The last Lew Archer detective novel by Ross Macdonald is a splendid one. Macdonald's humanistic sleuth is his tough self, but the tender side shows through even more clearly here. The story, like most of Macdonald's work, is about family secrets. This one is innovative and complex, starting with a missing painting and ending up with melancholy and deep regrets. The most melancholy thing for me was the fact that there are no more Archer novels. The entire series is among the best American crime writing, and The Blue Hammer is a fine and fitting conclusion to it. ( )

A sus 60 años, el detective Lew Archer ya no es lo que se dice un hombre de acción. Sus armas son la escucha, la inteligencia y la sensibilidad. El caso que ha de resolver con tan sosegadas técnicas gira en torno a un cuadro robado, pero lo que le interesa realmente es comprender la complejidad de los conflictos humanos.

review of
Ross MacDonald's The Blue Hammer
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 7, 2021

I've read & reviewed 16 other MacDonald bks now. I saved this one for last b/c it's the newest one I have & the only one that's a hardback. Maybe it'll be the last Ross MacDonald bk I ever read. Let us have a moment of silence. It's set in 1976. It's another art world crime, there's increased sexuality, MacDonald's going w/ the times.

""Who is Richard Chantry?"

"The woman looked at me in surprise. "You mean you've never heard of him?"

""Most of the world's population have never heard of him," Biemeyer said.

""That simply isn't true. He was already famous before he disappeared, and he wasn't even out of his twenties."

"Her tone was nostalgic and affectionate. I looked at her husband's face. It was red with anger, and his eyes were confused. I edged between them facing his wife."

""Where did Richard Chantry disappear from?"

""From here," she said. "From Santa Teresa."

""Recently?"

""No. It was over twenty-five years ago. He simply decided to walk away from it all. He was in search of new horizons, as he said in his farewell statement."" - p 5

The setting displays its up-to-date-ness:

"There was a natureburger place in a geodesic dome up the block, and now and then the uncertain wind brought me the smell of food. Eventually I went and had a natureburger. The atmosphere in the place was dim and inert. The bearded young customers made me think of early cave men waiting for the ice age to end." - p 29

The missing artist's portrait comes into play:

""I suppose so," he said wearily. Though I'd much rather look at this." He indicated the picture of the man on the wall.

""Who is it?"

""You mean you don't know? It's Richard Chandry—his only major self-portrait."

"I gave the picture a closer look. The head was a little like a lion's head, with rumpled tawny hair, a full beard partly masking an almost feminine mouth, deep eyes the color of emeralds. It seemed to radiate force." - pp 52-53

I found this to be a nice twist in description:

"Her voice was dark with sorrow and resentment. The darkness appeared to have seeped up from her mind into the roots of her hair." - p 54

This is something that I think about:

"The whole painting held a sense of distance that centered in her ice-blue eyes and seemed to suggest that she was watching me, or I was watching her, from a long way off. Perhaps the suggestion came from what Paola had relayed from her father, that the woman who sat for the picture would be old or dead, her beauty only remembered." - p 74

MacDonald's description of the painting seems more sensitive than most such descriptions in his bks where he has Archer, the detective, generally dismissive & contemptuous toward Modern Art.

I can relate:

"I retreated to the City Editor's desk and put my head down on my arms again. It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course the room was large and reasonably well lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind." - p 75

Was that innuendo?

"She knocked on a door marked "Managing Editor," and got no answer. We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose.

""Hey," she said. "He still likes me."" - p 94

Porn is never like that.

There's nothing like a cult to spice things up.

I don't know what those Mutual Love people believe in, but the belief they have is certainly powerful. One of the converts told me he turned over everything he had to the organization, and they work him hard besides. Looks to me like they're coining money. I know they paid Mildred over a hundred thousand for the place. Of course that includes the acreage. So hold on to your wallet with both hands."" - p 102

You know how those artists are:

""Murdered?"

""It could be. It happens to homosexuals—bisexuals—whatever he is or was. I see a lot of them in this business. Some of them go in for the rough trade almost as if they wanted to be killed. Or they wander away by themselves and commit suicide. That may be what Richard Chandry did. On the other hand, he may have found a soul mate and is living happily ever after in Algiers or Tahiti."" - p 130

I shd probably pat myself on the back at this point & say that I figured this one out llllooooonnnnnggggg before it actually ended. But I'm not tellin'.

Our hero, Archer, is actually becoming more sensitive to art & art history. He even works DaVinci into it:

""Are you sure that Mr. Chantry was a homo? I never knew one of them who liked hard work."

"I didn't mention Leonardo for fear of confusing the issue. "I'm fairly certain. You could ask around."" - p 147

& De Chirico!:

"Well, Doris was there, standing like a Chirico figure in the receding distances of the house." - p 163

& let's not forget potomania, an essential tool in the artist's kit:

"["] And if he doesn't get out of here while I count to ten, I'll throw him out bodily."

"I almost laughed in his face. He was a stout unsteady man whose speech was fed by synthetic energy." - p 186

Well, there you (don't) have it. I didn't spoil the plot. I enjoyed this, just like I enjoyed all the other Ross MacDonald novels I've read, but he has gotten somewhat predictable & formulaic. That's ok, I still enjoy it every time. It's like sex: do you complain if it's not that much different from te last time? Well, some of you probably do but as long as certain things are recurring features I'm satisfied. ( )

Lew Archer is on the hunt for a stolen portrait that is supposed to have been painted by an artist who disappeared a couple of decades ago and was presumed dead. The big question is if it was painted by him, when? Along the way, Archer encounters a bunch of characters who have been let down by life and are attempting to scrape by as best they can. For this reason, this is definitely a morose book, and I wouldn’t pick it as a starting point for reading about Archer. He continues to be his contemplative self, and he finds moments of joy, but the overall mood is gloomy. ( )

How should one read an author's series? This is a question for which the answer would seem obvious: from beginning to end. Yet while this is certainly true for many series nowadays which are basically one story stretched over multiple volumes (e.g. Harry Potter), there are plenty in which authors use the same characters in a variety of separate tales. Must, for example, Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories be read in the order they were written, or can they be read and enjoyed in whatever order the reader encounters them?

To be honest, this is a question I hadn't considered until I finished Ross Macdonald's book. While the final novel in his Lew Archer series, it's only the second one that I haven't read. This didn't inhibit my enjoyment of his story in the least, but when I finished it I wondered if I had read enough of them to form an accurate assessment of its merits. Part of it is that its plot was similar in many ways to that of the first Lew Archer novel I read, The Goodbye Look, with an investigation into the theft of a personal item leading to an unraveling of a family's secrets dating back decades. Fortunately Macdonald was too good of a novelist to simply rehash his earlier book, as events go off in a very different direction and end up in a different place as a result. But was this the premise for all of his novels or just a coincidence that the first two I read just happened to contain a similar premise? It may be a trivial point, but it's one that I need to resolve whether Macdonald was revisiting one of his many premises or whether it was a tired regurgitation by a one-trick pony. I'd like to think that it was the former, and I enjoyed this book even in spite of the repetition of the premise, but I feel that I can't make a final judgment until I have the opportunity to read more of Macdonald's work. ( )