Black Money/Macdonald

I'd been hearing about the Tennis Club for years, but I'd never been inside of it.  Its courts and bungalows, its swimming pool and cabanas and pavilions, were disposed around a cove of the Pacific a few miles south of the Los Angeles County border.  Just parking my Ford in the asphalt lot beside the tennis courts made me feel like less of a dropout from the affluent society.


So begins Ross Macdonald's 1966 Lew Archer novel Black Money.  I just read it for the first time and all I can tell you is that it further cements my long-held belief that Macdonald was among the greatest American  literary talents, never mind genre writers, of the twentieth-century.

Here is an excerpt from Tom Nolan's biography of Macdonald, which sheds light on how the great novelist's reputation steadily grew among critics and how he influenced other genre writers who have long admired his work.


TS