The Galton Case - Lew Archer #08

The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn 1959, Ross Macdonald published what is generally considered his breakthrough novel, The Galton Case, a complex, psychologically acute account of the search for personal identity, and of the destructive power of the unresolved past. Macdonald ultimately established himself as one of three dominant forces in the development of the modern private-eye novel. The other two, of course, were Dashiell Hammett, who virtually invented the form, and Raymond Chandler, who brought wit, attitude, and a highly evolved sense of language, elevating detective fiction to a whole new level. Macdonald -- the pseudonym of California-born novelist Kenneth Millar -- was the direct literary descendent of these two titans, and he worked comfortably within that inherited tradition for a number of years, producing several excellent, if generic, novels featuring private investigator Lew Archer. (Archer, incidentally, was named after Sam Spade s partner, Miles Archer, who is murdered in the opening pages of The Maltese Falcon.) The Galton Case was Macdonald s 13th novel, and his 8th entry in the Lew Archer series. It also represented his first fictional attempt to engage certain sensitive areas from his own unresolved past. Foremost among these was the sense of abandonment that resulted from his parents' divorce, which occurred when he was four years old. In the aftermath of that divorce, the young Ken Millar lived a fatherless, rootless existence that left him troubled, vulnerable, and emotionally scarred. Using the distancing device of the detective story -- which he once referred to as "a welder s mask enabling both writer and reader to handle dangerously hot materials" -- Millar/Macdonald created, in The Galton Case, a classic mystery that contains within itself a thinly veiled spiritual autobiography.As the novel opens, Lew Archer has just been hired by Gordon Sable, a Santa Teresa lawyer, to track down the long-lost son of his wealthiest client, the imper…