After you've read Hammett and Chandler, Ross Macdonald is the obvious next choice in the "hardboiled" genre. He is a very worthy successor to them, superior at times. I love his style of prose, it is fun just reading his books. His style may be equal to Rex Stout. "The Drowning Pool" is the second in the series and is filled with interesting characters and a few plot twists. If you haven't read Macdonald, read them in order, he gets even better with later books. His "Archer" character evolved over time and became more interesting and sympathetic. ( )

MacDonald's great strengths—wry narration and dialogue, vivid characters, wild yet tight plotting—are here, as are some annoying weaknesses: contempt for ordinary flawed humanity, narrative drooling over every female character between 16 and 40, and a preposterous closing act with villains seemingly out of the Dick Tracy comic strip and a pointless brawl. Also some less than nuanced portrayals of gay characters, but I'm inclined to overlook the blindnesses of of my grandparents' generation, as I hope my own might be overlooked by people of future generations. This is a good hard-boiled mystery, but perhaps I wasn't in the mood. I experienced it as an awful book partially redeemed rather than as a great thriller dragged down by bad authorial choices. I give it four stars because MacDonald stands so far above today's thriller writers such as Connelly and Child. but I recommend that new readers start with #3 in the series, The Way Some People Die, and skip the first two, of which this is the second. ( )

Re-visiting the Lew Archer novels in sequence, this second installment is a marked improvement on the first. Better characterizations, better plot, a little less philosophical talking, same great descriptions of people, places, and things. Really good 1950 Southern California feel to it. ( )

Though this is the third of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels that I’ve read, it’s the first one from the early years of his series. As such it was an especially interesting read, as I could see all of the elements that I’ve come to enjoy at an early stage of their development. Not only did it help me to better understand the formula to his stories that is emerging from my reading of Macdonald’s works, but it also highlighted the differences between the books and how his style changed over the years. This was all on top of my enjoyment of the book itself, of course, in which Archer is asked to investigate a case of blackmail that leads to murder and the unveiling of long-kept family secrets: in short, everything that I’ve come to enjoy in an Archer novel. ( )

A frightening and funny hard boiled detective novel. Plan on reading more ( )