Best 1959 Adventures (2)

By: Joshua Glenn
September 19, 2019

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1959 adventure novels.

Ross Macdonald‘s Lew Archer crime adventure, The Galton Case.

Mrs. Galton, a wealthy woman near the end of her life, hires suburban Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer — this is his eight outing — to track down her prodigal son, Anthony, from whom she has been estranged for 20 years. It seems that a chunk of the Galton family fortune went missing, along with Anthony — so this is a treasure hunt, as well as a whodunit and a psychological thriller. The story takes Archer to San Francisco, to a small town on the California coast, and to Detroit; his quest gets tangled up with the mysterious death of Peter Culligan, houseman to Mrs. Galton’s lawyer, Mr. Sable. As with most Archer stories, the crime in the present is linked to a crime in the past; Oedipal dynamics, childhood trauma, and tortured psychologies are Macdonald’s bread and butter. The book’s prose style is pure pleasure, and its plot structure is carefully considered — nothing is as it seems.

Fun facts: Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) has been called the heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. In a 1973 interview, he would recount that “I was forty-two when I wrote The Galton Case. It had taken me a dozen years and as many books to learn how to tell highly personal stories in terms of the convention I had chosen.”

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Best 1959 Adventures (2)

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