Series
Publication
Penguin Classics (2001)
Original publication date
1950
Collections
Genres
Subjects
Awards
Description
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred�??and sufficient motive for a dozen murde
User reviews
LibraryThing member idiotgirl
Liked this book a lot. (Audiobook listen.) Lew Archer is a good man. Hard to always know what the mystery was here. But in the end, the book revealed that it was a real one. Archer always perseveres. Even without money or someone pressing. I like this. Also like the ambiance of LA in the late 40s.
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Just before LA became LA--so much more possibility in these stories. A smaller more manageable world overall. Show Less
LibraryThing member Condorena
This is the second in the Lew Archer series. I liked it quite a bit and I am seeing some parallels in MacDonald's works. There are some recurrent themes such as lost innocence of youth, escalating violence, and broken adults with twisted lives.
LibraryThing member smik
This Penguin Publisher e-book version comes with an excellent introduction by John Banville.
"as usual with Macdonald, the mud at the bottom of today's pool is stirred up by yesterday's storms. There is hardly a character in the book without something to hide from his or her past."
All this gives
Three deaths later, Lew Archer comes up with an explanation that I had not seen coming.
I read it for my participation in the Crime Fiction of the Year Challenge @ Past Offences for January 2016, a book published in 1950.It also fits in with the Vintage Cover Scavenger Hunt, hosted by Bev at My Reader's Block.
"as usual with Macdonald, the mud at the bottom of today's pool is stirred up by yesterday's storms. There is hardly a character in the book without something to hide from his or her past."
All this gives
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the plot an incredible complexity, although, as Banville says, Macdonald was really intrigued by the motivations of plausible people in plausible circumstances.Three deaths later, Lew Archer comes up with an explanation that I had not seen coming.
I read it for my participation in the Crime Fiction of the Year Challenge @ Past Offences for January 2016, a book published in 1950.It also fits in with the Vintage Cover Scavenger Hunt, hosted by Bev at My Reader's Block.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
Not as good as The Chill but a decent noirish PI story.
LibraryThing member SarahEBear
Four and a half stars - I'm the first to admit that I'm a bag fan of crime fiction (both hard boiled and cozy), so it was no surprise that I loved "The Drowning Pool". This is Ross Macdonald's second book in the Lew Archer series. Former cop, now PI, Lew Archer is hired to track down the writer of
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a blackmail letter. Things get mucky when what seems to be a simple case turns in to a murder investigation involving salacious affairs, family drama, theatre, and the oil industry. Wonderful prose, snappy dialogue and all you could want from a hard-boiled, LA noir, crime fiction. Show Less
LibraryThing member MacDad
Though this is the third of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels that I’ve read, it’s the first one from the early years of his series. As such it was an especially interesting read, as I could see all of the elements that I’ve come to enjoy at an early stage of their development. Not only
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did it help me to better understand the formula to his stories that is emerging from my reading of Macdonald’s works, but it also highlighted the differences between the books and how his style changed over the years. This was all on top of my enjoyment of the book itself, of course, in which Archer is asked to investigate a case of blackmail that leads to murder and the unveiling of long-kept family secrets: in short, everything that I’ve come to enjoy in an Archer novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member wdwilson3
Re-visiting the Lew Archer novels in sequence, this second installment is a marked improvement on the first. Better characterizations, better plot, a little less philosophical talking, same great descriptions of people, places, and things. Really good 1950 Southern California feel to it.
LibraryThing member john.cooper
MacDonald's great strengths—wry narration and dialogue, vivid characters, wild yet tight plotting—are here, as are some annoying weaknesses: contempt for ordinary flawed humanity, narrative drooling over every female character between 16 and 40, and a preposterous closing act with villains
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seemingly out of the Dick Tracy comic strip and a pointless brawl. Also some less than nuanced portrayals of gay characters, but I'm inclined to overlook the blindnesses of of my grandparents' generation, as I hope my own might be overlooked by people of future generations. This is a good hard-boiled mystery, but perhaps I wasn't in the mood. I experienced it as an awful book partially redeemed rather than as a great thriller dragged down by bad authorial choices. I give it four stars because MacDonald stands so far above today's thriller writers such as Connelly and Child. but I recommend that new readers start with #3 in the series, The Way Some People Die, and skip the first two, of which this is the second. Show Less
Media reviews
The Drowning Pool, set in California and first published in 1950, is Archer's second outing and the most formally assured of the series...Macdonald unfurls his plot with the unforced majesty of an incoming Pacific tide, though it is in his laconic descriptive prose that he equals Chandler or
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Hammett. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
ISBN
0141196629 / 9780141196626
Physical description
272 p.; 5.08 inches
Pages
272