Although THE GALTON CASE represents Ross Macdonald's breakthrough where he really found his voice as a crime novelist, his next Lew Archer book, THE WYCHERLY WOMAN, was a genuine setback. It starts out like most of Macdonald's Archer novels do, with his detective hero called in by a wealthy Californian to solve family trouble, but instead of dwelling on the lives and the psychology of the wealthy (as THE GALTON CASE and his other later mature novels do), THE WYCHERLY WOMAN gets drawn instead into an unconvincing, vaguely Chandleresque world of wiretappers, blackmailers, and sleazy hotels. It has a murder plot that's much too complex (again showing the influence of Raymond Chandler) and some inauthentic dialogue among lowlifes, and it becomes very hard to care about the characters. And it's also very hard to see why Archer, who gets so easily impatient with his clients in all the other books, would ever stay on Homer Wycherly's payroll given how unbelievably secretive and witholding the millionaire is (at several points in the novel he would have certainly at least threatened to quit the case had he been written fully in character).
It's not until his next novel, THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE, that Macdonald seemed confident in the new direction in which he was moving and assumed full control of his mature style. No Lew Archer novel is unreadable, but this is not one of Macdonald's strongest books, and shows few of his genuine strengths as a mystery writer. (And what is up with that cover?)
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