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.

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.

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.

Lucy Graham is a twenty-two-year-old children’s governess in the home of a respected Essex surgeon. She seems to have no past, having arrived penniless from London with a single glowing recommendation from an obscure school mistress. Local widower Sir Micheal Audley, the wealthiest man in the county, smitten by her beauty and charm, makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

“The truth is that Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Micheal, made one of those apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the envy and hatred of her sex.”

Elmore Leonard’s Glitz opens with Miami Beach detective Vincent Mora getting shot by a dopesick junkie in his way home from the grocery store. The bullet goes all the way through Mora, just missing his hip. After surgery and a brief hospital stay, the main character seems to disappear from the story.

We next find ourselves, inexplicably it seems, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, following an American tourist and the cabbie who has become his full-time chauffeur. The tourist is polite, generous and curious. He wants to see the city as a native. He takes a lot of photos. The cabbie is happy with his reliable, well-tipping fare, but the cabbie’s wife has a bad feeling about the pale-skinned American who seems to have taken a shine to a local prostitute named Iris Ruiz.

Sunburn opens with a thrirty-something man, Adam Bosk, observing a thirty-something woman, Polly Costello, in a roadside restaurant in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. She’s come from the beach, forty or so minutes to the east, and her sunburnt shoulders are starting to peel. Her observer wonders if he should make a move, introduce himself, strike up a conversation.

She wonders too, as he takes a seat two stools down at the bar. She doesn’t know he’s followed her from the beach, where she walked out–without warning, and forever–on her husband and child. Her observer has been told to get close to her, and has been warned: not too close.

The plot was good enough, but this one fell short on several levels, reading like a journeyman’s immitation of a John D. MacDonald novel. I didn’t like the strained smart-guy dialog, the wisecracks that fell flat or the banter between main character Lemuel Gunn and his girl Friday, aka Ornella Neppi. Much of the humor and wit just wasn’t that funny, though it might appeal to an older generation. Neither Gunn nor Neppi came off as fully-formed characters worth caring about until the very end.

A Travesty is the first of two short novels in Donald Westlake’s Double Feature. The story opens with New York film critic Carey Thorpe looking down at the body of the girlfriend he’s just accidentally killed in her own apartment. A series of thoughts run through his mind, most of them converging on self-preservation: how can he get out of this mess without being fingered as the killer?

Perry Mason makes his first appearance in The Case of the Velvet Claws. The book begins with a Mrs. Eva Griffin approaching Mason for a favor. She’d been out on a date the night before with a man who wasn’t her husband. The police showed up to investigate a robbery at the hotel where said date occurred, and they took statements from witnesses.

Eva Griffin’s date was a powerful local politician, powerful enough to get the police to exclude his name from the witness list. A local gossip paper, however, knows he was there and they’re going to publish the story, which will ultimately expose Eva’s infidelity to her husband.

Kill Romeo is now available on Amazon.com. “What begins as a puzzling murder,” writes Diane Donovan of the Midwest Book Review, “turns into something unexpectedly even more complex on many levels… The story provides a riveting blend of personal and investigative conundrums that keep Freddy and his readers on their toes.”