Three Novels of the Early 1960s: The Zebra-Striped Hearse, The Chill, The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross Macdonald instant download

Three Novels of the Early 1960s: The Zebra-Striped Hearse, The Chill, The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross Macdonald instant download

The three novels collected in this volume represent for many readers the summit of Macdonald’s art. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). The intricate carpentry of their plotting is matched by their passion and imaginative sweep.

Each of these books reflects Macdonald’s enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father’s attempt to protect his daughter from “the complete and utter personal disaster” of marriage to a troubled drifter sends Archer on a perplexing and increasingly bloody trail that leads him from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and finally into the maze of a tragically splintered identity.

In The Chill, perhaps Macdonald’s most perfectly accomplished novel, the search for a young bride gone missing uncovers a succession of seemingly unrelated crimes committed over a period of decades, as Archer finds himself “a ghost from the present haunting a bloody moment in the past.” Macdonald relentlessly strips away his characters’ denials and delusions to reveal a core of violently twisted emotion.

Another hunt for a missing person—this time a young man escaped from an elite reform school—provides the impetus for The Far Side of the Dollar, which Macdonald’s friend Eudora Welty considered