The Galton Case, published in 1959, was Ross Macdonald's breakthrough book. Its predecessors are craftsmanlike, highly literate, hard-boiled detective stories; The Galton Case and most of its successors are literature that happens to inhabit the detective-story form. For Macdonald the man, Galton was the first book in which he explored his deepest personal concerns (he was the child of a broken home who was passed from relative to relative in his youth). For readers, it's the book in which he first perfected the balancing act that became his trademark: a tightly written page-turner that also probes profound themes and frequently rises to something like poetry.

The tale opens with detective Lew Archer visiting the swanky offices of a lawyer acquaintance, who engages him to hunt for a long-missing scion of the rich Galton family. Though the case seems fruitless, Archer begins digging. Soon a seemingly unrelated crime intrudes--but Archer tells us, "I hate coincidences." As he roams California (and, briefly, Nevada) following leads and hunches, he gradually uncovers a long-buried tale of deception, hatred, and the power of illusion. As usual, Macdonald can accomplish more with three lines of dialogue and a simple description than most writers can in three pages. The connection between Archer's two cases finally clicks about three-quarters of the way through the book, and the moving denouement, with its final plot twist, takes place in a hardscrabble Canadian boarding house much like those in which Macdonald spent parts of his childhood. The Galton Case is an exceptionally satisfying read on several levels. --Nicholas H. Allison


Book Description
Anthony Galton disappeared almost 20 years ago. Now his aging--and very rich--mother has hired Lew Archer to bring him back. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a suspicious heir, and a con man whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.


From the Inside Flap
Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In 1959, Ross Macdonald published what is generally considered his breakthrough novel, The Galton Case, a complex, psychologically acute account of the search for personal identity, and of the destructive power of the unresolved past. Macdonald ultimately established himself as one of three dominant forces in the development of the modern private-eye novel. The other two, of course, were Dashiell Hammett, who virtually invented the form, and Raymond Chandler, who brought wit, attitude, and a highly evolved sense of language, elevating detective fiction to a whole new level. Macdonald -- the pseudonym of California-born novelist Kenneth Millar -- was the direct literary descendent of these two titans, and he worked comfortably within that inherited tradition for a number of years, producing several excellent, if generic, novels featuring private investigator Lew Archer. (Archer, incidentally, was named after Sam Spade￯﾿ﾽs partner, Miles Archer, who is murdered in the opening pages of The Maltese Falcon.)

The Galton Case was Macdonald￯﾿ﾽs 13th novel, and his 8th entry in the Lew Archer series. It also represented his first fictional attempt to engage certain sensitive areas from his own unresolved past. Foremost among these was the sense of abandonment that resulted from his parents' divorce, which occurred when he was four years old. In the aftermath of that divorce, the young Ken Millar lived a fatherless, rootless existence that left him troubled, vulnerable, and emotionally scarred. Using the distancing device of the detective story -- which he once referred to as "a welder￯﾿ﾽs mask enabling both writer and reader to handle dangerously hot materials" -- Millar/Macdonald created, in The Galton Case, a classic mystery that contains within itself a thinly veiled spiritual autobiography.

As the novel opens, Lew Archer has just been hired by Gordon Sable, a Santa Teresa lawyer, to track down the long-lost son of his wealthiest client, the imperious Maria Galton. Her son, Anthony Galton, had disappeared more than 20 years before, following a bitter family argument over the suitability of his new, and very pregnant, wife. Now that she is old, frail, and close to death, Maria Galton is determined to reconcile with her son, and to locate the grandchild she has never met. Archer, certain that too much time has passed and that his chances of success are slight, reluctantly agrees to investigate.

Contrary to expectations, he gets immediate -- and astonishing -- results. First, he discovers the existence of a decapitated skeleton that appears to be the mortal remains of Anthony Galton. At the same time, he meets an orphaned young man -- "John Brown Jr." -- whose quest for identity forms the psychological heart of this novel. Brown bears a striking resemblance to the deceased Anthony Galton and possesses a birth certificate indicating that he just might be the long-lost Galton heir. Archer, wary and only half convinced, presents the young man to his putative grandmother, who welcomes him with open arms and pronounces the investigation over.

But, of course, it isn￯﾿ﾽt over. The Galton family physician, who is himself unconvinced of Brown￯﾿ﾽs legitimacy, hires Archer to look into the young man￯﾿ﾽs background. This new stage of the investigation takes Archer on a journey through John Brown￯﾿ﾽs past, carrying him from California to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and from Michigan to Canada, as he searches for proof of what he now believes is a carefully constructed act of imposture. Along the way, his investigation intersects with an apparently unrelated murder involving Gordon Sable and his emotionally damaged wife, with the violent depredations of a Nevada gangster, and with the long-buried secret behind the 20-year-old murder of Anthony Galton. In the final pages, all of the elements, past and present, come together in a climactic revelation, and John Brown Jr.￯﾿ﾽs traumatic history stands fully, painfully revealed.

The Galton Case created a kind of template for the 10 Lew Archer novels that would eventually follow. That template, which describes a process roughly analogous to that of psychoanalysis, invariably involved a number of common elements: a troubled family, torn apart by a combination of internal pressures and external events; a crime (or crimes) of violence; and an ancient, festering secret whose resolution is essential to the process of healing, and to the ultimate resolution of present-day dilemmas. This primal drama, embodied for the first time in the story of John Brown/John Galton and his search for his personal heritage, represents Macdonald￯﾿ﾽs major contribution to his chosen genre. More than any of his predecessors -- including Hammett and Chandler -- he understood both the complexities and the vulnerabilities of human psychology and brought that understanding to bear in a unique, irreplaceable series of novels that broke new ground, that broadened -- and deepened -- the emotional territory available to the writers who followed in his wake. (Bill Sheehan)

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Anthony Galton disappeared almost 20 years ago. Now his aging—and very rich—mother has hired Lew Archer to bring him back. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a suspicious heir, and a con man whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.

FROM THE CRITICS

Gale Research

The Galton Case "was a watershed book," Joe Gores wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, "the one in which [Macdonald] shook free of the Chandler influence and began to speak in his own unique voice." "It marks," Champlin believed, "a new dimension in the Ross Macdonald body of work."

Anthony Boucher - The New York Times Book Review