Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast (USA 2007)

From the Publisher:
"Ross Macdonald writes like a son-of-a-bitch." -- Anthony Boucher
"Not since the novels of Nathanael West has the theme of American innocence grinding to a stop at the polluted waters of the Pacific so consistently reverberated through a body of writing." -- Detroit News

Not since the time of Dashiell Hammett has the genre of American crime fiction enjoyed a writer of Ross Macdonald's stature.
The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy "uncle," Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood money, and mur-der on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a pugnacious boxer turned silver-screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won't stay hidden.

Lew Archer navigates through the watery, violent world of wealth and privilege in this electrifying story of obsession gone mad.

"Macdonald makes a routine story of ocean-side murder among the rich take on a hard-edged, glistening solidity." -- AudioFile

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast. A Lew Archer Novel. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0307279030 (December, 2007), 247 p., $12.95.

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast (UK 1988)

From the Publisher:
THE BARBAROUS COAST
Bassett is a tweedy, high-voiced New Englander who is steward at an exclusive Malibu sports club. He's also terrified, and has hired Lew Archer to protect him from what the gateman at the club calls a "cycle-path". But George Wall is not a psychopath, just a desperately worried young Canadian writer in search of his missing wife. Archer agrees to help, but the trail leads straight to blackmail, then on to blood-money and murder.

ROSS MACDONALD
Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.
"He carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries" -- The Guardian
"Ross Macdonald must be ranked high among American thriller writers. His evocations of scene and people are as sharp as Raymond Chandler's" -- The Times Literary Supplement
"Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them" -- New York Times Book Review

Ross Macdonald was born near San Francisco in 1915 and died in 1983. Among his other classic thrillers now published by Allison & Busby are The Blue Hammer, The Barbarous Coast, Black Money, The Chill and The Moving Target.

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast. A Lew Archer Novel. Allison & Busby American Crime, ISBN: 0850317126 (January, 1988), 218 p., £3.99.

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast (USA 1975)

From the Publisher:
WIFE TROUBLE
She was blonde, beautitul and very definitely missing. Her anxious, hot-headed husband was making enemies all over Malibu looking for her. So he put Lew Archer on the job. Archer found her all right-up to her pretty neck in a tangle of blackmail and murder.

THE BARBAROUS COAST
by Ross Macdonald
Winner of The Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books #Q2091 (April, 1975), 183 p., $1.25.

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast (USA 1956)

From the Publisher:
Front flap:
This is Macdonald's masterpiece -- the best of his many good books. Of him the London Times has said: "Macdonald must be ranked high among American thriller writers. His evocations of scenes and people are as sharp as those of Mr. Raymond Chandler and the speed of his writing is almost unmarred by either sentimentality or sadism."

This, his latest book, is fast, tough, exciting, and brilliantly written. Set in Southern California, it takes Lew Archer in search of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living, and leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler with a producer for a cover, the ghost of an eighteen-year-old girl whose murder was never solved, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.

A condensed version of this novel appeared in Cosmopolitan under the title of THE DYING ANIMAL.

Back flap:
JOHN ROSS MACDONALD will, from now on, sign himself ROSS MACDONALD. The explanation is simple: there is a John D. Macdonald (and that's his real name, while Ross is really Kenneth Millar) who also writes thrillers and - well - you can imagine that some confusion occasionally results.

Ross Macdonald, i.e., Kenneth Millar, was born in Los Gatos, California, in 1915, of mixed Scotch-Canadian and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After growing up in western Canada, he attended the University of Western Ontario and on graduation married. For a period he taught high school; later he held a fellowship at the University of Michigan. He entered the Navy in 1944 and served until 1946 as a communications officer aboard an escort carrier. In 1949 the transformation to John Ross Macdonald took place. At pres-ent Mr. Millar lives with his wife and daughter in Santa Barbara, California.

Back cover:
Here is what has been said about some of Ross Macdonald's earlier mysteries
FIND A VICTIM: 1954
"So much more satisfactory, whether as a thriller or as a novel, than most other private-eye books that it seems to belong to an entirely different genre of its own." -- Anthony Boucher, New York Times

MEET ME AT THE MORGUE: 1953
"Characters in the round, believable evil and clarity of telling make another fine Macdonald story... he's still above any hardboiled contemporary." -- Lenore Glen Offord, San Francisco Chronicle

THE IVORY GRIN: 1952
"This department has already placed itself extensively on record as believing that Ross Macdonald is the finest writer of 'hard-boiled' private detective stories since Raymond Chandler or possibly since Dashiell Hammett. The Ivory Grin copiously confirms that belief." -- Anthony Boucher, New York Times

THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE: 1951
"I wouldn't go so far as to opine that this must be Chandler operating under a pseudonym... but I say that if it is Chandler, he has lost none of his head-and-shoulders preemi-nence in the hard-boiled field; that if it isn't, he (and Philip Marlowe) had better, to coin a phrase, look to their laurels." -- Ernest Cady, Columbus Dispatch

Ross Macdonald: The Barbarous Coast. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 247 p., $2.95.