Black Money is a novel by US American mystery writer Ross Macdonald. Published in 1966, it is, according to Matthew Bruccoli and other critics, among the most powerful of all Ross Macdonald's novels. It was his own personal choice as his best book.[citation needed]
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book.
Mystery fiction is a genre of fiction usually involving a mysterious death or a crime to be solved. Often with a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character oftentimes will be a detective who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Sometimes mystery books are nonfictional. "Mystery fiction" can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.
Ross Macdonald is the main pseudonym that was used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Plot summary
The plot is typically intricate: Peter Jamiesen, the jilted boyfriend of the formerly wealthy Virginia Fablon, hires sleuth Lew Archer to investigate the background of Francis Martel, a man of mysterious wealth, grandiose claims, and violent threats. Fablon and Martel quickly wed after Archer's arrival. The resulting inquiries take Archer from the homeless to the wealthy, a canvassing seen in other Macdonald novels. Archer links Martel and Fablon to old gambling debts and a suicide that might have been murder.
Lew Archer is a fictional character created by American-Canadian writer Ross Macdonald. Archer is a private detective working in Southern California. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the character appeared in 18 novels and a handful of shorter works as well as several film and television adaptations. Macdonald's Archer novels have been praised for building on the foundations of hardboiled fiction by introducing more literary themes and psychological depth to the genre. Critic John Leonard declared that Macdonald had surpassed the limits of crime fiction to become "a major American novelist" while author Eudora Welty was a fan of the series and carried on a lengthy correspondence with Macdonald. The editors of Thrilling Detective wrote: "The greatest P.I. series ever written? Probably."
Except for brief forays into Las Vegas (the title refers to cash skimmed by casino operators to avoid taxes) and the environs of Los Angeles, the action takes place around Montevista. A wealthy enclave, Montevista is characterized by private clubs, opulent homes and exclusive medical clinics. The plot's implications, however, reach beyond California, as the edges of the story extend to Central America and Europe, whose cultures and economies the book sees as inextricably tied to American life.
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U.S. state and the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento. The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 8.8 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, and the country's second most populous, after New York City. California also has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs.
Central America is located on the southern tip of North America, or is sometimes defined as a subcontinent of the Americas, bordered by Mexico to the north, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south. Central America consists of seven countries: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The combined population of Central America has been estimated to be 41,739,000 and 42,688,190.
Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. It comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia.
Style
Written in understated style, with dry wit and occasional aphorisms ("What you do to others you do to yourself. That's the converse of the golden rule") and without the sentimental biases that sometimes mar the author’s other books, Black Money maintains the speed of a thriller at the same time as it manipulates the reader’s understanding of its characters so as to render them icons of their classes and to lay bare their psychological tropes and moral dimensions.[citation needed] In this respect the book owes much of its vision to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and it is no accident that Fitzgerald is mentioned once in the text itself: Martel and Virginia Fablon share something of Gatsby and Daisy Fay Buchanan.[citation needed] As in Fitzgerald, the glittering surface conceals profound corruption.[citation needed] The denouement is darker than Fitzgerald's work, however.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American fiction writer, whose works helped to illustrate the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age. While he achieved popular success, fame, and fortune in his lifetime, he did not receive much critical acclaim until after his death. Perhaps the most notable member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, Fitzgerald is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Four collections of his short stories were published, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime.
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
The compression of the writing augments its emotive force, notably in the complex final scene, which, without having the “jolt” (to use the author’s own word) of The Chill (1964), has an accretive force that gives it even greater power—that of tragedy.[citation needed]
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