The downside of the dollar

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The downside of the dollar (In the English original: The Far Side of the Dollar ) is a crime novel by Ross Macdonald . The original edition was first published in 1965 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York; the German translation (by Günter Eichel ) in 1971 at Diogenes Verlag in Zurich. In 1965 the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) honored this novel with the Gold Dagger Award ; in the category " best detective novel of the year" .

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Tom Hillmann, a boy from a good family, has run away from a home for young people who are difficult to educate. The director instructs the private detective Lew Archer to look for him. As is so often the case with Ross Macdonald, the research goes way back in time and reveals entanglements that lead to the deaths of two people.

Farmer Harley and his wife are raising two sons, Mike and Harold, in Idaho. Both suffer from the violent outbursts of their mentally unstable and bigoted father. Mike fled the family at the age of 17 and was offered the help of the sports teacher Robert Brown, but soon afterwards he fled with his 15-year-old daughter Carol. You end up in California and get married; Mike will soon be drafted into the US Navy. He served in the Pacific War under Captain Ralph Hillman, but committed a serious theft while on duty. Carol asks Captain Hillman for help so Mike doesn't go to jail, and Hillman manages to have Mike released only dishonorably. In thanks, Carol spends a night with Hillman fathering a child, Tom. To cover up the affair, Ralph Hillman adopts the child with the help of a doctor who served under him on the ship. He lets his wife Elaine believe the child is from an unknown couple and makes her believe he is sterile.

17 years later, in 1963, young Tom has great doubts about his origins; In addition, he suffers from the mendacity of his wealthy parents who rigidly suppress his musical abilities. He goes to a music bar with young jazz musicians. There he meets his real mother, Carol, who Mike has used as bait on Tom to blackmail his father. When the dispute escalated in Tom's parents' house, his father put him in a school for young people with difficult upbringing, from which he broke out after a week. Lew Archer is tasked with looking for Tom. In the course of the investigation, Archer is able to solve the past of the Hillmans and Harleys. With the help of his birth mother, Tom goes into hiding and ends up with Mike Harley and his friend, a Mr. Sipe, in the shabby Barcelona Hotel, the very place where he was conceived in 1945. While looking for Tom, Archer finds Carol in a shabby motel, beaten up and murdered. When he tries to confront Mr. Sipe in the Barcelona Hotel, he catches him just about to bury the dead Mike Harley with a knife that belongs to Tom. As the investigation progresses, Lew Archer can prove that Elaine Hillman murdered both Carol and Mike.

The novel is written from a first-person perspective.

expenditure

  • The downside of the dollar. Detective novel ("The Far Side of the Dollar"). New edition Diogenes Verlag, Zurich 2001, ISBN 3-257-20877-4 .
  • The Far Side of the Dollar. A Lew Archer Novel . Allison & Busby, London 1990, ISBN 0-85031-754-1 .