Bitter Tea and Mystery: Signing up for 20 Books of Summer 2026

Bitter Tea and Mystery: Signing up for 20 Books of Summer 2026: This is my eleventh year of participating in the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge. The event was originally hosted by Cathy at 746Books ...

The Rap Sheet: Bullet Points: Novedecennial Edition

 The Rap Sheet: Bullet Points: Novedecennial Edition

Patricia Abbott: Strangers in Town: Three Newly-discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald, edited by Tom Nolan

 Patricia Abbott: Strangers in Town: Three Newly-discovered Mysteries by Ross Macdonald, edited by Tom Nolan

Patricia Abbott: FFB: INWARD JOURNEY, Ross Macdonald

 Patricia Abbott: FFB: INWARD JOURNEY, Ross Macdonald

Patricia Abbott: Short Story Wednesday: STRANGERS IN TOWN, Ross Macdonald

 Patricia Abbott: Short Story Wednesday: STRANGERS IN TOWN, Ross Macdonald

Patricia Abbott: FFB:THE DROWNING POOL-Ross Macdonald (reviewed by Bill Crider in 2010)

 Patricia Abbott: FFB:THE DROWNING POOL-Ross Macdonald (reviewed by Bill Crider in 2010)

Patti Abbott: FFB: THE CHILL, Ross MacDonald

 Patti Abbott: FFB: THE CHILL, Ross MacDonald

Bitter Tea and Mystery Review: The Way Some People Die by Ross Macdonald

Bitter Tea and Mystery: The Way Some People Die: Ross Macdonald: This is the third Lew Archer book by Ross Macdonald. The private detective is trying to find a missing woman for her mother. The daughter, G...

Bitter Tea and Mystery: The Drowning Pool: Ross Macdonald

Bitter Tea and Mystery: The Drowning Pool: Ross Macdonald: In this second Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald, the plot is complicated, with a large cast of characters. Archer's client is a woma...

The View from the Blue House: Review of The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald (Wm ...

The View from the Blue House: Review of The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald (Wm ...: The Sebastian’s have hired P.I. Lew Archer to find their missing teenage daughter, Sandy.  Archer quickly establishes that Sandy has run a...

FFB Review: "The Zebra-Striped Hearse" by Ross Macdonald--Reviewed by Patrick Ohl

Patrick Ohl is back this week for Friday Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott. If things are still running as scheduled, this week Evan Lewis will be doing the links later today on his Davey Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and The Wild West. A blog you should already be reading and enjoying so if you don’t know about it, get with the program. Today Patrick reviews The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald.

Raymond Chandler is known for creating mean streets on which his detective, Phillip Marlowe, would walk. Ross Macdonald, however, took the hardboiled genre in a new direction by creating Lew Archer, a private detective who was sensitive. The Zebra-Striped Hearse was published in 1962, three years after 1959’s The Galton Case, which was the first book by Ross Macdonald that I read.

Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse is an intricately plotted book that keeps twisting and turning long after you think it’s finished. The story revolves around Colonel Blackwell, who consults Lew Archer about his daughter, Harriet. A month ago, she met a man named Burke Damis in Mexico, and now she wants to marry him. But the Colonel, overly protective of his daughter, senses that the young man is as phony as a three-dollar bill, and he hires Archer to look into Damis’ past life in order to uncover just what he is up to and expose him to Harriet.

Audio

The resulting plot is a complex one, and Macdonald uses it to tell a powerful story. These aren’t the mean, gangster-infested streets of Raymond Chandler. Rather, Macdonald takes crime and puts it into the neighbourhood, where even that nice old lady who lived down the street might have some connection with the murder in the newspaper headlines. In a way, the story is similar to that of The Galton Case; both novels evoke the loss of a child and the loss of a parent, both of which Ross Macdonald experienced. In both, Lew Archer sometimes seems more like a family therapist than a traditional private eye. Some use this to criticise Macdonald, saying that he wrote the same book over and over again. I can see the point, but from what I’ve seen, Macdonald uses a somewhat similar formula but produces something brilliant both times. The result is highly readable, literate, and there’s a note of genuine passion underscoring the book. That kind of combination is just outstanding.

Incidentally, I was expecting the titular “zebra-striped hearse” to be some crazy metaphor about life and death and stuff, because that’s kind of what I got to expect from the hardboiled, with titles like The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye… but it’s an actual hearse, and it has actual zebra stripes. It pops up every once in a while as Lew Archer investigates. This alone makes the book worth a read.

Lew Archer is a decent sort in a tragic world, trying to help the victims of violent crime while bringing the guilty party to justice. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Macondald’s mystery is fairly clued, with complexity that could match wits with a Golden Ag author any day. But most intriguing of all is the way Macdonald uses the mystery to create a small piece of art that wouldn’t disgrace the pages of a “serious” literary author. The theme of loss and the family struggling to stay together have poignant notes to it that I like very much. I can’t think of something the book does wrong… and that’s always a good sign. Ross Macdonald apparently considered it one of his best books, and it was nominated for “Best Novel” at the 1963 Edgar Awards. It was beaten by Ellis Peters’ Death and the Joyful Woman, which I have yet to read…

To read The Zebra-Striped Hearse, I relied largely on an audio recording I’ve taken a great fancy to. It is complete and unabridged, but read by a full cast, with Harris Yulin as Lew Archer. The musical scores are well-placed, and the sound effects (like someone knocking at the door or the ocean being heard in the distance) really enhanced the reading experience for me. If you get a chance to listen to this recording, I highly recommend it.

Patrick Ohl ©2014

Make sure to read more of Patrick’s excellent work here on the blog as well as his website At The Scene Of The Crime.

Via Randy Johnson--- FFB: Two Archer Shorts – Ross Macdonald

Meant to mention this earlier today and the day just got away from me....happens a lot these days.
 
FFB: Two Archer Shorts – Ross Macdonald

FFB Review: "The Drowning Pool" by Ross Macdonald--Reviewed by Patrick Ohl

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books with Patti Abbott. Patti has declared today to be in honor of Ross Macdonald. The list will be here later today. In the meantime, check out Patrick Ohl’s review of The Drowning Pool below…

When Maude Slocum walks into Lew Archer’s office, it looks like another typical case. She’s intercepted a nasty letter that was intended for her husband’s eyes—one that would cast more than a shadow of doubt on her fidelity as a wife. As it happens, her husband James will be a very rich man one day (when his mother dies) and she isn’t particularly keen on going through divorce proceedings. Plus, there’s a child to consider: Maude’s daughter Cathy. Maude went through a divorce as a child and doesn’t want Cathy to experience the same things.

And so Lew Archer gets ready to investigate. He rides to the scene but Death hitches a ride on the way, and very soon a body is discovered. The multimillionaire matriarch of the Slocum family, who kept rule over her son and his family with an iron fist, is found dead. She’s been drowned in the swimming pool. But was it an accident? Did she simply slip? Or was it murder?

Well, it’s a mystery novel and Mrs. Slocum was a multimillionaire, so you do the math. What surprised me about this book is that although it is very much written in the Chandler mould of hardboiled mysteries, it is still a quintessential Ross Macdonald novel. We have a bickering family, the loss of a parent/grand-parent, a child resenting her mother (while worshiping her father)… all these things threaten to tear a family apart. (Sometimes, Lew Archer seems like more of a family therapist than a detective.)

The characters, as usual for Macdonald, are wonderful. They are all superbly realised. The elderly Mrs. Slocum is not simply a cackling old witch (which is always a danger with characters of her type). However, she really is far too protective of her son James, a man who is weak-willed and spineless. He depends on others and even though his relationship with Maude is a shambles, he has no idea what he would do if she decided to leave. This, as well as his relationship with an “artsy” sort of man at a local theatre, leads Maude in a fit of frustration to accuse him of being a “fairy”. (The inference is clear.)

This sharp characterization is not limited to the main players. Even such a minor character as the local chief of police is wonderfully drawn out. Sometimes he seems to be a classic thick-headed official who hates everyone else as a matter of course (a.k.a. Raymond Chandler’s favourite kind of cop)… and eventually you find out why he behaves the way he does at times. It’s an incredibly powerful scene. There’s an Italian with a French accent (what kind of geneticist came up with that?) who owns a bar, and even though we only see him for a handful of scenes we feel a certain connection with him.

In fact, there’s only one thing seriously wrong with this book and that’s the plot. It’s odd, seeing how it’s a Ross Macdonald novel. Usually, he stretches things to a point of practically over-plotting. But the first half of the book is very slow—it seems like a novel of character, like a quiet domestic affair that should be solved by Archer’s staying with the Slocum family and investigating things. This slow pace seems just right for the tone of the novel… but in the third act, the book abruptly changes pace and introduces international criminals, gang murder, and everything short of bestiality. In fact, one of the book’s last scenes seems like something directly from a James Bond movie! It’s very jarring, and doesn’t seem at all like Lew Archer’s style.

Add to that the fact that the mystery is simply disappointing. It makes sense— in fact, the solution is perfectly plausible. You don’t doubt the explanation Macdonald gives you— but you do begin doubting whether Lew Archer is human. Because short of omnipotence I have no idea how he tumbled to the solution of the mystery. How did he know Didit did it? Magic, I suppose. You never find out and I couldn’t even make a proper guess.

And although generally speaking detectives who pull conclusions out of a hat annoy me, I can’t say that Lew Archer left me feeling that way. The Drowning Pool is a very well-written book that captures the drama of a murder and the effect it has on a family struggling to keep together. When it focuses on this family, the book is positively poetic. But when it decides to throw in some distracting action-oriented stuff, it stumbles hard. The book reads like Ross Macdonald struggling to throw off Raymond Chandler’s influence on the hardboiled mystery. Much of the time he seems to be succeeding but occasionally, Chandler penetrates through everything and spoils it. It’s a mixed bag—most of it is very Ross Macdonald-like material but by the third act, it feels like the plot has stepped into the alternate dimension of a James Bond book, and the Chandler-like style doesn’t work in all parts of the book. The book has masterpiece potential, but in the end, it is forced to settle for “pretty good” status.

Patrick Ohl ©2013

Patrick Ohl is a 20-year old Canadian crime fiction aficionado who enjoys hobbies such as taxidermy and runs a dilapidated motel in the middle of nowhere alongside his crazed mother. He enjoys relaxing in his subterranean evil lair while watching his favourite hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and will occasionally make chicken chow mein to die for. His life is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by John Williams, and James Earl Jones provides occasional voice-overs.