Books Podcast: Young Women in Need: The California

Not much more needs to be said about the arrogance of the literary establishment towards so-called genre literature.

Pigeonholing often goes hand in hand with cluelessness when some of the most striking voices of the last hundred years go unnoticed because some people think they belong in the dingy corner of the shelf.

That's why it's always worth taking out the books yourself and reading them in new and different ways.

And lo and behold: Some crime writers are simply the better writers.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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One such case is the American Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), who with his 18 novels about the private detective Lew Archer is not only considered the legitimate heir of Raymond Chandler, but also shaped the literary landscape of America and especially California around archetypal family tragedies in the noir has enriched tradition.

In this podcast, I speak to Macdonald admirer Donna Leon, who contributed afterwords to the new German editions, and to translator Karsten Singelmann, who tells me what he finds particularly fascinating about Ross Macdonald.

Available Macdonald titles (Diogenes Verlag) in the translation by Karsten Singelmann, each with an afterword by Donna Leon - the year of publication of the American original edition in brackets:

Mother and Daughter

(1961)

(1962)

(1963)

(1966)

(1971)

(1973)

(1976)

Every Sunday morning, the FAZ books podcast alternately publishes talks about books and topics, interviews with authors, readings, literary puzzles and recitations from the Frankfurt anthology.

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