Dark family secrets. How Ross Macdonald managed to get so many great books out of those three words is a wonderful mystery. This late novel featuring Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer is complicated yet compelling reading. The characters are so many and so convolutedly connected that they can easily be hard to tell apart. The denouement was surprising at a point where I though most of the surprises were over. Hired to find a runaway girl, Archer gets involved with a psychotic young man out to avenge his father's murder, a kidnapping, and other murders both recent and ancient. This is a fast-paced and enjoyable entry in the Archer series. ( )

"Hell, I could even retire. The possibility jarred me. I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city's great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before i died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein." (pg. 127)

"I had a second slug to fortify my nerves. Then I got Mrs. Marburg's check out of the safe. I tore it into small pieces and tossed the yellow confetti out the window. It drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, draft dodgers and dollar chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins." (end of book- pg. 240)

Just two great quotes from this great book. Why 4 stars? A bit too complicated for me ... maybe i should have adjusted my variable reading style (sometimes reading 3 days apart- very disjointed). Hard to keep the many characters and family relations together. Still - pretty great! Cain and Abel story... ( )

Yet another good Ross Macdonald. It is rather convoluted, and has some weirdly tangled family relationships, but fun and quite good.

Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian to find his daughter Alexandra (Sandy), who apparently has run off with a rather wild boy, Davy Spanner, along with her father's shot gun.

Davy has had rather a troubled time of life. It seems that he was found by the train tracks, at the age of three, next to a decapitated corpse. The corpse was presumed to have been his father, but it was unclear whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Davy's mother vanished about that time and he was brought up by foster parents.

Anyway, Archer digs into Davy's past, finding a high-school guidance counselor who keeps trying to help, finding the ex-cop who was supposed to have investigated the railroad accident, finding a woman who appears to have taken Davy in—gave him a sort of job and housing. Has she also taken Davy into her bed?

Well, there are lots of other loose ends which may be related. It seems that Keith Sebastian's boss's father was murdered on the beach around the time Davy's dad met his fate at the hands of the train; Keith Sebastian's boss himself seems to have a rather controlling mother, and so forth. Oh yeah, the boss is kidnapped, perhaps by Davy and Sandy.

Well, it's convoluted, but rather fun, as is generally the case with a Ross Macdonald novel.
( )

I didn't care for this one as much as some of the other Archer books, maybe because the people Archer is working for were all so unpleasant. ( )

I have to agree with the New York Times when it says that this book "moves fast and is full of surprises." The ending of this book was astonishing as the revelations kept coming, and the path that took the characters to this surprise-a-minute ending is one that the reader is quickly drawn into following. The back-cover blurb is slightly misleading in that it plays up the sex angle more than it appears in the book. The book's treatment of the sex crime angle is a revelation consisting of one or two sentences, spoken by the victim, and her blunt statement of the facts makes them even more horrifying than they would be if the sex crime had been written about in grim detail for pages on end.

This is recommended for fans of Lew Archer, particularly the really twisty installments like The Drowning Pool or The Galton Case. ( )

This book starts out with Lew Archer being hired to find someone as many of the series do. This time it is a runaway daughter. Sandra Sebastian has run away with Davey Spanner two disaffected youths who were part of the theme of many of Macdonald's books after his own personal tragedy.
Sandra and Davey end up kidnapping Stephen Hackett a very wealthy man who is also Sandra's father, Keith Sebastian's, boss. As the story goes on the plot gets more convoluted. Convoluted is putting it mildly. Davey grew up an orphan and when he kidnaps Hackett it is really part of his search for his father. The problem is that nobody is who you think they are as the mixture of Hackett's, Blevins' and their wives and mothers require a diagram to keep track of.
The Hackett's, since they are rich, turn out to be bad guys of course. More people are murdered and murders from the past wind their way into the story. Somewhere the story of the disaffected youths seems to get lost or jumbled up with all the other crazy people. Then at the end Archer does a three page summary of who did what to whom and the book is over.
To be honest the plot got so complicated I lost my empathy for the characters and when you quit caring about the characters the plot falls apart. Macdonald definitely wrote better books than this. I am glad this is not the first book in the series that I read. I give it three stars because he is a good writer but he got off track in this book and never really pulled it back together. ( )

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels are considered to be among the best of the hardboiled genre, as manifested in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the author's influence, themes of power and corruption (as seen in novels by Raymond Chandler) gave way to plots in which criminal behavior is an outcome of dysfunctional families and the psychological disturbance they cause.

In The Instant Enemy, Lew Archer is hired to find a missing 17 year girl, who turns out to be involved in a dangerous and pointless kidnapping of a wealthy businessman. In the process of trying to save the kidnap victim and the girl herself, the detective uncovers a complex web of murder, blackmail and abuse involving three generations of families. The plot is convoluted with a sizeable cast of characters. There are no winners and no heroes – only a sordid history of damaged people and dark secrets, and Archer uncovers the truth through dogged persistence. The cultural referents to the 1960s (Beatles, LSD) help place the story into a historical context. If I were to read the novel again, I'd make a list to keep track of all the characters. ( )

Raymond Chandler wrote about a world where mobsters and coppers were both corrupt and willing to use power to get what they wanted. The powerful always took from the weak and Chandler's private eye, Pillip Marlowe was a loner who stood up for the weak against a corrupt system. Chandler's view was a sociological view of the world; it was the system that Marlowe fought against.

Ross MacDonald saw the evil that men do to each other as being psychological and coming from within the family. MacDonald was much less interested in what society had done or not done to his killers, but much more interested in what the killers family had done to him/her. In The Instant Enemy MacDonald's private eye, Lew Archer, sets out to find a young girl that has run away from home. Archer almost immediately comes across the boy that she has run away with. The Instant Enemy then has Archer slowly discover family secrets involving both the girl and the boy involved. It is these family secrets that result in murder, kidnapping and rape.

The Instant Enemy is a quintessential Ross MacDonald mystery. Family dysfunction is at the heart of what moves each of the characters forward. MacDonald's compassion for famiies can be heard in the discription Archer gives about a woman who was the foster mother for the boy in the story:

"She was quite a woman, I thought: trying to create a family out of a runaway boy and a reluctant husband, a wholeness out of disappointed lives."

And it is this disappointment, and pain, and even cruelty in families that leads to what MacDonald sees as the driving force in his killers. And the reader can understand that driving force because we too grew up in families and understand about family secrets and how somthing that happened 20 years ago can still effect a person. It is why we can believe the story and understand what happened.

MacDonald does not have the same ability to write about the people in his story or the places they populate with the same beauty as Raymond Chandler. But what he comes up short in with his prose he more than makes up for in his plotting of his story. The Instant Enemy is a great story with a plot that is believable and relentless. ( )

Many of Macdonald's novels seem to start off in a similar vein, especially when read one after the other, in the order that they were written, as I have been doing. Eventually, however, they all take on an individual life of their own as did "The Instant Enemy".. yielding an intricate saga of murder and mayhem, and the occasional unforgettable line, such as: "I said I was sorry, and left her warming her hands at her bible". Lew Archer.. literate shamus of the 50s and 60s! ( )