Joe's Reviews > The Zebra-Striped Hearse

Let's get this out of the way from the start: "The Zebra-Striped Hearse" is a horrible name. The name 'technically' makes sense with the story but the name is just so bad that it's distracting...if that makes any sense.

Now the book itself, I found delightful. A great mystery from start to finish that had so many twists and turns that I honestly kept guessing down to the last every pages. Macdonald really put Archer through his paces in this one. I can't think of another book where Archer had to travel to so many distant locales.

I enjoyed his relationship with the femme fatale even though (or possible because) it remained so chaste I like that Macdonald ages Archer and has the book take place circa when the book was written. Too many detective series freeze during a particular era. God knows Macdonald could have left this series in the 40's where he first created it but he's allowing his character to grow just like the world around him. Given that I'm only about halfway through this series, I'm excited to see where that growth leads.

Quotable Quotes:

"Everything's under control," I said. "We were just having a yelling contest. This gentleman won."

I apologized a second time for invading her privacy, and for the unspoken fact that she was not pretty, and went upstairs.

She had the faintly anachronistic airs of a woman who had been good-looking but had found no place to use her looks except the mirror.

I was thinking that you never could tell what murderers would do. Most of them were acting out a fantasy which they couldn't explain themselves: destroying an unlamented past which seemed to bar them from the brave new world, erasing the fear of death by inflicting death, or burying an old malignant grief where it would sprout and multiply and end by destroying the destroyer.