Friday, December 04, 2009

Friday's Forgotten Book: Experience with Evil

I'm in the middle of John Ross Macdonald's Howard Cross novel Experience with Evil, from, I think, 1954 (I don't have the book with me as I write) and enjoying it, well, maybe not as much as a bonafide Lew Archer novel, but almost as much. It's interesting to see how Macdonald uses his usual tropes of fatherlessness and cold mothers and the generational evil even when Lew Archer is not around. Not to be missed by any Ross Macdonald fan. I'm not sure if the book is in print; I'm reading an old Pan edition. With a great cover, but you'll have to wait for that one.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This one must have had a different title in the U. S. Okay, I checked. It was called Meet Me at the Morgue.

Todd Mason said...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23023719@N04/2307505900/

I prefer kidnap mysteries for casual perusal, myself...

Actually, I don't know if I've yet read any fiction from Millar/Macdonald that wasn't Archer fiction, something I should do sooner rather than later.

It's very OP in the US, at least.

Juri said...

Thanks, Bill - you make me wonder, though, whether I have this in the original US edition. And whether it might have been translated in Finnish, after all, and whether I've actually read this before and not just remembering it...