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The Three Roads A Spasm of passion. . . A sudden lapse of memory. . . form the brutal chemistry of murder!
Silken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at him—that’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine. He was drunk when he married her, stone cold sober when he found her dead. Out on the sunlit streets of L.A. walked the man—her lover, her killer—who had been with her that fatal night. Taylor intended to find him. And when he did, the gun in his pocket would provide the quickest kind of justice. But first Taylor had to find something an elusive memory so powerful it drove him down three terrifying roads toward self-destruction—grief, ecstasty, and death.
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First published January 1, 1948
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About the author
Ross Macdonald
160 books801 followersRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his parents' native Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, where he started college. When his father abandoned his family unexpectedly, Macdonald lived with his mother and various relatives, moving several times by his sixteenth year. The prominence of broken homes and domestic problems in his fiction has its roots in his youth.
In Canada, he met and married Margaret Sturm (Margaret Millar)in 1938. They had a daughter, Linda, who died in 1970.
He began his career writing stories for pulp magazines. Millar attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key and a Ph.D. in literature. While doing graduate study, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. At this time, he wrote under the name John Macdonald, in order to avoid confusion with his wife, who was achieving her own success writing as Margaret Millar. He then changed briefly to John Ross Macdonald before settling on Ross Macdonald, in order to avoid mixups with contemporary John D. MacDonald. After serving at sea as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Michigan, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree.
Macdonald's popular detective Lew Archer derives his name from Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, and from Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Macdonald first introduced the tough but humane private eye in the 1946 short story Find the Woman. A full-length novel, The Moving Target, followed in 1949. This novel (the first in a series of eighteen) would become the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper. In the early 1950s, he returned to California, settling for some thirty years in Santa Barbara, the area where most of his books were set. The very successful Lew Archer series, including bestsellers The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, concluded with The Blue Hammer in 1976.
Macdonald died of Alzheimer's disease in Santa Barbara, California.
Macdonald is the primary heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as the master of American hardboiled mysteries. His writing built on the pithy style of his predecessors by adding psychological depth and insights into the motivations of his characters. Macdonald's plots were complicated, and often turned on Archer's unearthing family secrets of his clients and of the criminals who victimized them. Lost or wayward sons and daughters were a theme common to many of the novels. Macdonald deftly combined the two sides of the mystery genre, the "whodunit" and the psychological thriller. Even his regular readers seldom saw a Macdonald denouement coming.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 13, 2019
The Three Roads is the fourth and final book that Ross MacDonald produced before writing his first Lew Archer novel, and it's a mess. It is written in a more mature and disciplined style than the three others, but it is stuffed to the gills with every MacDonald obsession, each of them exploited beyond its uttermost, indulged before the writer had developed a coherent strategy for how to uing it. There is a corrupt coastal American city, a childhood wound and family trauma involving a primal scene and an Oedipus complex, far too much about psychiatry in general (two therapists for characters, and even a brief discussion of the comparative virtues of Freudian and Adlerian therapeutic technique), plus amnesia and a murderer barely guilty of anything, embittered and marred by his past. Throw in at least five points of view (three males, two females, all limited third person), a way too complex plot and an unsatisfactory ending, and it all adds up to the failure that is The Three Roads.
If you're just looking for a satisfactory mystery, you should avoid this book. But if you are--like I am--a great admirer of Ross MacDonald, I think you might find its perusal instructive. This is definitely the bad book MacDonald needed to write, the one that helped him tame his lifelong obsessions and transform them into classic and enduring themes.
April 5, 2019
After the Philip Marlowe and Harry Bosch novels, Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books are probably my favorite detective series of all time. Unfortunately, this is not a Lew Archer story, although it has some of the hallmarks of an Archer novel (all the Archer books seem to be based on a crime related to how the older generation has screwed up the newer generation) it is sadly lacking Archer himself. The plot of this thing is an overwrought and silly mess, larded with absurd Freudian psychology. Still, it’s entertaining enough and I wasn’t bored. I also feel like it gives Archer fans an interesting insight into MacDonald’s development as a writer. If you’ve read all the Archer novels, this is worth reading. If you haven’t, you should go read The Chill instead.
July 6, 2009
Ross MacDonald is just so good at describing a scene. I return to his books to learn how to write sentences. I had high hopes for this one and I was disappointed that the Oedipal story (The Three Roads = the three roads at Phokis where Oedipus unknowingly killed his father) wasn't a closer parallel. But you can't go wrong with any MacDonald.
September 26, 2017
Kenneth Millar's fourth and last novel before inventing Lew Archer shows him still learning his craft.
It starts extremely well, with a sensationally disorienting opening chapter which skillfully deploys the postwar 'amnesiac protagonist' gimmick, but then the rest of the first half of the book is almost solid Freudian psychobabble. In the Archer novels, Millar/Macdonald mostly subordinated his fascination with psychoanalysis to the need to sustain a narrative line, but here great bleeding chunks of theory are dumped on the reader, and not only is narrative subordinated, but also characterization. What's really disturbing is the report that Knopf insisted he cut an additional two hundred pages of this stuff from the manuscript; this is definitely not a case in which I would look forward to seeing the text restored in accordance with the author's original intentions!
Once we are past all the theoretical discourse, it's mostly smooth sailing, and Millar handles plotting and characterization in ways which foreshadow his work to come. There are indications of inexperience: the resolution of the mystery is too predictable, particularly if you've seen many noir films of the period. Millar often overwrites, although even his most florid passages are interesting and sometimes brilliant. For instance, take the description of the Golden Sunset Café at the beginning of chapter thirteen:
"It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings."
This is both striking and absurdly exaggerated, almost a parody of Chandler, who indeed complained that Millar/Macdonald did not know what similes were for. Metaphorical overkill of this magnitude certainly demonstrates the author's virtuosity, but also his self-indulgence.
Chandler also commented on his young rival's need to show off his erudition, and this book is not only lumbered with a great deal of Freudian chit-chat, it is studded with classy namedropping to reassure the intelligent reader that he is not just slumming with some crummy crime novel. Beethoven's Pastoral symphony pops in, along with El Greco and Sophocles.
If Millar had died after writing this, he'd still have a niche audience as a promising, undisciplined talent. As it is, the book is recommended to Ross Macdonald devotees and serious students of noir.
It starts extremely well, with a sensationally disorienting opening chapter which skillfully deploys the postwar 'amnesiac protagonist' gimmick, but then the rest of the first half of the book is almost solid Freudian psychobabble. In the Archer novels, Millar/Macdonald mostly subordinated his fascination with psychoanalysis to the need to sustain a narrative line, but here great bleeding chunks of theory are dumped on the reader, and not only is narrative subordinated, but also characterization. What's really disturbing is the report that Knopf insisted he cut an additional two hundred pages of this stuff from the manuscript; this is definitely not a case in which I would look forward to seeing the text restored in accordance with the author's original intentions!
Once we are past all the theoretical discourse, it's mostly smooth sailing, and Millar handles plotting and characterization in ways which foreshadow his work to come. There are indications of inexperience: the resolution of the mystery is too predictable, particularly if you've seen many noir films of the period. Millar often overwrites, although even his most florid passages are interesting and sometimes brilliant. For instance, take the description of the Golden Sunset Café at the beginning of chapter thirteen:
"It was chilly and desolate in the morning, like a fever patient who began each day with a low temperature and rose to a peak of delirium in the hot evening. The long room was like an image of his own hangover, run-down and almost empty, containing like a corrupt memory the odors of rancid grease and stale whisky spillings."
This is both striking and absurdly exaggerated, almost a parody of Chandler, who indeed complained that Millar/Macdonald did not know what similes were for. Metaphorical overkill of this magnitude certainly demonstrates the author's virtuosity, but also his self-indulgence.
Chandler also commented on his young rival's need to show off his erudition, and this book is not only lumbered with a great deal of Freudian chit-chat, it is studded with classy namedropping to reassure the intelligent reader that he is not just slumming with some crummy crime novel. Beethoven's Pastoral symphony pops in, along with El Greco and Sophocles.
If Millar had died after writing this, he'd still have a niche audience as a promising, undisciplined talent. As it is, the book is recommended to Ross Macdonald devotees and serious students of noir.
May 6, 2018
I love Ross Macdonald, but this book is absolutely terrible. There are a lot of problems, structurally it just didn't work at all for me. You might say it revolves around a murder, yet it does not follow the structure of mystery. It's been described as a psychological thriller, but while there was enough Freud to make me sick, it was far from thrilling. The whodunit may not have been a cliche when the book first came out in 1948, I don't know, but I knew who done it from the start and though I kept hoping it was a misdirect, sadly it turned out not to be.
The biggest problem is the writing. The book is so badly overwritten that I'd have rejected it early on if it weren't for Macdonald's name on the cover. Macdonald is trying way too hard here, the imagery is all over the place, the prose trying its damnedest to be stylish. The first third to half is just flat out boring on top of it. I'm not sure if he dialed back the overwriting in the second half or I just got used to it and was more successful at tuning it out once the pace of the story picked up.
What makes this really surprising is that this is Macdonald's fourth book published, and the two on either side of it are much better. I have not read Macdonald's first two novels yet (they're out of print), but his third, Blue City, which came out in 1947, while not the most sophisticated noir/crime novel either in plot or style is at least an entertaining story. The Moving Target, 1949, is the first Lew Archer novel, and while far from Macdonald's best, still immensely better than The Three Roads.
I would recommend all but the most die-hard Macdonald fans avoid this one.
The biggest problem is the writing. The book is so badly overwritten that I'd have rejected it early on if it weren't for Macdonald's name on the cover. Macdonald is trying way too hard here, the imagery is all over the place, the prose trying its damnedest to be stylish. The first third to half is just flat out boring on top of it. I'm not sure if he dialed back the overwriting in the second half or I just got used to it and was more successful at tuning it out once the pace of the story picked up.
What makes this really surprising is that this is Macdonald's fourth book published, and the two on either side of it are much better. I have not read Macdonald's first two novels yet (they're out of print), but his third, Blue City, which came out in 1947, while not the most sophisticated noir/crime novel either in plot or style is at least an entertaining story. The Moving Target, 1949, is the first Lew Archer novel, and while far from Macdonald's best, still immensely better than The Three Roads.
I would recommend all but the most die-hard Macdonald fans avoid this one.
April 6, 2020
When I bought the book, I assumed was a Lew Archer mystery. I'm a fan of the hard-boiled detective genre. Alas, that was a misguided assumption.
The first third of the book is devoted to the protagonist's psychological status. A US Navy lieutenant, he suffered from delusions about his mom's death and the death of his one-day-wed wife. As I recall, this descent into despair and depression was spurred by the sinking of his ship. A Navy psychologist is helping, sort of. Another private psychologist with a Freudian background accompanies the introduction of "the beautiful woman," and they both complicate his recovery.
I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis, so this big chunk of the book was not very interesting for me.
The middle chunk of the book has our lieutenant pursuing the killer of his wife. It was better reading, but a mere foreshadowing of the writer that MacDonald became with the Lew Archer novels. I wouldn't recommend The Three Roads except to someone who wants to complete his/her reading of MacDonald.
The first third of the book is devoted to the protagonist's psychological status. A US Navy lieutenant, he suffered from delusions about his mom's death and the death of his one-day-wed wife. As I recall, this descent into despair and depression was spurred by the sinking of his ship. A Navy psychologist is helping, sort of. Another private psychologist with a Freudian background accompanies the introduction of "the beautiful woman," and they both complicate his recovery.
I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis, so this big chunk of the book was not very interesting for me.
The middle chunk of the book has our lieutenant pursuing the killer of his wife. It was better reading, but a mere foreshadowing of the writer that MacDonald became with the Lew Archer novels. I wouldn't recommend The Three Roads except to someone who wants to complete his/her reading of MacDonald.
April 19, 2023
By far the most atypical novel by Ross Macdonald — and for sure a good idea to leave to read near the end of his oeuvre, as I have — but at the same time it feels like a distillation of a lot of his writing career as a whole. The Second World War, which is a haunting spectre in many of his other novels, is a full-blown, raging ghost in this one, as are his usual preoccupations with familial trauma and psychosexual guilt.
Macdonald long dreamed of writing a "literary" novel, but while that (thankfully) never came to pass, it's hard not to come away from this book thinking that it was probably the closest he ever came. It's the only one he ever wrote in the third-person, and the slow pace that comes from its multi-character perspective shifting — as well as its constant psychological rhapsodising — might be a hard task for those attuned to the breakneck speed of the Lew Archer series. But on its own this is a very powerful and suspenseful little mystery that is suffused with a ghostly, Hitchcockian lyricism that will be hard to forget.
Macdonald long dreamed of writing a "literary" novel, but while that (thankfully) never came to pass, it's hard not to come away from this book thinking that it was probably the closest he ever came. It's the only one he ever wrote in the third-person, and the slow pace that comes from its multi-character perspective shifting — as well as its constant psychological rhapsodising — might be a hard task for those attuned to the breakneck speed of the Lew Archer series. But on its own this is a very powerful and suspenseful little mystery that is suffused with a ghostly, Hitchcockian lyricism that will be hard to forget.
March 30, 2021
Ross Macdonald's fourth novel had all the elements of what would be characteristic of the later detective stories: familial historical drama, a tenacious investigation, unsolved murder, character deception and betrayal, psychological references (a bit overdone) and masterful writing. Particularly liked that the story unfolded from two points of view, Navy Lieutenant Bret Taylor and fiancee Paula West, which I had not seen in any of his other works. "How on earth did a girl get that way? She'd made a couple of bum choices, but she was not spiritual masochist, in love with a system of diminishing returns kissing the fists that gave her the old on-two. It was true she'd been tossed out on her ear and come back for more, but that was because he needed her."
After reading almost all of the Lew Archer books, it's wonderful to see how Macdonald has refined his writing, characters, plots, from his earlier works, but always had his wit, wisdom and observations.
After reading almost all of the Lew Archer books, it's wonderful to see how Macdonald has refined his writing, characters, plots, from his earlier works, but always had his wit, wisdom and observations.
April 20, 2025
A noir novel. An amnesiac investigates his wife's murder. Elevated by the ending.
"Swayed heavily by the alcoholic pulse that was rising and falling in his brain, his imagination saw with hysteric clarity the pipes of sewage that branched like infected veins through all the streets of all the cities, the beast with two backs crying its rut in a thousand undomestic bedrooms, the insatiable appetite of female loins and the brutal meat that fed those blind, adulterous mouths."
"Swayed heavily by the alcoholic pulse that was rising and falling in his brain, his imagination saw with hysteric clarity the pipes of sewage that branched like infected veins through all the streets of all the cities, the beast with two backs crying its rut in a thousand undomestic bedrooms, the insatiable appetite of female loins and the brutal meat that fed those blind, adulterous mouths."
July 20, 2023
Not vintage MacDonald, but fun plot and characters as always. Very psycho-analytical by design. Lots of tones of Oedipus Rex, which was fun, but a bit much of it.
Just not as economical as his books are usually. I missed Lew Archer.
Don’t read this unless you want a taste of early MacDonald and are willing to sift through the psychobabble.
Just not as economical as his books are usually. I missed Lew Archer.
Don’t read this unless you want a taste of early MacDonald and are willing to sift through the psychobabble.
April 15, 2019
Not your daily detective story
Not very mysterious. So full of wisdom it is difficult to read this book, but it is pure Ross Macdonald exposing crime as psychological illness. Life is compromise: the third road. A major work.
Not very mysterious. So full of wisdom it is difficult to read this book, but it is pure Ross Macdonald exposing crime as psychological illness. Life is compromise: the third road. A major work.
July 31, 2019
Every Ross Macdonald is good, but this isn't one of his best. The ending did come as a bit of a surprise, but there's a bit too much psychological musing going on. Still, he's a beautiful writer and it's a pleasure to read even his less good ones.
April 17, 2018
This is not a Lew Archer novel but a stand alone thriller. Macdonald never dissapoints. He's consistently great.
February 20, 2023
Early work
Good twisted story. Slow at the start and not as deft or solid as his Lee Archer novels, but worth reading.
Good twisted story. Slow at the start and not as deft or solid as his Lee Archer novels, but worth reading.
June 23, 2025
2 1/2
June 15, 2013
"For now I am discovered vile, and of the vile. O ye three roads, and thou concealed dell, and Oaken copse, and narrow outlet of three ways, which drank my own blood..." - Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus
It seems that if you a review a book by the standard of today it becomes outmoded, outdated if it is written in the stye of its era. The year is 1948, the war is still in everyone's minds and its outcomes are the stuff of everyday thinking, not of 21st century legend. Ross Mcdonald's main character is caught in a world of analysts and murder and is part of that rather sad era of post war GI bills, PTSD, and men returning to a world they had no cue about. And the writer places his character in far too many scenes of the worst moral forces of the era.The book may not be all that lew Archer brings to the genre but it does talk the language of the era and still, quietly, stands up ad a small but effective work of its time,
It seems that if you a review a book by the standard of today it becomes outmoded, outdated if it is written in the stye of its era. The year is 1948, the war is still in everyone's minds and its outcomes are the stuff of everyday thinking, not of 21st century legend. Ross Mcdonald's main character is caught in a world of analysts and murder and is part of that rather sad era of post war GI bills, PTSD, and men returning to a world they had no cue about. And the writer places his character in far too many scenes of the worst moral forces of the era.The book may not be all that lew Archer brings to the genre but it does talk the language of the era and still, quietly, stands up ad a small but effective work of its time,
August 31, 2023
This is probably be hands down the worst Ross McD I have read. Full of amateur pop psychology, self-absorbed and an apology of a story line. Not sure why he was so off-form on this one, seems to be an early trial run before his style matured into the superb Lew Archer series. Here's a particularly egregious sample of what I mean.
Just hand me the cyanide. I rest my case.
His mind retreated in panic from the edge of the ruin he foresaw if Paula should be lost to him, the desert of dry ashes where he had lain once for an eternity bound hand and foot by paralysis of the will, in the undawning twilight of a mood too weak and cold to be called despair, prostrate in the chilly grip of self-disgust, obscurely plagued by little stillborn motivations, without reaction to even the memory of terror.
Just hand me the cyanide. I rest my case.
December 27, 2015
This author seems to subscribe to the philosophy that once you've hooked the reader don't let up the tension. It's suspense and uncertainty from beginning to the end.
The language and vocabulary is impressive as is the depth of learning in terms of mythology and various disciplines.
The book abounds in ironies which the reader only recognises when all is revealed at the end of the book.
Sometimes the similes and metaphors seem to be over the top and might suggest that the author is impressing with his obvious talent and knowledge.
Although the characters seem to be used more to add to the general unease of the plot rather than to unravel their true nature, this is a writer's book which has a lot to teach the aspiring author.
The language and vocabulary is impressive as is the depth of learning in terms of mythology and various disciplines.
The book abounds in ironies which the reader only recognises when all is revealed at the end of the book.
Sometimes the similes and metaphors seem to be over the top and might suggest that the author is impressing with his obvious talent and knowledge.
Although the characters seem to be used more to add to the general unease of the plot rather than to unravel their true nature, this is a writer's book which has a lot to teach the aspiring author.
November 20, 2012
Absolutely stunning and fabulous. Lyrical, emotional, amazing twists, beautifully drawn characters--I could not possibly say enough about this fantastic novel. I literally cannot wait to get my hands on more of Macdonald's material--this was one of the best of the noir/detective type fiction reads I have ever had. The authors of this type of book often have a beautiful and lyrical style but this is more gorgeous than most that I have read without losing the gritty side of the story . About as close to perfect as a book gets.
November 30, 2016
I started it late in my lending library period and didn't finish it in time. The book must be popular, even now, since i had to wait a few weeks to have it renewed.
But now, i have.
I would say “Classic” Macdonald except that the subject matter is not quite what one would expect in a mystery novel. Psychoanalysis and arguments for and against its various schools of thought. I am somewhat versed in the matter and still found its detail a bit obstructionist to the reading. But, I did enjoy reading a Ross Macdonald I had not previously even heard of.
Maybe, I can find more.
But now, i have.
I would say “Classic” Macdonald except that the subject matter is not quite what one would expect in a mystery novel. Psychoanalysis and arguments for and against its various schools of thought. I am somewhat versed in the matter and still found its detail a bit obstructionist to the reading. But, I did enjoy reading a Ross Macdonald I had not previously even heard of.
Maybe, I can find more.
August 29, 2013
The Freudian determinism of this novel does not mesh all that well with the individual responsibility that typifies the novel's genre. This novel was released the year after Hitchcock's mystery film The Paradine Case, which also heavily used psycological concepts in its plot and which also had a mentally damaged person as its detective. On the whole, an ambitious attempt to expand the limits of the detective story that is not all that successful.
June 19, 2016
I remember in the late fifties and early sixties, psychobabble was treated with a lot more respect than it is today. Psychiatry and psychology were looked at as almost sciences. That is clearly exhibited in this novel. In addition, a ton of overly descriptive filler stretches out the narrative. In spite of these criticisms, I give it three stars for catching the feeling of the times in a lot of ways. (less)
January 20, 2022
If I didn't have to read this for a class it probably wouldve been a dnf. I can't stand Freud or any of his theories, and I can't stand pretentious writing. This book has both, topped off with characters that you either love to hate or hate to love.
It's worth pointing out that Oedipus did not have repressed aggression towards or because of his mother or father. That was not at all the point of the play.
It's worth pointing out that Oedipus did not have repressed aggression towards or because of his mother or father. That was not at all the point of the play.
January 7, 2011
This one's a cheater, as the reader is told in the beginning that the culprit couldn't have done it. And the jumping around from point-of-view to point-of-view is distracting. Still, it's a solid, well-written mystery. Just don't take Macdonald's implied advice on what kind of person is safe to marry.
October 13, 2015
I first read this 40 years ago, so of course I remembered none of it! The Three Roads came before Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) wrote the first of his 18 Lew Archer novels, but it has all the traits of those wonderful books: hard moral questions, tortured family histories, nuanced psychological twists, and fine writing.
April 30, 2011
This was the first disappointing Ross MacDonald book I've read. I think a big part was that I was expecting a detective/mystery story and instead I got a psychological melodrama. Just not my thing.
May 24, 2012
Ross Macdonald was still feeling his way into the craft of writing mystery novels, but his ability to write emotional experience has blossomed since he wrote BLUE CITY. His magnificently experienced characters are still, over all, too depressed to create a successful series as he was later to do.
April 27, 2007
Freudian crime fiction. Turns out, seeing your mother get it on with a man Not Your Father really *will* ruin your life...or at least cause lasting damage to your psyche. Damn you, mom!
March 30, 2008
It stared off very melodramatic and then took a turn for the
"noir!"
"noir!"
June 21, 2012
Well done but not as good as his later writing.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews