Black Money - Style

Style

Written in understated style, with dry wit and occasional aphorisms ("What you do to others you do to yourself. That's the converse of the golden rule") and without the sentimental biases that sometimes mar the author’s other books, Black Money maintains the speed of a thriller at the same time as it manipulates the reader’s understanding of its characters so as to render them icons of their classes and to lay bare their psychological tropes and moral dimensions. In this respect the book owes much of its vision to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and it is no accident that Fitzgerald is mentioned once in the text itself: Cervantes and Virginia Fablon share something of Gatsby and Daisy Fay Buchanan. As in Fitzgerald, the glittering surface conceals profound corruption. The denouement is darker than Fitzgerald's work, however.

The compression of the writing augments its emotive force, notably in the complex final scene, which, without having the “jolt” (to use the author’s own word) of The Chill (1964), has an accretive force that gives it even greater power—that of tragedy.

The works of Ross Macdonald
Lew Archer works
Novels
  • The Moving Target
  • The Drowning Pool
  • The Way Some People Die
  • The Ivory Grin
  • Find a Victim
  • The Barbarous Coast
  • The Doomsters
  • The Galton Case
  • The Wycherly Woman
  • The Zebra-Striped Hearse
  • The Chill
  • The Far Side of the Dollar
  • Black Money
  • The Instant Enemy
  • The Goodbye Look
  • The Underground Man
  • Sleeping Beauty
  • The Blue Hammer
Short stories
  • The Name is Archer
  • Lew Archer: Private Investigator
  • Strangers in Town
Omnibuses
  • Archer in Hollywood
  • Archer at Large
  • Archer in Jeopardy
Writing as John Macdonald
  • The Dark Tunnel
  • Trouble Follows Me
  • Blue City
  • The Three Roads
Other novels
  • Meet Me at the Morgue
  • The Ferguson Affair

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