I must confess that I was unable to reread the assigned text
of BLACK MONEY, even though I lugged it through several
states in December. Then I found myself reading some of the
Joseph Hansen's I had missed after his death.
Although I have a paperback somewhere of BLACK MONEY, I
couldn't find it so picked up a cheap copy of the omnibus
ARCHER AT LARGE that also includes THE GALTON CASE and THE
CHILL. It might be of interest to quote from the Macdonald
introduction.
"As I look over such alter books as THE CHILL and BLACK
MONEY, I'm struck by obvious changes in my work. When I took
up the hardboiled novel, beginning in 1946 with BLUE CITY, I
was writing in reaction against a number of things, among
them my strict academic background. The world of gamblers and
gunmen and crooked politicians and their floozies seemed
realer somehow, more central to experience than the cool
university life I knew.
"In these later books, the academic life keeps creeping back
in. Its privileged upper world, like the sub-world of
professional crime, does have of course its plots and
counterplots, its knifings and its bloodless assassinations,
its politicians and players for high stakes, its guilty
lover. And the campus, which seemed in my prewar youth to
have a seductive lingering medieval unreality, has become
where it is at.
"In BLACK MONEY, the corruptions of the world invade a
college campus and make themselves at home there. Perhaps
because its binocular view includes in a single pattern the
pits of Las Vegas and the groves of academe, some academic
reviewers have considered BLACK MONEY anti-academic. I'm
afraid on the other hand it betrays how persistently academic
my mind has remained through twenty-six years of
detective-story writing. In either case, as university people
become central figures in our society, they merit unsheltered
treatment in fiction as in life. The lords of the
military-industrial-complex may be as subject
to tragic flaws as Shakespeare's kings.
"The reader who comes to BLACK MONEY fresh from THE GALTON
CASE will notice similarities in structure, and in the
central characters. The boy from Canada and the boy from
Panama were intended to match and balance each other. But the
world, or my vision of it, darkened in the seven years that
elapsed between the two novels; and the Panamanian boy comes
to a worse end."
THE GALTON CASE was published in 1959.
Richard Moore
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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