Our book today is another skimpy little thing, a 1973 Capra chapbook combining two essays by the crime fiction writer who worked under the pen name of Ross MacDonald, and although it fits in with our deep-breath respite from enormous whopping volumes, it’s also undeniable in this case that we probably don’t want this particular booklet to be much longer than it is. MacDonald led a storied life, and he wrote two dozen murder mystery novels starring his stoical, capable, boring gumshoe Lew Archer. Those novels tended to be over-praised in MacDonald’s lifetime, and some of his stuff has been ushered into the Library of America in our own time, but like so many of his fellow hardboiled-detective authors, the man could overestimate his professorial capabilities.

The two pieces in this chapbook, The Writer as Detective Hero and Writing the Galton Case, form perfect cases-in-point. In the second, MacDonald takes us through an interesting but fairly standard account of the genesis of one of his most popular novels, The Galton Case, but where his hero Raymond Chandler might have made such an essay crackle with pointed anecdotes, MacDonald hauls in Freud and Oedipus and just generally overdoes things.

He’s far more bearable in the first essay, The Writer as Detective Hero, in which he traces the autobiographical elements in the genre’s most popular characters, from Poe’s Dupin to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to Hammett’s Spade to Chandler’s Marlowe. And although this analysis would be a lot more enjoyable if it weren’t so clearly encouraging the reader to end that sequence with “to MacDonald’s Lew Archer,” it’s still plenty enjoyable, with some neat observations about the nature of the genre’s gimmicks:

Nostalgia for a privileged society accounts for one of the prime attractions of the traditional English detective story and its innumerable American counterparts. Neither wars nor the dissolution of governments and societies interrupt that long weekend in the country house which is often, with more or less unconscious symbolism, cut off by a failure in communications from the outside world.

At one point MacDonald writes, “Detective story writers are often asked why we devote our talents to working in a mere popular convention.” And then he answers his own posed question: “One answer is that there may be more to our use of the convention than meets the eye.” It never seems to occur to him that another answer – more plausible and more obvious to many of his readers, then or now, is: “Because ‘mere popular convention’ is just about as much as your talents can handle.” But maybe that’s a tale for another chapbook.