The Way Some People Die by Ross Macdonald 1951

I re-read all of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald every few years.  But I have not done so with Ross MacDonald (real name:  Kenneth Millar), finding his novels a little thin when I originally read them.  But I've been recently reading the letters between Ross MacDonald and Eudora Welty, rich in intelligence and observation, and decided it was time to return to Ross MacDonald's novels.

Mosquito wasted no money on front.  The room stood as he had found it; bare discolored walls, broken-backed iron bed, cracked green blind over the single window, the rug on the floor marked with a threadbare path from the bed to the door of the bathroom.  He could move at a minute's notice into any one of ten thousand similar rooms in the city
  --Ross MacDonald, The Way Some People Die (Knopf, 1951)

The book is narrated in the first person by private detective Lew Archer, who is looking for a woman's daughter, Galatea Lawrence. The search takes him through some of the seediest parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco and he meets many shady characters: dope addicts, gangsters, grifters of all sorts.  In MacDonald's novels everyone has a secret to conceal.  Like the best genre writers MacDonald is expert at descriptions of everything from seedy motels to greasy spoons, where people on the fringes of society hide out.  Little of Lew Archer's character is explored directly (he mentions that he was a cop and in the war) and we are given few of his thoughts; MacDonald rather gives vivid descriptions of the characters Archer meets, the places he goes, and their effect on him. When Archer first goes to meet Gatatea's mother in Santa Monica he says "the houses had too many stories, too few windows, not enough paint" and at the end, when he has to tell Galatea's mother that Galatea is guilty "The colored fanlight over the door washed her mother in sorrowful purple.  She opened the door, and noon glared in on her face.  The tear-tracks resembled the marks of sparse rain on a dusty road."  Mrs. Lawrence is like many characters in MacDonald's world, unwilling to admit family secrets. Hammett's books exemplify the 30's, Chandler's the 40's, and Ross MacDonald's the 50's, when a placid exterior tried to conceal the deceit beneath it.