Wednesday, July 04, 2007

New Lew Archer story

The Rap Sheet has posted "a never-before-published" Lew Archer tale by Ross Macdonald.

From the editor of The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce:
we present here a previously unseen bit of work by the renowned 20th-century American detective novelist Ross Macdonald (1915-1983). This 2,500-word fragment of a never-completed work is included in a collection of Macdonald’s Lew Archer tales called The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, edited by Tom Nolan and newly published by Crippen & Landru. Anyone familiar with the 18 Archer novels will recognize Macdonald’s hand here immediately. “Heyday” gives us the sun-burned Southern California backdrop, the rarified world of the wealthy, and a young person in trouble, probably because of some event in his family’s past -- all hallmarks of Macdonald’s later work. Why the author never finished “Heyday in the Blood” is anybody’s guess. Maybe he....
Read the rest of Pierce's brief introduction and the Ross Macdonald tale.

--Marshal Zeringue