After tea and biscuits (on the same Sunday as in the previous post), as Vinod and I came out of the Irani, Vinod asked me if I had read anything by
Ross Macdonald. This was a new name to
me and I said no, I hadn’t. Vinod then
told me that Ross Macdonald was writing around the same time as Raymond
Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and they were considered the ‘holy trinity’ of
crime fiction in America. He told me
that Ross Macdonald too had a ‘detective’ of his own called Lew Archer, who was
a ‘tough, but humane’ detective. Vinod
says in one of his posts that had had no idea about this writer till he read The Wycherly Woman, which he found in
Abids in March this year and then in June he found three more by Ross
Macdonald. And since then he has been
hooked. And he asked me not to miss any
book by Ross Macdonald, especially if one has enjoyed reading Chandler and
Hammett. Ross Macdonald also has a
similar style in terms of writing sharp dialogues. So, one more name was added to my list of
‘must-read’ writers.
And though I looked
carefully, I didn’t find any Ross
Macdonald novels that day at Abids. Back
home, as is the norm, I googled and then Wikipedia-ed 'Ross Macdonald' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Macdonald)
and got to know quite a bit about him and his novels. According to the entry in Wikipedia, “Macdonald has
been called the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries.” This is how
Fedora and all ... 'private-eye' written all over ...
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