Book Review: The Underground Man

A short while ago Penguin very kindly sent me a copy of Ross MacDonald’s The Underground Man to review. I was excited by this because I spent last summer pursuing The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon - books which share The Underground Man’s genre - but had never read anything by MacDonald himself.

Hardboiled detective fiction is slick, exciting, at times grimy, and, for me at least, rapidly devoured and enjoyed. I looked forward to finding out how the exploits of MacDonald’s creation, Lew Archer, would compare with the likes of the notorious Philip Marlowe.

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The novel opens with private detective Lew Archer waking to a West Los Angeles morning. He rapidly finds himself entangled with a deeply troubled family - a desperate wife, a troubled husband, a son caught between them - and is drawn into a mystery of missing men and murder.

Archer appears fairly clean-cut, as far as hardboiled detectives go, but he still seems to attract trouble and generally rub people up the wrong way. The Underground Man has the hallmarks you’d expect of the genre - a beautiful woman in distress, heavy drinking, overly aggressive alpha-males, blackmail - which make it dark, but at the same time accessible to a wide audience.

A case in point, the husband of the dysfunctional family the narrative centres on, Stanley Broadhurst, first appears to have kidnapped his son, but he is found dead, murdered, soon after. From this event emerge several suspects, bound up in a scandal that has haunted the Broadhurst family since Stanley’s childhood.

The story becomes a little convoluted as Archer follows leads that become dead ends, but the pace of the novel doesn’t suffer for it. I found that I really wanted to follow MacDonald’s tale to its resolution because I cared enough about characters to desire to know whodunnit. On the strength of my enjoyment of The Underground Man I’m looking forward to getting hold of the other four MacDonald books Penguin have just re-released as essential reading for my summer holidays.

I would like to thank Penguin UK for sending me a copy of this book, because it reminded me exactly how much I love this genre. The Underground Man is perfect summer reading - compelling without being too heavy - and I would strongly recommend you grab yourself a copy before heading to the beach/rain-battered caravan this holiday season.

All the best,

Alison