The Chill

Lew Archer #11

by Ross Macdonald

In The Chill a distraught young man hires Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Noir, Detective, Mystery Thriller, Thriller

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Ross 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.

Reviews

[La Lectora]

Me ha resultado pesado y aburrido. La historia es muy pobre y la trama se limita a dar vueltas a lo mismo de un modo demasiado rebuscado y con tantísimos personajes que resulta liosa. El libro me ha parecido igual que el protagonista: Lineal y soso, sin nada que destaque por lo que no ha llegado a despertar mi interés. Solo leyendo muy por encima he llegado al final que es inesperado pero tan enrevesado como el de una telenovela. Lo que más me ha llamado la atención es la mala traducción y revisión de la edición en castellano con múltiples errores gramaticales y en elección de vocabulario

[María]

El escalofrío es una novela con una gran carga psicológica, que hunde sus raíces en el psicoanálisis sin máscaras ni evasivas. Archer va dejando de lado las armas de fuego y los puños para afilar sus preguntas, indagar con su mente, su presencia, su paciencia y su deseo de saber qué motiva a querer y a odiar. Sus inquietudes son universales, sus procedimientos no tanto: la búsqueda de la verdad le expone al dolor ajeno, al padecimiento fuerte y concluyente de algunos que atesoran secretos y miedos a partes iguales, que lo manchan con sus dudas y sus actos no siempre perdonables. Archer, a diferencia del terapeuta, entra en las aguas del sufrimiento de quien habla y se expone ante sus ojos, Archer se compadece y toma un camino u otro porque apuesta por devolverle a alguien su buen nombre, porque le duelen las mentiras que dañan a los inocentes. Y, como no es un héroe, no siente que al caer el último velo ha triunfado: cada caso que se cierra es un nuevo mazazo, más leña en la hoguera de los odios y la crueldad humana.
Archer cuando acusa sabe que una parte de sí mismo también está siendo expuesta y sacrificada, porque todos somos lo mismo aunque no hagamos lo mismo, aunque no nos condenemos sino individualmente por culpa de nuestros errores individuales.

[Fausto]

Buena obra, sobre todo al principio. A pesar de que en algunas ocasiones resulta lioso, logré descifrar el misterio y los asesinatos. La trama, los díalogos y los personajes, son muy interesantes. Requiere concentración, pero merece la pena.

[Maria]

Muy entretenida