THE INSTANT ENEMY will extend decades into the past, which MacDonald brilliantly links to the present. Often one gets the sense that MacDonald's is revealing the secret history of his character's lives. This one does as well, but instead of going forty years into the past, he goes merely a few years.

I loved the locales of the novel. Although I wish he physically described the areas Archer visits, MacDonald was always more of an ethicist than a sociologist. He was always less interested in communities and the way society worked than in the way that humans worked and how the decisions they make ripple down through the lives of other human beings. Thus he visits Lake Tahoe, but there is a kind of timelessness to the area he described. In reading Chandler, on the other hand, there is often a deep consciousness of the character and nature of the places where the stories occur. These technique benefits both authors, by providing a concreteness to Chandler's stories that is often missing in MacDonald's, while lending a sense of timelessness to MacDonald that is impossible in Chandler. Most hardboiled writers have tended to follow more in Hammett and Chandler's footsteps than MacDonald's, though James Ellroy is one notable exception.

Though this is not one of MacDonald's best novels, it is still exceptionally enjoyable. It is also one of his least typical. Some people survive you anticipate meeting violent ends (the body count for his central characters is usually quite high). As always, he unrolls his plot skillfully. The characters are all vividly drawn. And unlike many of his other novels, there is more than one unexpected twist at the end. This is as fine a place as any for any newcomer to MacDonald to start, and any MacDonald veteran who has not read it certainly should. It may not contain the glories of his great masterpiece THE CHILL (which more than one critic of the genre considers to be the supreme novel of the entire detective genre), but it is nonetheless a very fine book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only in California..., June 11, 2003

By 

Neal C. Reynolds (Indianapolis, Indiana) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Zebra Striped Hearse (Hardcover)

Yeah, only in California are you likely to see a zebra striped hearse full of surfing teens. Although one of the important clues comes from the hearse, it doesn't really play that important a part in the story, but it's a symbol of the California lifestyle, especially the lifestyle of the teens & young adults. And this symbol has a bearing on the character especially of the young woman whose boy friend and potential husband Lew Archer is hired to investigate.

Of course, you know that what appears to be a simple case for Archer is going to develop into a complicated skein of emotions and events including murder. You can also guess that there will be tragic overtones in the matter.

Ross MacDonald is deservedly recognized as one of the elite of the hard boiled school. While there are resembances to Hammett, Chandler and even Parker to an extent, he is unique. While he presents you with a puzzle, he also makes you care for his characters. He may have you disliking and distrusting some of the characters such as the father and the boy friend in this book, and then have you caring in one way or another for them.

If you haven't discovered Ross MacDonald yet, it's time you did. And if you have, you don't even need to be reading this review. (Although I'm glad you are)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of his best, December 30, 2003

By 

S. Harris (Spotsylvania, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback)

I've liked everything I've read so far by MacDonald, and Zebra-Striped Hearse is no exception. What I found different is Archer's travels, be it Mexico, Nevada, and up and down California. In particular, his portrayal of an American colony in Mexico of drunks, artists, and others just hiding out, read true. Same with the surfer kids in their zebra striped hearse. It's the kind of writing that gives you a slice of what the early sixties was like, but in a way that doesn't sound dated, but accurate.

The novel as a whole is moody, its story a dark (and very sad)one of sexual depravity, psychological cruelty, a deliberate red herring or two, and of course, murder(s). To some extent I felt novel had too many characters, and it was hard to keep track of all the motivations, not to mention Archer's frenetic movements between Mexico, California, and Nevada. But with MacDonald you get a master of character creation who possesses excellent descriptive powers. He can create a memorable character, with a history in the space of a paragraph or two. He's amazing. And his scenes can very suggestive, very dark. In one, a little girl looking at a comic book suggests (possible) crimes of a much greater scale. But MacDonald doesn't dwell on it. He leaves you hanging, effectively haunting you for the rest of the book. You never know for sure, but it's that not knowing that shows MacDonald at his best. Within the scope of the novel, it's a small moment, but MacDonald cares about those small moments as he builds a whole.

If there is convolution in Zebra Striped Hearse, it's a small sin blown away by the fine descriptive powers of a master.