Volume 18, Number 9 · May 18, 1972
The Mystery of Mysteries
By Geoffrey Hartman
The Underground Man
by Ross Macdonald
Bantam, 256 pp., $1.25 (paper)
Ross Macdonald's 'underground man' is a corpse buried in a red Porsche on a California hilltop. In a house nearby, just before being murdered, he had been making love to one married woman while planning to run off with another. Fifteen years later his son is about to dig him up but the son too is killed, on the same spot, in the act of exhuming the evidence. The girl who is with the son happens to be the daughter of the woman the corpse slept with the night he was killed—she is probably their illegitimate child—and she is raped. In the less than seventy-two hours Macdonald's book covers, another murder takes place and a child is kidnapped. It is, as one character observes, 'a bad night for mothers.' (I suspect Macdonald is not too fond of mothers and likes to give them bad nights.) Indeed the day is almost turned into night by the smoke of a vast California brush fire that burns throughout the novel, threatening to leap into the plot and wipe out (among other things) the evidence.
Review, 3913 words
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