It would be too easy to label Macdonald’s novels as Chandleresque. True, the two giants of the genre share a noirish troubled detective at their root but, in literary terms, Archer develops where Marlowe innovates. Consequently, here we get a more rounded gumshoe: less violent, more conflicted. In Archer’s second outing, he dives into the greed and corruption of a Californian oil town and soon finds himself peeling back blackmail, extortion and murder. The storytelling of The Drowning Pool is tight and pacy and written in an easy witty style. This is traditional noir of the very highest order.

It would be too easy to label Macdonald’s novels as Chandleresque. True, the two giants of the genre share a noirish troubled detective at their root but, in literary terms, Archer develops where Marlowe innovates. Consequently, here we get a more rounded gumshoe: less violent, more conflicted. In Archer’s second outing, he dives into the greed and corruption of a Californian oil town and soon finds himself peeling back blackmail, extortion and murder. The storytelling of The Drowning Pool is tight and pacy and written in an easy witty style. This is traditional noir of the very highest order.