The Three Roads

Occasionally interesting but mostly awkward and disjointed, The Three Roads (1948) demonstrates Ross Macdonald's struggles as a writer before he found his niche as the third and greatest master of the private eye subgenre. It's a slightly better book than the previous year's Blue City, but a far less consistent one. There's some decent action--both psychological and physical--in the novel, but it takes a long eighty pages to get going. Macdonald was intent on foisting his fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis on the reader, and did it in the clumsiest, most sophomoric way.

The plot twist doesn't amount to much, and when the book was finished I wondered if I was supposed to care about Bret Taylor and Paula West. And, if so, why? Flawed show more characters are one thing, but Macdonald seems to have gone out of his way to make them unsympathetic. There are flashes of the psychological depth that would distinguish his Lew Archer novels, but they're few and far between...making The Moving Target, the first Archer book, an even more impressive achievement. (Macdonald figured out that the ideal protagonist in a murder mystery is not a tortured amnesia victim, but rather an investigator who's fundamentally neutral.) Confirmed Macdonald fanatics should not expect much from The Three Roads; casual readers should avoid it altogether. show less

Although it's a bit dated in its reverent stance on psychoanalysis, this Ross Macdonald novel is still a gem.

Bret Taylor, a seemingly-shell-shocked Navy veteran, returns to his civilian life in California. A couple of complications: his ill-chosen wife's been murdered, and his loyal screenwriter girlfriend is almost overcome with complex, mixed emotions.

Sounds hokey in the extreme, but the characterization is superb, the writing incredibly taut, and the ending highly satisfactory, if inevitable.

Macdonald is seriously underrated; this is an excellent novel all around.

Highly recommended.