The Galton Case

Description

One of America's finest crime writers in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case- is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill. The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at poverty, greed, murder and identity. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

MacDonald served as president of The Mystery Writers of America in 1965, received the Silver Dagger in 1964 and the Gold Dagger in 1965 from The British Crime Writers Association, and in 1981, received The Eye, the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Private Eye Writers of America.

Exciting, beautifully plotted * The New York Times Book Review * A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were -- Eudora Welty America's greatest crime writer -- Elmore Leonard Ross MacDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books -- James Ellroy The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American -- William Goldman I defy any reader to set the book aside before the last twist in a thrilling story -- Barry Turner * Daily Mail *