Re Mark & Bill's comments below
"Newsweek had a cover article on him. I think it was 1971. I
think the
Sunday NY Times book section had first page reviews two of
his books
around that year." (Mark)
"his" [Macdonald's] "rep as Hardboiled Great #3 was pretty
much
manufacturd by a couple of critics at Time and some other
magazine?"
(Bill)
Although the articles referred to did cement Macdonald's
status as a
best-selling writer, they were not the beginning of his being
thought of as the
"Holy Ghost" to Hammett's "Father" and Chandler's "Son." If
there is any one
critic who put Macdonald in that august company, it was
Anthony Boucher, who
once said that, without in the least diminishing his
admiration for Hammett and
Chandler, he believed that Macdonald was the best writer of
the three. I
believe he said that in the early '60s. Certainly, critics
started using the
phrase "in the tradition of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald"
as early as the
'60s. The fact that Knopf was the publisher of all three also
lent some
gravitas to Macdonald, as did the fact that Hammett's first
PI novel appeared in
'29, Chandler's in '39, and Macdonald's in '49 made it seem
like a natural
development in the PI novel was taking place. While Macdonald
may not have been
perceived as the equal of Hammett and Chandler as early as
the '50s, he was
certainly the most critically acclaimed PI writer of that
decade. Michael
Avallone (RIP) was the one who coined the "Father, Son, &
Holy Ghost" quip to
describe Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald, again, I beleive,
in the early '60s.
The critical and commercial success of the film *Harper*,
based on Macdonald's
first novel *The Moving Target*, in '66 added to his luster.
All this predates
the articles in *Newsweek* and the *NY Time Book Review*.
These really were the
culmination of a long process of critical acclaim that
greeted Macdonald almost
from the first. - Jim Doherty
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