Change for a “Dollar”?

Following on our own recent tribute to Ross Macdonald and Tom Nolan, the latter of whom edited the new Macdonald collection, The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, novelist Ed Gorman recalls in his own blog:

The first Ross Macdonald novel I ever read was The Way Some People Die. He was John Ross Macdonald then, still going back and forth I suppose with John D. MacDonald about the use of names so similar.

I was fifteen, steeped in Gold Medals and Lions and Ace Doubles. By then I’d read a good deal of Hammett and Chandler as well. None of it prepared me for Ross Macdonald.

I was too ignorant to pick up on stylistic differences. What I noticed were the characters. Few of them were new to me as types, most of them in fact were in most of the hardboiled novels I’d read, but Macdonald brought a depth and humanity to them that made me think not of other crime writers but of authors such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway and James T. Farrell and Graham Greene, my idols at the time. This was real no bullshit psychological writing.

Just as superheroes never outgrow their need for milk, I’ve never outgrown my need for the novels and stories of Ross Macdonald. I share his view of humanity, that amalgam of fascination, disappointment, anger and sorrow that fill his work.

Meanwhile, The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura notes that a $45 limited edition of Nolan’s new collection--signed by the editor and the cover artist, Jeff Wong, and with “a facsimile of the author’s (Ross Macdonald’s) signature”--also comes with “a separately printed pamphlet reproducing the 29th chapter of The Far Side of the Dollar [1965], which did not appear in any trade editions.” Yowza! I thought that all of the unpublished Macdonald stuff Nolan found was already contained in The Archer Files. Yet there appears to be still more. I’ll endeavor to acquire a copy of this 29th chapter, and let you know what it contains--how The Far Side of the Dollar could have ended.