Ross Macdonald Trouble Follows Me (1946) Trouble doesn’t follow Sam Drake, the narrator, he looks for it. This early Ross MacDonald (first credited to Keith Millar) already has all the ingredients we associate with him: the sleazy underworld, corruptions in high places, police subservient to money and politics, losers chasing the American Dream, and repeated confusion about what is and what is not important in life. And of course attempts to preserve self-respect by concealing or lying about crucial facts.
Drake is on leave, attends a very boozy party, and is on scene when a woman’s body is found swinging at the end of a rope. He’s dissatisfied with the inference of suicide, and after many and mostly plausible plot twists as well as several dollops of violence, he discovers the truth: An evil female has murdered her friend to conceal her own crimes.
It’s war-time, and as far as I can tell, MacDonald gets the ambience right. I don’t know how many unpublished novels or stories MacDonald wrote before this one, but he’s mastered characterisation well enough that we care about the principals and ignore the cardboardiness of the secondary players. The tough-guy style wobbles a bit here and there, but it’s as least as good as Hammett and Chandler. A good enough entertainment for the pulp fiction audience it was written for. **½
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