Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (UK 2023)

From the Publisher:
'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph
Maude Slocum is in trouble. But luckily trouble is Investigator Lew Archer's business.
A well-dressed, wealthy woman has arrived at Archer's L.A. office, having intercepted a poison pen letter accusing her of adultery. Reluctantly agreeing to help her find the culprit, he dives into the Slocums' moneyed, oil-rich California world. But when Maude's mother-in-law is found dead in the swimming pool, secrets come to the surface too. For the urbane, world-weary Archer, a case of blackmail soon becomes murder.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. Penguin, ISBN: 9780241639191 (July, 2023), 240 p., £9.99.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (UK 2012)

From the Publisher:
When Maude Slocum - beautiful, frightened and angry - comes to Lew Archer's office with a poison pen letter intended for her husband, he reluctantly agrees to help her. As he follows the Slocums around, Archer finds that Mrs Slocum might have the least of the family's troubles: her teenage daughter is desolate, her husband is in the closet and her mother-in- law has just come to an unpleasant end in the swimming pool. But why is their handsome ex-chauffeur still hanging around? And what does the sinister Pacific Refinery Company have to do with the all the bloodshed?

The Drowning Pool is Ross Macdonald's gripping tale of adultery, jealousy, murder and lies.

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. Penguin, ISBN: 9780141196626 (July, 2012), 255 p., £8.99, eBook £5.50.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face-down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred--and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. A Lew Archer Novel. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, ISBN: 0679768068 (June, 1996), 244 p., $12.00.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 1983)

From the Publisher:
DROWNING POOL
The Slocums were a curious lot. James was a certified failure tied to his mother's fortune. His daughter Cathy was a very precocious teenager -- too precocious in some ways. Olivia Slocum was an iron-willed matriarch with an untapped oil field in her back yard. And James wife Maude was worried enough about her future -- and her past -- to hire Lew Archer to find the author of a poison pen letter. But the night Archer met the Slocums, Olivia changed his job. Because that was the night she was found floating face down in the family pool.

ROSS MACDONALD
Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, Ross Macdonald is acknowiedged around the-world as one of the greatest mystery writers of our time. The New York Times has called his books featuring private investigator Lew Archer "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books, ISBN: 0553226789 (March, 1983), 216s p., $2.50.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 1975)

From the Publisher:
DROWNING
Archer wasn't going anywhere with the case. The women in it were getting to him. The one who had married for money was out to show him how little it now mattered. The one who was being blackmailed didn't care how Archer saved her mockery of a marriage. The young girl was the worst: too innocent to be involved in this sordid tangle. Three beautiful women. They had a way of distracting Archer -- even from murder.

Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. A Lew Archer Novel. Bantam Books #T2284, ISBN: 0006140890 (January, 1975), 216 p., $1.50.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 1966)

From the Publisher:
Lew Archer takes on six gunmen.
A knot of men waded into our headlight beam -- six gunmen carrying the tools of their trade. I got out to meet them. One of them spoke: "Put your gun down, Jack."
"You'll have to take it," I said.
"Don't be foolish, Jack."
I shot at the man's gun arm. Stupidly he watched the blood drip off his hand. The men looked from him to me.
"There are six of us, Archer."
"My gun holds seven rounds," I said. "Go home." Then an arm came around my neck. I broke away and raked my gun muzzle across a man's cheek. He screamed.
Then blackness settled in...

Lew Archer's nerves are like steel. He needs them all, too, and then some, in this ferocious story of MAYHEM, MURDER, and MORE MURDER.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. Lew Archer rumbles through a case involving blackmail and a double dose of MURDER! Pocket Books #50279 (July, 1966), 195 p., ¢50.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (UK 1955)

From the Publisher:
THE DROWNING POOL is the second of John Ross Macdonald's "tough" thrillers of California (the first was The Moving Target) which have attracted wide attention in the U.S.A. and have been highly praised in Great Britain also. Lew Archer, private detective, is called upon to investigate the affairs of a certain Maude Slocum, who asks him a question concerning the authorship of certain written aspersions on her virtue. When Mrs. Slocum's mother-in-law is drowned very soon after, the question becomes more urgent. It takes Archer a long way from the hill-top where the Slocums live in what is to them "reduced circumstances" (only two cars). He pieces the answer together from many sources: an English aristocrat living in California, thieves and hoodlums living and dying on various income levels, a beautiful woman grotesquely married to a millionaire graduate of the Detroit black market, a girl adventurer in an oil-boom town, a policeman torn three ways by three kinds of duty. This novel runs a vivid course through a raw new society, probing at some of the roots of evil without ever losing pace.

"John Ross Macdonald" is a pseudonym adopted by Kenneth Millar, who has written several successful thrillers and many stories and book reviews under his own name (his wife also writes thrillers). Of Scots and Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, he spent his early life in Canada, travelled in Europe, studied at two Canadian Universities, and received his Ph.D. from the American University of Michigan. He lives in California.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. London: Pan, 1955, Pan-Books #325, 192 p., 2'-.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 1951)

From the Publisher:
DANGER SIGNAL!
A voice whispered: "It's me."
"Don't play hiding-games," detective Lew Archer snarled. "A .45 slug would play hell with your constitution."
"I like my constitution the way it is. Don't you, Archer?" Her beautiful blond head appeared at the edge of the pier. She held out her hand. It was as cold as a fish.

When Lew Archer met sultry Mavis Kilbourne, he knew there would be trouble. He expected her to lie to him. He expected her to cheat on him. He expected her to be mixed up with the vicious killer he was after. But what Archer didn't count on was the sweet-looking torture chamber her friends had rigged up for his benefit!

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. A hard-boiled murder mystery about about a beautiful blonde who offered a tough private-eye A ONE-WAY TICKET TO THE MORGUE! Pocket Book #821 (August, 1951), 195 p., ¢?.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool (USA 1950)

From the Publisher:
Lew Archer, who made his debut in The Moving Target, returns to the private wars of his calling to find the answer to a lady's question. At least Maude Slocum looked and talked like a lady, though her question concerned the authorship of certain written aspersions on her chastity. When Mrs. Slocum's mother-in-law was very shortly drowned, the question became more urgent.

It took Archer a long way down from the hilltop where the Slocums lived in two-car poverty. He pieced the answer together from many sources: an English lordling living in California, thieves and hoodlums living and dying on various income levels, a beautiful woman grotesquely married to a millionaire graduate of the Detroit black market, a trailer-girl in an oil-boom town, a policeman torn three ways by three kinds of duty.

This novel runs a vivid course through a raw new society, probing at some of the roots of evil without ever losing pace. According to the New York Times, Macdonald's first Archer novel, The Moving Target, restored life to the American hard-boiled mystery tradition. The Drowning Pool is a better book than its predecessor. It will establish Archer as one of our outstanding detectives, Macdonald as a writer of hard-boiled prose with a difference.

John Ross MacDonald: The Drowning Pool. A Murder Mystery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, 195 p., $2.95 net.