“The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”

That’s Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, who wrote eighteen Lew Archer novels over thirty years before Alzheimer’s put an end to his career. Incredibly, as the man got closer and closer to Alzheimer’s, his structures, those surprises, only became more and more complex. The best of his novels, from The Galton Case right on through to The Blue Hammer must have required extraordinary mental effort just to keep the characters straight, which, of course, they never were to begin with.

Macdonald’s characters rarely have fixed identities. Those surprises that he mentions in the quote are less Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes than “General Hospital”: a wife is really her husband’s daughter, a Frenchman is really a Panamanian, but also really a Frenchman, etc. Like I said, complex. Phantasmagoric even. Sometimes illegal. READ MORE >