Find a Victim — Part Two

                    “Great Starts Can Lead to Muddled Middles”                                     --Ross Macdonald, speaking of Find a Victim       Macdonald was always sensitive to the importance of his first scene. He employed many different...

Find a Victim — Part One

                                WHAT THE CRITICS SAY       “Find a Victim is the noir-est of Macdonald’s early Archer novels . . .  the bottom line of Find a Victim is negative . . . Macdonald finds the penal code next to irrelevant in describing or...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Ten

                                                                                                                                   SPOILER ALERT              Macdonald Sidelined Archer Without a Good Reason     Meet Me at the Morgue is a fine mystery....

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Nine

SPOILER ALERT                                                  Masterful But not Perfect Plotting   Peter Wolfe, in Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams, rightly calls this a “tightly built novel.”  Everyone who is important to the resolution of the mystery is on...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Eight

SPOILER ALERT                                        Wrapping it Up        The reader will no doubt have a sense of relief that the trip from Pacific Point to San Diego was not at gunpoint. Helen has been through enough for one week. More practically, if Amy...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Seven

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  SPOILER ALERT  ...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Six

                       Closing in on the Kidnappers at Last   Cross rushes to the Johnson home; our favorite lawyer, Larry Steifel is there, drunk and making moves on the new widow.  Steifel makes himself annoying to everyone in the house except Abel Johnson, who...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Five

                             Running Down the Clues   Using the card from the detective agency as well as a label from the dead man’s clothes, Cross moves the investigation along. Although he has no investigative training, he could give Archer a run for his...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Four

                                 An Encounter with Tiresias     Following the instructions in the ransom note, Cross goes to the drop off point at the train station next to the newsstand. A lesser writer would have obtained a lead from the newsstand operator...

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE Part Three

                                     Late to the Party   Chapter Two opens with the appearance at the courthouse of Amy Miner, Fred’s wife. She is highly upset but Cross manages to get out of her that a ransom demand of fifty thousand dollars has been made,...

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