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johnnygamble's review
3.0
The opening chapters seemed rushed, the solution implausible, and I'm still confused as to who did what. But...Still better than most detective fiction and fabulously complicated.
efbeckett's review against another edition
4.0
The final Archer novel is better than its reputation. The inconsistencies - usually spoken of as sloppiness or possibly signs the onset of his dementia - are really small potatoes, like Archer saying he hasn't eaten when he has. I'd love for him to have been able to write the proposed next - and final - novel, where the past wrapped up in the mystery is Archer's own. But as it is, this is a nice send-off, with Archer beginning a potentially deep relationship with the journalist Betty Siddon. The mystery in The Blue Hammer is probably the easiest of all the books for the reader to solve before Archer, but the finale is moving enough that I can't claim to be particularly bothered by that.
serpabooks_0103's review
3.0
Fast paced and hard boiled. I like Lew Archer and his intuitive mind, straight forward and trustworthy characteristic. It is being said this is the final in the series hope I can read Ross McDonald books. Although predictable but it test also my patience on whose who were tangled in the painting and killings.
clambook's review
4.0
Never hurts to revisit the master. The Blue Hammer was Macdonald's last Lew Archer (of 18) and I've read all of them, some three times. Dated, yeah, but still the spring from which many waters flow.
markk's review
3.0
How should one read an author's series? This is a question for which the answer would seem obvious: from beginning to end. Yet while this is certainly true for many series nowadays which are basically one story stretched over multiple volumes (e.g. Harry Potter), there are plenty in which authors use the same characters in a variety of separate tales. Must, for example, Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories be read in the order they were written, or can they be read and enjoyed in whatever order the reader encounters them?
To be honest, this is a question I hadn't considered until I finished Ross Macdonald's book. While the final novel in his Lew Archer series, it's only the second one that I haven't read. This didn't inhibit my enjoyment of his story in the least, but when I finished it I wondered if I had read enough of them to form an accurate assessment of its merits. Part of it is that its plot was similar in many ways to that of the first Lew Archer novel I read, The Goodbye Look, with an investigation into the theft of a personal item leading to an unraveling of a family's secrets dating back decades. Fortunately Macdonald was too good of a novelist to simply rehash his earlier book, as events go off in a very different direction and end up in a different place as a result. But was this the premise for all of his novels or just a coincidence that the first two I read just happened to contain a similar premise? It may be a trivial point, but it's one that I need to resolve whether Macdonald was revisiting one of his many premises or whether it was a tired regurgitation by a one-trick pony. I'd like to think that it was the former, and I enjoyed this book even in spite of the repetition of the premise, but I feel that I can't make a final judgment until I have the opportunity to read more of Macdonald's work.
To be honest, this is a question I hadn't considered until I finished Ross Macdonald's book. While the final novel in his Lew Archer series, it's only the second one that I haven't read. This didn't inhibit my enjoyment of his story in the least, but when I finished it I wondered if I had read enough of them to form an accurate assessment of its merits. Part of it is that its plot was similar in many ways to that of the first Lew Archer novel I read, The Goodbye Look, with an investigation into the theft of a personal item leading to an unraveling of a family's secrets dating back decades. Fortunately Macdonald was too good of a novelist to simply rehash his earlier book, as events go off in a very different direction and end up in a different place as a result. But was this the premise for all of his novels or just a coincidence that the first two I read just happened to contain a similar premise? It may be a trivial point, but it's one that I need to resolve whether Macdonald was revisiting one of his many premises or whether it was a tired regurgitation by a one-trick pony. I'd like to think that it was the former, and I enjoyed this book even in spite of the repetition of the premise, but I feel that I can't make a final judgment until I have the opportunity to read more of Macdonald's work.
alanfederman's review
3.0
Fairly good LA-noir type mystery, but definately not one of his better ones. Still, great plot twists at the end.
nigellicus's review
5.0
Though published in 1976, this doesn't feel like the type of crime/PI novel of the seventies. It's not remotely hard-boiled, for a start, though it's certainly noirish. If anything, MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are downright soft-boiled, there's always a terrible sadness at their core, and Archer is not immune to that sadness, in fact he seems drawn to it and braced for the inevitable pain he's determined to uncover.
In The Blue Hammer, Archer is asked to recover a stolen painting. Almost at once it becomes apparent that this isn't about an art heist but about deep dark family secrets, and Archer follows the clues and the threads, with a murder or two along the way, until the whole thing finally unravels.
This isn't exactly action-packed. Archer moves like a secular priests from person to person, extracting their confessions and putting the outlines of the larger story together from the details. There's lots of driving from one place to another, walks on beaches, long conversations and short ones. The urgency mounts when someone goes missing, though, and outcome depends on Archer working out who the hell is who.
In The Blue Hammer, Archer is asked to recover a stolen painting. Almost at once it becomes apparent that this isn't about an art heist but about deep dark family secrets, and Archer follows the clues and the threads, with a murder or two along the way, until the whole thing finally unravels.
This isn't exactly action-packed. Archer moves like a secular priests from person to person, extracting their confessions and putting the outlines of the larger story together from the details. There's lots of driving from one place to another, walks on beaches, long conversations and short ones. The urgency mounts when someone goes missing, though, and outcome depends on Archer working out who the hell is who.
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