Detective Novel as Moral Fable
Ross MacDonald goes Raymond Chandler one better, raising the stakes of the Southern California detective novel. His protagonist Lew Archer roams the wasteland of La La Land, and at his very best MacDonald takes the genre to the level of moral fable. One doesn't think of other detective novelists so much as T.S. Eliot. When Eudora Welty said that MacDonald was more complex than either Chandler and Hammett, she was right. Recommended.