Macdonald, Ross -- The Ivory Grin (1952)

Much superior [to The Goodbye Look], I thought, was The Ivory Grin, Macdonald's fourth Archer tale.  The California setting and social detail is well-evoked, and the characters actually are more interesting (and varied) then in his later books.  The plot is complex, involving an amazing succession of deaths, though fortunately it's not grounded in ancient, Oedipus-like history and is conveyed with impressive clarity.  There's some clever deduction (a nice bit with a thermometer) and a bravura reveal late in the day (it helps explain why Macdonald was furious when the title of his novel was changed in the paperback edition to the idiotically banal "Marked for Murder").  Archer and his creator here are tougher here on human weakness (and the disaster wrought by it), more like Chandler, though they are by no means devoid of human sympathy.  Indeed, considerable interest is shown by the author in the casual and cruel racial discrimination directed against African-Americans in fifties California.  Archer has moments where he sounds (oddly enough!) like an English Ph.D., but that is forgivable in such a richly-imagined book.  I give "The Ivory Grin" a shiny, solid A.