The book starts with the hero, Lew Archer, meeting a young boy, his neighbor, just as the boy’s father comes to pick him up from his mother. I admit to work such a conscious symbol sounds precious, but he was good at it, an education to us all. (Ironic, considering the troubles we’ve had this year with such fires.) And just as the fire moves - now almost under control, now bursting out again and threatening disaster - so the characters fall under pressure from this surprise or that. The big symbol in the book is a wildfire that’s burning over the California hills. By that point in his career, he’d worked on plot, characterization, emotion, language and metaphor, all the techniques a writer needs, and he had turned to mastering symbolism. The Underground Man was 3rd to the last of his books. So every one of his novels is better than the last (maybe excepting his very last book, the Blue Hammer, when he was fighting dementia), and by the end, Lordy he was good. The difference is that Macdonald never stopped trying to improve. Yes, I’ve read all of Chandler, all of Hammett, my share of Christie and various others. Ross Macdonald is the greatest mystery writer you’ve never read.
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