Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 2007)

From the Publisher:
"Macdonald's spare, controlled narration, built for action and speed, conveys the world through which the action moves and gives it meaning, [bringing] scene and character, however swiftly, before the eye without a blur." -- Eudora Welty, The New York Times Book Review

"Archer-Macdonald are working together at their peak, piecing together a most modern American tragedy, making literature out of the thriller form, gazing more clearly than ever into the future as it rolls through the smog." -- Newsweek

Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.
A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who's gone mysteriously missing.

Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.

"Ross Macdonald must be ranked high amongst American thriller writers." -- The Times Literary Supplement

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A Lew Archer Novel. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0307278999 (July, 2007), 240 p., $12.95.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 1988)

From the Publisher:
PRAISE FOR A GENIUS OF THE GENRE
"It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write: he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and, maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.... I owe him." -- ROBERT B. PARKER

"Ross Macdonald's work has consistently nourished me.... have turned to it often to hear what I should like to call the justice of its voice and to be enlightened by its wisdom, delighted by its imagination, and, not incidentally, superbly entertained." -- THOMAS BERGER

"The most important successor to the Chandler/Hammett tradition, as well as the writer who elevated the hard-boiled private-eye novel to a new 'literary' form."-- MARCIA MULLER

"[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett. refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were." -EUDORA WELTY

The lady flashed a diamond on each finger and a dimpled smile. But the olive-drab smudges under her eyes told Lew Archer she wasn't young anymore. His experience told him she was lying. And his empty wallet told him a hundred swallow. So Archer had only himself to blame when he wro looking for the girl she wanted found... And discovered a grisly love triangle where the price of desire added up to three: one body stabbed, one body shot and one body burned a crisp, dark brown.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553273523 (August, 1988), 256 p., $3.95.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 1984)

From the Publisher:
THE IVORY GRIN
The lady flashed a diamond on each finger and a dimpled smile. But the olive-drab smudges under her eyes told Lew Archer she wasn't young anymore. His experience told him she was lying. And his empty wallet told nim a hundred bucks could make even her phony story sweet enough to swallow. So Archer had only himself to blame when he went looking for the girl she wanted found... And discovered a grisly love triangle where the... price of desire added up to three: one body stabbed, one body shot and one body burned a crisp, dark brown.

ROSS MACDONALD
Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, Ross Macdonald is acknowledged around the world as one of the greatest mystery writers of our time. The New York Times has called his books featuring private investigator Lew Archer "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553238043 (January, 1984), 249 p., $2.95.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 1971)

From the Publisher:
back side: THE IVORY GRIN
Bella City, California -- corrupt city on a plain. Through its hot, dusty dives, pawnshops, rooming houses, offices, in the poverty of its Black and Chicano streets, Lew Archer trails several dangerous misfits into the jaws, the ivory grin, of death.

Inside:
I FOUND HER WAITING AT THE DOOR OF my office. She was a stocky woman of less than medium height, wearing a blue slack suit over a blue turtleneck sweater, and a blue mink stole that failed to soften her outlines. Her face was squarish and deeply tanned, its boyish quality confirmed by dark hair cut short at the nape. She wasn't the type you'd expect to be up and about at eight thirty in the morning, unless she'd been up all night.
THE IVORY GRIN -- scene one.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books #N6774 (September, 1971), 249 p., ¢95.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (UK 1970)

From the Publisher:
Lew Archer "by a long chalk, the best private eye in the business" Sunday Times

California Gunplay...
I found myself looking into an ornate room occupied by a squat, over-dressed woman and a young man in the clothes of a hospital orderly. The place was thick with dust, strewn with unwashed dishes, cigarette butts, rotting fruit...
Suddenly the door was flung open, revealing a small, thin man wrapped in red brocaded silk. He held a gun. "Now!" he cried. "Hands on heads -- this is it!"
He shot the orderly three times, point-blank. The orderly lay down on the floor, a faint smile on his face. Then the thin man shot the woman, who grimaced theatrically and collapsed on a dusty divan.
I had already noticed it was a toy cap-pistol.

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. London: Fontana 1970, Fontana Books #2407, 191 p., 5/- (25p).

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 1967)

From the Publisher:
Front cover:
Hard-hitting private eye Lew Archer is hired to shadow a blackmailer. The trail leads him to the twisted lives of a dozen people-linked together by murder!

Back cover:
Love, Blackmail, and Murder!
She wore a mink stole and the rings were genuine diamonds. She wouldn't give her name or her real reasons for hiring private eye Lew Archer, but he took the hundred-buck fee and agreed to find and tail Lucy, the cute Negro nurse.

Lew found her easily enough, but before the day was over, Lucy was dead. Lew gave back his retainer and set out on his own investigation.

The case got tougher and nastier as he dug for the facts. One violent murder led to another.
Then Lew met Bess, a blonde juvenile delinquent whose ways hadn't improved with age. Bess was a girl friend of Lucy's ex-employer. She had another lover who hadn't been seen for two weeks. She also had a husband and knew a lot more about murder than she was telling.

Everyone connected with this triple-crossing blonde was marked for murder!

Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. New York: Pocket Books, 1967, Pocket Books #50291, 198 p., ¢50.

John Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (UK 1957)

From the Publisher:
THE IVORY GRIN.
The town stood, astride the highway, sprawling, dusty, busy with the usual market places and orchards, garages, liquor stores, bungalows and motels, "and in the road the big trucks went by in a constant stream going towards Los Angeles or coming out for Bella City." It was a town and a case like many another in the experience of private detective Lew Archer. Only two days work at fifty dollars a day, and a grim reminder to a private detective of forty-two, that "it was not much of a life." Archer hadn't liked fat, mannish, expensively dressed Una, or the story she had told, that she had seen her run off with her jewellery to hide in Bella City. Perhaps it was the truth, Una was dead and disappeared. And Archer was trying to pass as white, that made him take the job. But it wasn't the truth, it was a grim game of passion with the ivory grin of death. The girl, Lucy, lay with her throat cut in a ditch, and her nineteen-year-young Negro lover was in jail. Una had hired him, and Archer was hunting a girl who looked very much like Lucy, desperately in love with a missing man. Up to the mountains, out of the far away valley, Archer pursued the case in a landscape of beautiful, gaudy, bustling and blowsy maze that is California desert country. He knew the killer was in the crowd and, if not the underdog if he couldn't. It was a long cold chase. For once but not for Archer. Nobody knows what he thinks or feels, nobody can hurt him, nobody loves him. It's almost happy he will finish the case. And in this, the fourth of his adventures to appear in PAN Books, he again gives his readers excitement, colour and tension in a story which amply justifies his author's growing reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

JOHN ROSS MACDONALD is the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, who has written several successful thrillers and short stories and book reviews under his own name; his wife also writes thrillers. Canadian and Pegasus, Scots-Dutch stock, he spent his early life in Canada, studied at two Canadian universities and received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

John Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A Lew Archer Detective Story. London: Pan, 1957, Pan Books #410, 191 p., 2'-.

John Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin (USA 1952)

From the Publisher:
Front cover:
1949
THE MOVING TARGET... "Human compassion and literary skill return the much-abused hard-boiled detective story to its original Hammett-high level -- NEW YORK TIMES

1950
THE DROWNING POOL... "Macdonald, who writes like a streak, is rapidly promoting this Archer eye into the front ranks of eight-minute eggs... Extra good." -- SATURDAY REVIEW

1951
THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE... "The top hard-boiled novel of ti year. the best novel in the tough tradition that I've ref since "Farewell My Lovely"... and possibly since Maltese Falcon." -- ANTHONY BOUCHER

Front and back flap:
Only occasionally does a writer succeed in breathing new life into the mystery field. Agatha Christie was one who did with her novels of character and circumstance; Eric Ambler another with his unequaled spy stories. Still another was Dashiell Hammett, whose invention of the hard-boiled detective story was a dedicate contribution to American letters.

But over the years since his Black Mask days the private eye has acquired a glaze of boredom. His world has degenerated slowly into a narrow show of tabloid glamour and G-man intrigue, dulling a powerful popular form seemed headed for the literary ash-heap. But when John Ross Macdonald's first mystery novel was published three years ago, critics looked up and flatly stated that here was "a writer of hard-boiled prose with a difference," who promised to give the private detective "a new lease on life." Praise for Macdonald continued on the publication of his second book, and last fall, when his third, The Way Some People Die, came out, Anthony Boucher of the New York Times "stuck his neck out," as he said, and acclaimed it: "the best novel in the tough tradition that I've read since 'Farewell, My Lovely'... and possibly since 'The Maltese Falcon'... the top hard-boiled novel of the year."

What is it about Macdonald's books that makes veteran critics tend to lose their restraint? Just this: though writing in the tough tradition and retaining its pace, vividness, and spade-calling realism, he has not accepted its limitations. Macdonald's characters have psychological depth, his stories have social range and moral dimensions. Instead of action for action's sake, diluted with cynical sentimentality, here is human compassion for the broken patterns of life. Here is keen observation of contemporary society, writing of freshness and distinction.

In The Ivory Grin, Archer, the private eye who sees deeper than most, presses another murder investigation to a strange, moving conclusion. A dozen lives are laid bare, as, in the end, is the criminal secret that links them all together. It is a book for those who are weary of gin-mill mysteries punctuated with automatic bumps on the head -- a book to refute the too widely credited charges that the detective has passed his peak in American fiction.

back cover:
ANTHONY BOUCHER says of JOHN ROSS MACDONALD
"Macdonald has the making of a novelist of serious caliber -- in his vivid realization of locale; in his striking prose style, reminiscent of Chandler and yet suggesting the poetic evocation of Kenneth Fearing; in his moving three-dimensional characterization; and above all in his strangely just attitude toward human beings, which seems incredibly to fuse the biting contempt of a Swift with the embracing love of a Saroyan."

John Ross Macdonald: The Ivory Grin. A New Mystery Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952, 240 p., $2.50.