Going back to HardBoiled Ways … my first book in 2017 …

Sometime in the middle of 2015, on one of the Sundays at Abids, Vinod asked me whether I had read any novels by Ross Macdonald … I said no and then he said he too discovered the writer only recently and found out that Ross Macdonald formed a sort of ‘hard-boiled’ triumvirate with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler … Ross Macdonald has his own detective, Lew Archer, a chap similar in many ways to The Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe … Archer appeared in 18 novels and if you remember The Maltese Falcon, then you’d know where ‘Archer’ comes from … Macdonald came in slightly later into the hard-boiled game … and that endorsement by Vinod set me off on a hunt for Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels …

Vinod also helped me in acquiring my first Lew Archer novel and then many of the others that I have … not much actually, around 6 or so … and along the way, I discovered Ross Macdonald also wrote Archer short stories … and there were three different collections … the first one with 7 stories, the second one is the expanded first one with 2 more stories, and third one has three new stories … and then I discovered that all these short stories are available in one collected volume The Archer Files … this collected volume also has some extras like ‘newly discovered case notes,’ which are actually beginnings of novels or short stories that Macdonald never completed … and Tom Nolan, the editor of this volume, has 'prefaced' this book with a biographical sketch of Lew Archer ... ever since I found about all these, I have been looking for these books … for one and half years, I looked and searched … secondhand bookshops, firsthand book shops, online, brick and mortar …

 

And then sometime towards the end of 2016, I saw The Archer Files on amazon … I was tempted to buy it then and there … it was expensive and I hesitated … but transferred it to the cart … for some reason, the price kept fluctuating … and then suddenly one day, the price fell to the lowest I had seen in two months or so … I considered it to be a good omen and pressed the button … and in the next couple of days, the price increased … and increased further … so, anyway, the book arrived towards the end of January, my first book of this year … this is how it looks …

  

 

Typical ‘hardboiled tropes’-laden cover, no? … he he … the publishers probably couldn’t resist, I suppose … but it was a pleasure going back to hardboiled detective stories, those hardy detectives, the dialogue and repartee, the atmosphere … you can actually hear the music in the background … I have already read 3 stories from this volume and am currently reading Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, which was lying unread for a couple of years now …