Scan barcode
A review by psteve
The Blue Hammer by Ross Macdonald
4.0
25 years before the story takes place, renowned painter Richard Chantry disappears without a trace suddenly. Now Lew Archer is called into look into the disappearance of a painting that may have been painted by Chantry. Archer is drawn into the mystery which goes back to that disappearance and earlier. Macdonald is very adept at stringing together all the threads of the story and brining them together at the end, even with the very last sentence of the story. I enjoyed this quite a bit; even though maybe if I'd read a bit more closely I could have seen things coming.
A few weeks ago I watched a Paul Newman movie from a MacDonald novel, probably from around the same time. In both there was a cult involved, which dates things quite a bit now; you don't find mystery stories these days with many cults in them (or do you?). (In that movie, Strutter Martin played the cult leader, and he's always fun.) Also I noticed in this book that nearly without exception when Archer first meets a woman he describes her breasts; I don't notice that much these days, or maybe he was just clumsier about it than writers are now.
A few weeks ago I watched a Paul Newman movie from a MacDonald novel, probably from around the same time. In both there was a cult involved, which dates things quite a bit now; you don't find mystery stories these days with many cults in them (or do you?). (In that movie, Strutter Martin played the cult leader, and he's always fun.) Also I noticed in this book that nearly without exception when Archer first meets a woman he describes her breasts; I don't notice that much these days, or maybe he was just clumsier about it than writers are now.