The moving target | Collections | The Huntington

The moving target | Collections | The Huntington

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The ivory grin
Rare Books
"'The ivory grin' features private detective Lew Archer again and even Lew finds the job pretty tough, especially since his original assignment petered out early on when the girl he was hired to trail had her throat cut. Lew, however, needed money and he soon discovered enough of the ramifications to make sure of an adequate return if he solved the problem--which, by then, had become a puzzle he couldn't resist anyway. But Death grinned in more ways than one before he got to the root of it all"--Half-title verso.
636030
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Find a victim
Rare Books
"'He was the ghastliest hitch-hiker who ever thumbed me,' says Archer, recalling how it all started. And by the time the man was stowed into Archer's car so much blood had been pumped out of the round hole in his chest that the body was almost lifeless. By the time he reached hospital there was no life at all. But on the way, Archer had stopped for help at Kerrigan's motel, and his reception there didn't come up to what a good Samaritan might except. Archer, who had no business in this little desert town and didn't know a single soul living--or dying--in it, had to postpone his journey to Sacramento to give evidence at the inquest. And being Archer, he didn't spend the time sitting in a hotel bedroom; though he would have been a lot more comfortable if he had, because there was precious little time for sleep once he started finding out why that body had a hole in it"--Dust jacket.
636032
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The Ferguson affair
Rare Books
"The young nurse charged with selling stolen property was to be defended by Bill Gunnarson, a lawyer who had yet to make a name for himself. Bill believed her to be innocent, despite her secretiveness and her lies. Before the case came to trail a murder was committed--a murder obviously linked with the multiple burglaries which had led to the girl's arrest. The young lawyer found himself embarked on a tough, complicated and dangerous investigation; there were to be several more murders, and some bewildering developments, before Bill Gunnarson could make sense of the Fergunson case. Very few readers will be head of Gunnarson in unravelling the story, or in penetrating the secrets of the character of the film star, Holly May, who was married to the oil magnate called Ferguson"--Half-title verso.
636036
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The doomsters
Rare Books
"When Archer opened the door to the tall young man who was afraid of the light, he was letting the Doomsters in. Who were the Doomsters? Carl certainly knew them--that was why Archer found him on the doorstep in a bad state of exhaustion and desperately in need of help. Zinnie knew them, though you wouldn't expect her to be haunted by memories--or conscience; Zinnie was pseudo-Hollywood, expensive and not very new, but a nice machine for all that. Mildred certainly knew them and that was more understandable, with her grave innocence and the loneliness that made her seem vulnerable. And Dr. Grantland had his fill of them--he was a good doctor suffering from a bad case of lack of integrity. There was the red-headed woman, too, who drank time under the table; she knew them. But Archer didn't, until he got talked into helping Carl, and found himself a lap behind the next murder"--Dust jacket.
636034
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The barbarous coast
Rare Books
"Though Lew Archer was called to the exclusive beach-side Channel Club in Malibu to save the club manager from a dangerously angry husband, he soon discovered that the club swimming pool was the depository for a lot of dirty linen. The angry young husband's wife, Hester, had recently been an exhibition diver at the pool; now she was missing. Two years before, her eighteen-year-old predecessor, Gabrielle, had been found dead early one morning on the adjoining beach. Looking for Hester, Lew Archer found the mystery of Gabrielle's death constantly obtruding. He also found himself up against a number of unpleasant characters who disliked his interest in both the missing girl and the dead one. Fast, tough and exciting, this story is John Ross Macdonald at this punch-packed best; if you read mysteries as a sedative, keep away from this one"--Dust jacket.
636033
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The blue hammer : a Lew Archer novel
Rare Books
"The theft of a valuable painting. The long-ago disappearance of a famous artist. A murder as deceptive as magicians' illusion. A horrendous--but not buried--explosion of family hatred. These are the nerve centres of Ross Macdonald's new Lew Archer novel, the richest we have had from the author of 'the best detective novels ever written by an American' (New York Times)--a fusion of unfaltering suspense with dramatic revelation of the way lives are shaped and misshaped in the flow of time, in the hidden and dangerous emotional currents beneath the surface of family history. The time is now; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Archer has been hired to retrieve is reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard Chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of an unknown woman--and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he is drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money talks or buys silence, where social prominence is a murderous weapon, where behind the plausible façades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and woman deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait--and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry--Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer, the solitary traveller, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own..."--Page [1].
636046