The Galton Case

First edition (publ. Knopf)

The Galton Case is the eighth book in the Lew Archer Series by Ross Macdonald. It was published in 1959. Macdonald thought with this book he found his own voice as a writer.^[1]

Blurb

From the back of the 1983 Bantam edition:

Rich boy Anthony Galton had dropped out of sight more than twenty years ago. To Lew Archer that meant the man was either dead or didn't want to be found. But Tony's nice old mother had a dream that her son would still come home before she died. So Archer took on the case hoping that Tony and Mom could live happily ever after... until he discovered that once upon a time there was a clever swindle, a scared blonde, and a very nasty murder.^[2]

Influence

The book influenced the American writer Jerome Charyn to begin his detective series "The Isaac Quartet", beginning with the novel Blue Eyes published in 1974.^[3] Wrote Charyn: "The book had a morphology I happened to admire - as if Ross Macdonald were in the habit of undressing bodies to find the skeleton underneath. Nothing was overwrought: landscape, language, and character were all laid bare. But this was no simpleminded accident. It was Macdonald’s particular craft, that “wild masonry of laying detail on detail to a make a structure.”^[4]

Hollywood

In 2011, Warner Brothers and Joel Silver announced plans to make a film of the book as part of a plan to reprise the Lew Archer character that had last been played on film by Paul Newman.^[5]

References