"...a tone that was new to me..."

More lines I would quote in my critique of Ross Macdonald's The Doomsters (1958), if I was writing one:

The rest of it happened in ten or twelve seconds, but each of the seconds was divided into marijuana fractions.

...

Sheriff Ostervelt: "I still don't like to kill a man. It's too damn easy to wipe one out and too damn hard to grow one."

...

Anger stung my eyes and made me clench my fists. I hadn't been so mad since the day I took the strap away from my father. [First reference to Archer's childhood in any of the novels.]

...

My voice sounded strange: it had broken through into a tone that was new to me, deep as the sorrow I felt. It had nothing to do with sex, or with the possessive pity that changed to sex when the wind blew from the south. She was a human being with more grief on her young mind than it was able to bear.

...

"I don't hate you, [killer's name]. On the contrary."

I was an ex-cop, and the words came hard. I had to say them, though, if I didn't want to be stuck for the rest of my life with the old black-and-white picture, the idea that there were just good people and bad people, and everything would be hunky-dory if the good people locked up the bad ones or wiped them out with small personalized nuclear weapons.

It was a very comforting idea, and bracing to the ego. For years I'd been using it to justify my own activities, fighting fire with fire and violence with violence, running on fool's errands while the people died: a slightly earthbound Tarzan in a slightly paranoid jungle. Landscape with figure of a hairless ape.

It was time I traded the picture in on one that included a few of the finer shades.

Worth noting that the book was serialized the same year under its original title, Breakthrough -- a fact that is not even mentioned in Tom Nolan's supposedly definative biography.