John Ross Macdonald / Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 2001)

From the Publisher:
"Ross Macdonald was simply one of the best.... [His] books showed me the possibility that crime novels could be art." -- Michael Connelly
Las Cruces wasn't a place most travelers would think to stop. But after Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big time bank heist by a small time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone's a victim.

"[Ross Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries." -- The Guardian

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, ISBN: 0375708677 (August, 2001), 215 p., $12.00.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1991)

From the Publisher:
FIND A VICTIM
The hitchhiker rose to his knees on the side of the dark road. When Archer stopped the car and got to him, he knew he was in for a ride-for this boy was dying of a gunshot wound. In a matter of hours, Archer would be suspected by the law, hired by a target-shooting trucking magnate, and propositioned by an adulterer's wife. A hijacked load of hootch and a band of sinners are on the loose in the hills and desert around this nice Southern California town. So is this L.A. private eye, who keeps getting blood on his hands...

ROSS MACDONALD
"[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald." -- New York Times Book Review

A SELECTION OF THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK CLUB

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. A Lew Archer Novel. Warner Books, ISBN: 0446358924 (September, 1991), 195 p., $4.50.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1984)

ROSS MACDONALD
"[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald." -- New York Times Book Review

A SELECTION OF THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK CLUB

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553243748 (September, 1984), 185 p., $2.95.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1972)

From the Publisher:
FIND A VICTIM
There was a murder epidemic in Las Cruces and Lew Archer was making a habit of finding the victims. Catching the killer was a lot trickier. It might have been the cute little brunette who discovered something: that gave her an even bigger bang than sex. Or thes public servant with a private problem. It could have been the blue-eyed blonde who got widowed twice in the same night. Or the little lady who, when last seen, was all prissied up and dressed to kill...

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. A Lew Archer Novel. New York: Bantam, 1972, Bantam Books #N7432, 185 p., ¢95.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1967)

From the Publisher:
I'M LEW ARCHER, PRIVATE EYE. AND I'VE SEEN EVERYTHING --
at least I thought I had till I got mixed up with a cute little brunette who discovered something that gave her an even bigger bang than sex; a blue-eyed blonde who got widowed twice in the same night; a hitchhiking corpse; a public servant with a private problem and a pair of beautiful sisters who shared more than the same last name...

And don't miss Archer, the loner with the lethal gun, in
THE GALTON CASE
THE NAME IS ARCHER
THE FAR SIDE OF THE DOLLAR
BLACK MONEY
THE BARBAROUS COAST
Available wherever paperbacks are sold.

Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. Lew Archer - the hardest of the hard-boiled dicks. Bantam Books #F3342 (March, 1967), 153 p., ¢50.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (UK 1958)

From the Publisher:
Overhead, the buzzards turned in wobbly circles like tipsy undertakers...
"I'm not competing, Archer," he said. "I don't want your blood on my hands."
"Let me see your hands."
He held them out in front of him, palms up and empty. He winced when I took the gun out of his pocket. It was a blue steel revolver, a .38-calibre. The butt was suave from use.
"Take it," he said. "It's the one you want."

The toughest, slickest thriller ever -- with dialogue that fairly crackles! John Ross Macdonald is one of the most imprèssive American crime writers in the business today' says TRUTH.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. London: Pan, 1958, Pan Books #G146, 187 p., 2'6.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1955)

From the Publisher:
"The best of hard-boiled detectives" NEW YORK TIMES
I'M. LEW ARCHER,
Licensed Private Detective. It's a hard business, and I live in a hard world - fuil of rough deals. One of the roughest started like this:
He was the ghastliest hitchhiker who eves thumbed me... His eyes were black holes, his mouth a bright smear of red. The arm he raised overbalanced him. He fell forward on his face...

"John Ross Macdonald is the best hard-boiled mystery writer" NEWSWEEK
In the vivid American tradition of the hard-boiled detective novel there are three great authors -- Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and John Ross Macdonald

FIND AVICIN "rough, tough and ruthless" BOSTON POST
FIND A VICTIM "tops in the tough class" PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
FIND A VICTIM "vivid, realistic, tough, and compassionate... COLUMBUS DISPATCH
FIND A VICTIM "murder and a whirlpool of passion" BOSTON TRAVELER

The best Mysteries come from Bantam Books
LOOK FOR THE BANTAM ROOSTER -- YOUR ASSURANCE OF QUALITY

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. Bantam Books #1360 (September, 1955), 153 p., ¢25.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (UK 1955)

From the Publisher:
Ross Macdonald is now truly established in the front rank of mystery thriller writers. Find a Victim is a new case for Lew Archer, the private eye whom Macdonald momentarily forsook for that last success Experience With Evil.

"He was the ghastliest hitch-hiker who ever thumbed me," says Archer, recalling how it all started. And by the time the man was stowed into Archer's car so much blood had been pumped out of the round hole in his chest that the body was almost lifeless. By the time he reached hospital there was no life at all. But on the way, Archer had stopped for help at Kerrigan's motel, and his reception there didn't come up to what a good Samaritan might expect. Archer, who had no business in this little desert town and didn't know a single soul living -- or dying -- in it, had to postpone his journey to Sacramento to give evidence at the inquest. And being Archer, he didn't spend the time sitting in an hotel bedroom; though he would have been a lot more comfortable if he had, because there was precious little time for sleep once he started finding out why that body had a hole in it.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. London: Cassell & Company, 1955, Cassell Crime Connoisseur, 208 p., 9'6.

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim (USA 1954)

From the Publisher:
Archer found him in the ditch beside the highway -- a young Spanish American blowing sad small bubbles of blood. Tony died in the Las Cruces hospital within an hour. Meantime Archer had seen enough of the brawling valley city to make him want to see more. He had met Donald Kerrigan and Kerrigan's handsome and tormented wife. She told him that another woman was missing: Anne Meyer had been close to the murdered man, and very close to Kerrigan. As Archer thought and fought his way into the case, Anne Meyer's disappearance became the key to it.

This shattering story of crime and intrigue moves like lightning through California's rich and riotous Central Valley. It involves a B-girl who grew up too early and a judge's daughter who grew up too late, a sheriff caught between his passion for justice and more criminal passions, a woman who became the victim of her own murderous wish. As usually in Macdonald's stories, the meaning of the action, the root of the evil, is found at the end in the recesses of the human heart.

John Ross Macdonald, whose annual mystery novel is an event that is looked for by an international audience, has never written with such savage brilliance.

John Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
was born in Los Gatos, California, in 1915, of mixed Scotch-Canadian and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. After growing up in western Canada, he attended the University of Western Ontario and on graduation married. For a period he taught high school; later he held a fellowship at the University of Michigan. He entered the Navy in 1944 and served until 1946 as a communications officer aboard an escort carrier. In 1949, partly because there were by that time so many K. and M. Millar titles on the market, the transformation to John Ross Macdonald took place and resulted in books that have received high praise ever since. At present Mr. Millar lives with his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter in Santa Barbara, California, where he continues to produce his remarkably well-written, adult, human, and extremely moving mysteries-mysteries that in Anthony Boucher's words "return the much-abused hard-boiled detective story to its original Hammett-high level."

John Ross Macdonald: Find a Victim. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954, 153 p., $2.75.