Black Money is a novel by US American mystery writer Ross Macdonald. Published in 1966, it is among the most powerful of all Ross Macdonald's novels and was his own personal choice as his best book. [1]
Black Money is a novel by US American mystery writer Ross Macdonald. Published in 1966, it is among the most powerful of all Ross Macdonald's novels and was his own personal choice as his best book. [1]
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.
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.
Macdonald commented on his novel that he had spent some twenty years thinking about and taking notes for Black Money. It was "the longest I have held a book in mind before I wrote it". He also mentioned as formative influences his visit to Panama as a seaman in 1946 and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925); [2] it is no accident that Fitzgerald is mentioned once in the text itself. Matthew Bruccoli draws a parallel between the themes of Fitzgerald there and Macdonald's novel. The poor boy whose love for a 'golden girl' inspires him to try and raise himself to her level, at times by dubious means; and beyond that "the effect of money, both on those who have it and those who, for whatever reasons, want it". [3]
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"), 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 ] As in Fitzgerald, the glittering surface conceals debilitating corruption. 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 ]
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole descends into mental illness.
Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym 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. Since the 1970s, Macdonald's works have received attention in academic circles for their psychological depth, sense of place, use of language, sophisticated imagery and integration of philosophy into genre fiction.
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 '70s, 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."
The Moving Target is a detective novel by writer Ross Macdonald, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in April 1949.
Blue City is a thriller written in 1947 by Ross Macdonald. The novel was originally released under his real name, Kenneth Millar, by Alfred A. Knopf, while a condensed version was serialized in the August and September 1950 issues of Esquire.
The Way Some People Die is a detective mystery published, under the author's then pseudonym of John Ross Macdonald, by Alfred A. Knopf in 1951. It is Ross Macdonald's third book to feature his private eye Lew Archer. The plot centres on the activities of heroin-traffickers, a form of criminality which Macdonald particularly despised.
Jay Gatsby is the titular fictional character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his vast fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States. Fitzgerald based many details about the fictional character on Max Gerlach, a mysterious neighbor and World War I veteran whom the author met while living in New York City during the raucous Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", claimed to be educated at Oxford University, and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.
"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Metropolitan magazine in December 1922 and later collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. The plot concerns the attempts by a young man to win the affections of an upper-class woman. The story, frequently anthologized, is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest works "for poignantly portraying the loss of youthful illusions."
The Galton Case is the eighth novel in the Lew Archer series by Ross Macdonald. It was published in the US in 1959 by Knopf and in 1960 by Cassel & Co in the UK. The book has been widely translated, although the title has been changed in some cases to highlight other aspects of the story. In French it appeared as Un Mortel Air De Famille ; in Turkish as Ölmek Yasak ; in Finnish as Rouva Galtonin perillinen ; and in Italian as Il ragazzo senza storia. Macdonald thought that with this novel he found his own voice as a writer.
The Great Gatsby is a 1974 American romantic drama film based on the 1925 novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film was directed by Jack Clayton, produced by David Merrick, and written by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Robert Redford in the title role of Jay Gatsby, along with Mia Farrow, Sam Waterston, Bruce Dern, and Karen Black.
Daisy Fay Buchanan is a fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, by whom she has a daughter. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. Described by Fitzgerald as a "golden girl", she is the target of both Tom's callous domination and Gatsby's dehumanizing adoration. The ensuing contest of wills between Tom and Gatsby reduces Daisy to a trophy wife whose sole existence is to augment her possessor's socio-economic success.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he created and popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Find a Victim is a novel by Canadian-American author Ross Macdonald, the fifth in a series featuring detective Lew Archer. It was published as a Borzoi Book by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954 and mass marketed by Bantam Books in the following year. The first British hardback was published in Cassell & Company's Crime Connoisseur series in 1955, the same year that a French translation appeared as Vous qui entrez ici. At this period the author was writing under the name John Ross Macdonald and was also identified as Kenneth Millar on the Knopf dust jacket.
The Ivory Grin is Ross Macdonald's fourth Lew Archer detective novel, published in April 1952. Like most of Macdonald's, the plot is complicated and takes place mostly in out of the way Californian locations.
The Barbarous Coast is a 1956 detective novel by Canadian-American author Ross Macdonald, the sixth to feature private investigator Lew Archer and his eleventh novel overall. It was published by Alfred A. Knopf in hardcover, and by Bantam Books as a paperback. The plot follows Archer's attempt to locate a missing young woman who is associated with an upscale country club. The novel takes an acid view of Southern California society that foreshadows Macdonald's later treatment of cross-generational deterministic themes.
The Name Is Archer is a collection of short stories written by Ross Macdonald and featuring his detective hero, Lew Archer. Originally compiled in 1955 and published under the name John Ross Macdonald, more stories were added in later collections under different titles.
Meet Me at the Morgue is the ninth novel completed by Ross Macdonald. Credited at the time to John Ross Macdonald, it was published in 1953 by A. A. Knopf and released as a paperback by Pocket Books the following year. In that year too the book was published by Cassell & Co in the UK under the title Experience with Evil. There had been disagreement over the novel's original title. Knopf turned down Macdonald's suggestion of Message from Hell and Macdonald turned down the suggestion of The Convenient Corpse from Pocket Books.
The Chill is Ross Macdonald's eleventh Lew Archer novel, published by Alfred A. Knopf in their Borzoi series in 1964. Macdonald's reputation was now growing and the front cover bore the announcement "a new novel by the author of The Zebra Striped Hearse", which had been well received. After the book was published by Collins Publishers in the UK that year, it went on to gain the Silver Dagger award for 1964 from the British Crime Writers Association. A French translation also appeared in 1964, followed by a Danish translation the following year and an Italian translation in 1967.
The Wycherly Woman is a detective novel by Ross Macdonald. The ninth to feature Lew Archer, it was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1961. Earlier that year a condensed version had appeared in Cosmopolitan under the title "Take My Daughter Home". The novel was nominated for the 1962 Edgar Awards, and earlier included in Anthony Boucher’s best crime fiction list of 1961.
Tom Nolan, "Gatsby as noir: The genesis of Ross Macdonald’s Black Money", Library of America, 14 July 2017
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