Ross Macdonald’s 1951 novel, The Way Some People Die, is the first book in the Library of America’s Ross Macdonald Collection. It’s one of the earlier books in the Lew Archer series, and as I’ve read a number of the later ones, I know this is not Macdonald’s best work. It’s worth a read, if you happen to like Raymond Chandler, and I do, but Macdonald’s later work is much better. Better than Chandler, even.

I’m not the only one who thinks that. The end of this first volume of the Collection includes some miscellaneous pieces from the author, one of which is a letter to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. In the letter, dated August 28, 1952, Macdonald complains to Knopf that Pocket Books, the paperback publisher, wants him to dumb down the nuance and spice up the action in one of his mysteries for the dime-store audience.

James Ross’ country noir, They Don’t Dance Much, published in 1940, takes place in and around Corinth, North Carolina, around the year 1939. Prohibition has ended, the Great Depression is in full swing, and many people, including the book’s protagonist, Jack McDonald, are down on their luck.

McDonald is a failed farmer in a mostly poor Southern town. His crops won’t grow, the bank has a lien on his land, he can’t pay the undertaker who just buried his mother, his chickens won’t lay, and even his cow is mortgaged. Drifting around town one day, looking for a drink, he visits Smut Milligan’s gas station to spend one of his last dollars on a pint of bootleg corn liquor.

Megan Abbott’s novel is set in late 1940s Hollywood, during the studios’ golden era. The main character, Gil “Hop” Hopkins, is a publicist and fixer for one of the studios. His job is to generate good press for the stars and to suppress bad press that might turn the public off. Hop has plenty of work to do because his wards are always getting into trouble. He is a glib, smooth-talking salesman type, apparently handsome and well-dressed, a bit of a seducer who’s not above bribing cops and waiters when necessary, to keep them from talking about the misbehavior of celebrities whose reputations he is paid to protect.

I give this book five stars not because it’s deep or life-changing. It’s entertainment. It doesn’t attempt the match the depth and insight of the great classics. I give it five stars because it’s a master class in storytelling, and for what it is, it’s very good.

I had not read Ed McBain before, though I had certainly heard of him. McBain is one of Evan Hunter’s many pen names. Hunter wrote across a variety of genres, including sci-fi, mystery, crime, children’s books, and possibly porn, though he never fessed up to it. In what must be one of the most unexpected collaborations in film history, he adapted one of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories into the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel opens with Dr. Hugh Densmore driving his mother’s white Cadillac through the desert of southeastern California. Hugh, who is completing his residency at UCLA Medical Center, is on his way to his parents’ house in Phoenix to attend his sister’s wedding.

Driving through the night, he spies a lone figure stirring beneath a tree in the desert outside the town of Indio. He stops to check on the person, a girl of fifteen or so named Iris Croom. She tells him she’s trying to get to Phoenix. He gives her a ride to Blythe, near the Arizona border, buys her a bus ticket from there to Phoenix and bids her goodbye.

Melanie Agnanos’ Nightswimming opens in the early hours of a cold January night in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1979. Owner Randall Low is closing up RJ’s Taproom, a bar and strip club serving a working-class clientele in a city that’s a few decades past its heyday. Dancer Cindy Kaczorek stands with him behind the bar when an unexpected visitor arrives. Hours later, a friend finds Danny’s and Cindy’s bodies in a pool of blood by the register.

Don Carpenter’s first novel Hard Rain Falling, is almost as bleak as a book can be. The main character, Jack Levitt, was given up at birth by young, troubled parents who both died young. He was raised in an orphanage where kids had to fend for themselves against the cruelty of others.

New York, winter, 1966, 4:00 a.m. Detective Matt Walker is wrapping up a shift on the vice beat near Times Square. He’s just finished taking advantage of a prostitute, having promised to let her go in exchange for a favor. He considers this one of the perks of the job. “Vice isn’t free,” he remarks. “Someone has to pay for it.”

Now he’s drunk as hell and he can’t find his car. He needs a cup of coffee to sober up. The lights are on in the diner at 37th and 5th. When he tries to go in, the night porter explains the place is closed. They can’t take any customers.

A good book leaves you with lots of questions. This book left me with three: 1) Why was it written? 2) Who would want to read it? And 3) Why was it included in The Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 1960’s?

My best guess regarding number three is that the editors wanted to preserve it as a cultural artifact, like something an archeologist found in a dig that gives us insight into the mindset of an ancient civilization. It says, Yes, this is what they read back then, and then leaves us to puzzle over what life must have been like for them and what it might have been like to live in such a world.

Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.