Rating: 
Summary: Where There's Smoke There's Fire
Review: THE UNDERGROUND MAN is my favorite Ross MacDonald novel. Lew Archer reaches his highest stage of development in this novel as he investigates a multigenerational mystery amid the southern California fire season. In my humble opinion, there has never been a finer mystery author, and THE UNDERGROUND MAN is MacDonald's finest book.
Rating:
Summary: Where There's Smoke There's Fire
Review: THE UNDERGROUND MAN is my favorite Ross MacDonald novel. Lew Archer reaches his highest stage of development in this novel as he investigates a multigenerational mystery amid the southern California fire season. In my humble opinion, there has never been a finer mystery author, and THE UNDERGROUND MAN is MacDonald's finest book.
Rating:
Summary: The best of the best
Review: The Underground Man was the first Lew Archer novel I had ever read. I was 12 or 13 and was looking for something other than the Stephen King and Michael Crichton potboilers that were so popular at the time . Reading this book was an epiphany. Now, nearly 15 years later, and hundreds of PI novels later, I have discovered nothing that surpasses this series.The thing I liked about what MacDonald did is he took all the traditional Hammett/Chandler plot points and character traits (later to become tired cliches when grabbed on by dozens of lesser writers) and made them fresh and relevant. All the authors that came after him, from Parker's Spenser to Grafton's Kinsey Millhone (who sometimes resembles a female Lew Archer) owe their livelihoods to MacDonald. The Underground Man is particularly interesting. In it, the author combined a natural disaster ( a devastating wildfire in the Southern California hills) with the turmoil that has enveloped the family whose members he is investigating. Like most of the later Archer stories, he serves not so much as the investigator of wrongs than an emissary to untangle the complex and poisonous relationships of the characters and try to avert impending tragedy. He is not so much interested in "who did it" as much as finding out what circumstances caused the situation he is now mixed up in. Please disregard the previous negative reviews of this book. It doesn't sound to me like they even read the bookvery carefully. They totally misinterpreted the character. Lew Archer is not the stereotypical hardened tough guy of zillions of pulp paperbacks. He is actually a sensitive softie, perhaps too soft for his own good on occasion ("down these mean streets this weeping man must go" as one wag put it). The other characters, the female ones included, are neither overly virtuous nor utterly weak as the negative reviewers seem to believe. They are simply ordinary people caught up in a bad situation. Politically Correct (even though the term didn't even exist when the book was written) platitudes give way to a realism never seen before in a detective story. MacDonald transcended genre. Lew Archer is above all a flawed romantic who tries to make sense of a senseless world. I think the world could use a few more Lew Archers. Both this character and his creator have been inspirational to me in more ways than I can count. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Are you too young to appreciate Ross MacDonald
Review: This is my favorite Ross MacDonald book of all. Delighted it is being reprinted. Think I have an original copy. Read it in context of when written, but also Ross is a very good writer. Grow Up you people in the 90's. Or better yet, take me back to a "super" time for crime/detectives.
Rating:
Summary: Are you too young to appreciate Ross MacDonald
Review: This is my favorite Ross MacDonald book of all. Delighted it is being reprinted. Think I have an original copy. Read it in context of when written, but also Ross is a very good writer. Grow Up you people in the 90's. Or better yet, take me back to a "super" time for crime/detectives.
Rating:
Summary: Unmatched
Review: You could scour shelf after shelf of mysteries and not find Underground Man's equal. Macdonald's prose is unmatched and his past-engulfed characters stumble through a charred southern California landscape unable to escape their history. This book will, however, spoil you for other mystery writers who cannot match the master.
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