Ross Macdonald: Three Novels of the Early 1960s (LOA #279) The Zebra-Striped Hearse / The Chill / The Far Side of the Dollar

The three novels collected in this second volume in the Library of America Ross Macdonald edition represent for many readers the summit of American crime writing. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). Each reflects Macdonald’s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the complete and utter personal disaster” of marriage to a troubled drifter sends private detective Lew Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity. In The Chill, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” Another hunt for a missing person—this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school—provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald’s friend Eudora Welty considered “securely among your strongest and best . . . a beauty that just gets better.”

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

TOM NOLAN has been a freelance writer for many publications (including Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, and Oxford American) since age 18—and a Ross Macdonald reader since age 11. He is the author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999) and editor of Ross Macdonald’s The Archer Files (2007).  He is also the author of Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet (reissued 2011) and has been crime fiction reviewer for The Wall Street Journal since 1990. He lives in Burbank, California.