Black Money (novel)

Macdonald commented on his novel that he had spent some twenty years thinking about and taking notes for Black Money. It was "the longest I have held a book in mind before I wrote it". He also mentioned as formative influences his visit to Panama as a seaman in 1946 and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925);^[3] it is no accident that Fitzgerald is mentioned once in the text itself. Matthew Bruccoli draws a parallel between the themes of Fitzgerald there and Macdonald's novel. The poor boy whose love for a 'golden girl' inspires him to try and raise himself to her level, at times by dubious means; and beyond that "the effect of money, both on those who have it and those who, for whatever reasons, want it".^[4]

Written in understated style, with dry wit and occasional aphorisms ("What you do to others you do to yourself. That's the converse of the golden rule"), Black Money maintains the speed of a thriller at the same time as it manipulates the reader's understanding of its characters so as to render them icons of their classes and to lay bare their psychological tropes and moral dimensions.^{[citation needed]} As in Fitzgerald, the glittering surface conceals debilitating corruption. The compression of the writing augments its emotive force, notably in the complex final scene, which, without having the "jolt" (to use the author's own word) of The Chill (1964), has an accretive force that gives it even greater power—that of tragedy.^{[citation needed]}

Tom Nolan, "Gatsby as noir: The genesis of Ross Macdonald’s Black Money", Library of America, 14 July 2017